Let me tell you about the Miser Paradox.

We will use that archetype of all misers, Ebeneezer Scrooge.

Here is a man whose every waking moment is devoted to the acquisition of wealth. This pursuit has twisted his once gentle soul onto that of a hard, bitter, callous, grasping wretch who is almost as miserable inside as he makes the lives of others.

What makes this a paradox is that all his wealth gathering neither makes him happy nor makes his life any better. He cannot bring himself to spend even a tiny fraction of his considerable wealth on any sort of creature comforts. small pleasures, or anything that might bring him joy.

So he is a man driven by the need to acquire wealth he will never use. That is the paradox. The pursuit of wealth is the end unto himself. He gathers money compulsively, blindly, and this compulsion is so strong, so dominant in his psyche that he cannot bear to spend any of it (besides the bare minimum for survival) because that would mean letting go of it.

Essentially, he is a hoarder of wealth. He is no different than the people who gather all kinds of garbage not because they rationally ever have any use for it, but because their compulsion is so strong that completely dominates their psyche and blinds them to anything but that drive for mindless acquisition.

The difference, of course, is that trash hoarders, pet hoarders, food hoarders, hoader-collectors, and their ilk live sad lives of pathetic squalor and unbelievable misery and horror, whereas, for some reason, we let wealth hoarders more or less rule the world.

The parallel is so close, in fact, that I think wealth hoarding (and its close relative, status hoardind) should be in the DSM as a genuine mental disorder which honestly does make the sufferers a threat to themselves and others on so very many levels.

And just as trash hoarders develop “clutter blindness”, where they honestly lose the ability to perceive how nasty or cluttered their environment has become (because to perceive that might lead to the conclusion that they should stop hoarding, and that is absolutely unacceptable to their disease), I think wealth hoarders have a similar pathology I will call “wealth blindness”, where no matter how much money they have, they will still feel like they desperately need more.

There is no such thing as “rich enough” to a wealth hoarder.

That is why they scream so loudly about their taxes and will actually spend 2 dollars to avoid 1 dollar in taxes. Being hoarders, there is nothing worse to them than a reduction in the hoard. To them, it is worse than a death in the family or the loss of a limb. Hoarders identify with their hoard beyond the point of total insanity, well beyond the horizon of mental illness, and therefore the slightest reduction in their hoard fills them with a sense of loss so profound that it only further cements their determination to make sure it never happens again, and keep the hoard growing.

That is the only thing that keeps them even remotely sane, and when someone needs something to keep their head just barely above water, you can bet they will not be rational or flexible about it.

They are powerfully addicted to the pleasure of acquisition. And like all addicts, they can seem perfectly normal and rational and calm when their supply or access to their addiction is secure.

That’s why when you watch these programs about hoarders, they always seem quite friendly and rational at first… until someone suggests taking something, anything, from their hoard, and then the madness rears its ugly head and they start screaming like you are trying to kill one of their children.

With wealth hoarders, of course, it’s taxation that brings out the screaming and incoherent animal madness in their blood. They absolutely cannot stand the idea of money leaving their hoard against their will. You might as well be raping them with a red hot stovepipe.

Now you might think that a person like me is fairly immune to hoarding. I don’t have the money to hoard anything, after all. Not money, not stuff. I have a lot of books but those have been acquired over a very long time as I can rarely afford even used books.

Perhaps if I had more money, I might be a book hoarder. I do love my books.

Otherwise, me, a hoarder? How could that even be possible?

Today, I answered that question. Typical of me, my hoarding is entirely internal. It happens all in my mind. It is a kind of cerebral hoarding.

And what do I hoard? Ideas. Inspiration. Information. Insight. All the magical products of my overflowing imagination and extraordinary intellect. I do nothing with most of them. They just build up in my mind, and I think I take some comfort from that, as though I have turned hoard of ideas and so forth in my mind into a fortress which protects me from the harsh outside world.

And so when it comes time to try to bring one of them to life, I have to deal with the same profound sense of imminent loss that any hoarder feels when faced with the prospect of letting go.

I think this is a large part of what has been holding me back from tapping into even a fraction of my creative potential. Keeping the thoughts and ideas and whatnot inside adds more bricks to that fortress, more soft and cozy lining for my next.

Bringing those ideas into harsh reality means giving up some of that security and grappling with the conflict between my desire to express myself and my emotional dependence on this internal hoard.

I have an enormous fortune in ideas and inspiration inside me. Thoughts, theories, insights, ideas… my mind teems with them. There are more than I could ever use in a lifetime.

And yet, I never spend this fortune.

I am a mental miser.

Welcome back to another sizzling hot edition of the Friday Science Whatsit. It is a simply gorgeous day out here at Science Central. The sky is bluish, the sun is shining bright, the air is filled with that heavenly fresh mowed grass smell from all the folks mowing their lawns, and the kids are playing in the green spaces around this apartment building.

It is downright bucolic out there, and reminds me of pleasant summer days of my youth. I have always enjoyed the blue skies and sunshine of summer, despite a propensity for both heatstroke and hay fever.

But before this turns into A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, on with the science!

First out of the gate is this story of an intriguing new therapy to cure deafness.

It involves taking some bone from the patient’s rib and essentially molding a new eardrum for the patient. That, and an amplifier and receiver implant so small that it’s practically weightless, allows the patient to abandon more cumbersome and expensive hearing aids, and gives them a broader dynamic range than most traditional hearing aids can afford to give as well.

After all, less sophisticated means of amplification simply increase the volume of the sound, and under that model, you usually have to turn up the volume to get more dynamic range.

That’s why people with hearing aids are always fiddling with the volume control. They turn it up when they are trying to understand speech, but then everything else becomes too loud to endure so they end up turning it right back down again.

With this new innovation, specifically the replacement eardrum and the tiny audio processor attached to it, allows for something far more like the subtlety and sophistication of a normal human ear.

Three cheers for medical science!

From there we go to the realm of the animals. Brace yourself for… ZOMBIE ANTS.

There is a fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilaterali, that incorporates living carpenter ants into its life cycle in a particularly gruesome and chilling way.

When the ant is infected, it is overcome by the urge to climb down from its high forest canopy home to the lower leaves of the tree, where it clamps down hard with its powerful mandibles, and dies.

The fungus continues to grow inside the ant, dissolving the ant’s internal organs into food for itself, but avoiding the muscles that keep the ant clamped in place.

Eventually, the infected ex-ant splits open and drops spores onto the forest floor, where they can infect more ants and start the cycle again.

It is always fascinating when an apparently complex series of actions can be the result of something as simple as a fungal infection.

Intriguingly, some theorize that need to avoid this fungus is the whole reason carpenter ants build their nests high up in the tree when all their food is on the ground.

Ants have even been shown to avoid areas infected by the fungus.

It’s like there is a terrifying war going on between the ants and the fungus. Real horror-movie stuff.

Got to feel sorry for the poor ants, though.

On to a less horrifying section of the animal kingdom : humpback whales have been shown to learn new dishing techniques from one another.

Whales being elusive creatures with vast ranges, it took 27 years to get enough data to make this conclusion, but now we can add the humpback whale to the list of species which have shown signs of social learning, or what in humans we call “culture”.

In the whales’ case, what was tracked was a particular method of feeding that involved the whale first smacking its mighty tail down on the surface of the water.

It was first observed in 1980 in a single whale, and researchers were able to track it as it spread from whale to whale and even through successive generations.

That means that these whales are capable of innovation. A future researcher who was ignorant of this study might very well declare this fish-slapping technique was “instinctual” to the whales.

But it’s not. One whale invented it. Other whales tried it and liked it. They in turn taught it to their calves. Eventually, they will all know it.

The implications regarding the sophistication of the whales’ society order and mental capacities are breathtaking. It means they still try new things as adults. It means they are capable of innovating by experimentation and observation just like we do.

Suddenly, those people who wants to give whales citizenship seem a little less silly.

And if you think that is impressive, wait to you learn how vervet monkeys adapt to local monkey culture.

It is the classic “when in Rome” situation. A vervet monkey who finds himself amongst members of a different monkey troupe than his own will quickly adopt that troupe’s distinctive habits and mannerisms.

This suggests to me that these monkeys have the same instinct to conform that we humans beings have. Any world traveler will tell you that when you are in a foreign culture, you instinctively begin to search for social cues to tell you what to do and how to act in that culture.

And you don’t need to travel to the Kalahari to experience this, either. Even just hanging out with a different social group than your own will activate this instinct.

That is why people at a party always go through a careful feeling-out process at the beginning. When a bunch of socially unconnected people go to the party, they are essentially creating a new temporary culture for the duration of the party,

And when we are out of our usual social groups, we instinctively become more reserved, formal, and hesitant. We observe the others around us for social cues, just like we did as children.

So these vervet monkeys are doing a very human thing when they do “as the Romans do”. So much for yet another thing that we humans thought made us unique.

And we definitely are unique amongst all of the children of Earth.

We just haven’t put our finger on exactly why yet.

And finally tonight, we have an update on a medical miracle in the making : teaching the immune system to go after cancer.

Normally, your immune system ignores cancer because, mutated as they are, cancer cells are still cells of your body and it is the immune system’s job to protect, not attack those.

But with modern genetic immunotherapy, still in its infancy, the immune cells can be programmed to go after the cancerous cells (and ONLY the cancerous cells), and wipe out cancer entirely.

Here’s the update : the group working on this at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has another success story to report : 7 year old Avery Walker is cancer free!

For now, they are only testing this therapy on children who do not respond to the usual chamber of horrors that is modern chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

And that was Avery. At the age of 4 she was diagnosed with a particularly nasty kind of leukemia. Traditional therapies just did not work for her. It was time to take some risks.

And so far, it seems to have worked wonderfully. Avery is cancer-free and all she had to suffer through was a day or so of feeling a little under the weather.

Beats the hell out of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, doesn’t it?

Dare to dream of a world without cancer!

Yup. You guessed it. I am going to link to a TED talk then talk about education.

This is a particularly wonderful speaker named Sir Ken Robinson, and he calls for a revolution.

Isn’t he delightful? Charming, funny, self-effacing, and adorably British.

Oh, and wise. Very very wise.

And I agree with him. A revolution in education is needed. I have resisted the word revolution for a long time due to my inherent bias towards the moderate, and instead have called myself a reformer.

But there comes a time when you have to take a good hard look at your plans for the world and realize that, whether or not you think of them as revolutionary, everybody else will.

There is only so far you can reform something before it becomes, and requires, a de facto revolution. So be it. Call me a reluctant revolutionary.

Before I get into the meat of what I plan to discuss tonight, I just have to note that amazing quote about the folly of linear education : “A three year old is not half of a six year old”.

When I heard that, it felt like the top of my skull flew off, that’s how much it blew my mind. That is such a perfect way of putting it that I feel like it should be written above the doors of every school and across the ceiling of every schoolroom.

But what I really want to talk about tonight stems from his story about the fireman who was humiliated by his teacher for wanting to be a fireman, and told that it would be “throwing his life away” to pursue that choice of career.

When I heard that, I suddenly realized that the entire school system is geared towards creating and catering to exactly one kind of person, those proficient in the forms of abstract reasoning that we have chosen to call “intelligence”.

Everything else is given short shrift. The teachers are all academically gifted people who went to college and got degrees, and they rather myopically think that this is the only truly worthy path, and that anything else is, as best, a consolation prize for those who are not quite good enough, and at worse, suitable only for worthless people with poor grades doomed to the horrors of working in “the trades”.

The firefighter story illustrates this perfectly. There are few more noble callings in the world than that of the firefighter, but purely because it does not require a college education, that evil-minded teacher told a young person full of hope that this was just plain not good enough.

And how do teachers rate themselves? And how do schools rate teachers? By how many of their students go on to college. That is the ultimate goal of all education, it seems. Feeding students into the college system as fast as we can.

This despite the fact that everybody knows that degrees are increasingly worst than worthless, because they do not get you a job but they do get you into a massive amount of debt.

That is bad enough, but what is worse is the way the whole system turns up its nose at anything that does not lead to or require a college degree.

The sort of abstract reasoning abilities that I and others possess that makes us, in the current system “academically gifted” is just one form of intelligence. There are many others, and they are all just as valid and just as meaningful to society, if not more so.

After all, it could be argued that a full trained and licensed plumber is of more use to society than yet another minimum wage worker with a Bachelor of Arts in English.

Clearly, there is intense snobbery of an aristocratic (almost Platonic) mien embedded very deeply in the education system widely used in the modern world today. Careers that involve working with your mind are encouraged. Ones that involve working with your hands are frowned upon.

The result : a system that tells the (at least) two-thirds of its student who are not blessed with a natural flair for memory and abstract reasoning that people like me possess that they are worthless and unimportant and not worth spending time and effort on.

And I have seen this in action. Teachers like dealing with the gifted kids because we are more like them and they can relate to us. Fine. But we are not the only ones getting the message. One heavy sigh before dealing with a struggling student can crush a child’s spirit for life. One look of apprehension and fear in a teacher’s eyes when she looks upon the rougher looking students tells them all they need to know about how society views them.

And don’t think the average and struggling kids do not notice how the teacher lights right up when they are dealing with the bright kids. Suddenly it’s all smiles, kindness, and patience. What do the other kids get? Frowns, defensiveness, and dismissiveness.

We fool ourselves into thinking that we are a classless society because the classes are no longer enforced by law or custom.

But the real lesson in class happens in the classroom. That is when kids are told what they are worth, and where they belong. Where they sit in the pecking order of life.

And all because we are all caught up in this antiquated idea that getting into college for a child is success and all else is failure.

As Sir Ken says, college is not for everyone. For many people, like I said, college turns out to be worse than useless, and it can truly be said that they would have been far better off going to a vocational school that taught them exactly what they needed to know for the career they have chosen, and saved a lot of time, energy, and money.

Part of our revolution in education has to be a concentrated and serious effort to wipe this kind of snobbery out of the education system.

A teacher should be just as happy that a student went on to be a plumber (or a firefighter) or even just manager of a 7-11, if that is what makes them happy.

That should be the only metric for educational success : happiness.

Now isn’t that a revolutionary thought?

Another day, another education-themed TED talk.

And this time, it’s all about math!

This Conrad Wolfram fellow thinks we put too much emphasis on teaching kids to do math by hand when what is truly important is to teach them mathematical thinking skills.

After all, he says, computers can handle the calculation part quite well. Calculating by hand has been obsolete since the advent of the pocket calculator. There is no point in teaching kids an ancient technique left over from the days when solving by hand was your only option and knowing basic mathematics was actually a very valuable job skill, one that could, in fact, make a whole career as a clerk.

Obviously, those days are long gone, and the argument can be made that calculating via the old paper and pencil method is a useless skill in these days when you can get a calculator at a dollar store that can handle all the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that you will ever need.

Not only that, but every cell phone is a calculator, as is every desktop computer, laptop, tablet computer, and so on.

The odds of you being in a situation where there are no computers around to do the calculating are diminishingly small. So why teach kids to do things the old way?

And when I look back at my own mathematical education, I have to wonder myself. The idea that I did not do anything but the most basic algebra until Grade 10 strongly suggests that we are spending a hell of a lot of money and time teaching kids calculation when they could be learning real math.

It makes me wonder what the heck we were doing in the years between Grade Five, when we learned long divison, and Grade Ten. What is there to learn between those two?

So in Conrad’s world, you would get a calculator in first grade, and right away, the teacher could be teaching you what is happening when you press buttons on it and what the number you get as a result means.

Potential problem : it might well turn out that no matter whether they are using calculators or not, kids before a certain level of cognitive development just plain cannot understand the concepts we would like to start teaching them that early.

I am not saying that would definitely be true. And if it was true at first, a diligent educator could develop a different teaching method for mathematical concepts that takes their level of cognitive development into account.

I am picturing teaching Grade 3 students basic algebra using pictures of animals for the variables. “Now children, solve for Frog. ”

Now I know that the idea that we could start teaching algebra in Grade Three will strike a lot of people as absurd, unrealistic, and perhaps even dangerous.

But if you take learning pencil and paper math out of the equation, what is left? And who knows, maybe if we learned algebra in elementary school, it would be a lot less painful for people.

And speaking of algebra, I am not exactly sure how you could teach that without using pencil and paper. I have tried doing algebra on a computer and it is a serious pain in the ass. The paper method is way simpler and easier. Maybe that is just because that is how I was taught to do it, though.

But having third grade students doing algebra is not my most pressing concern when it comes to math education. Wolfram hints at what I am looking for when he talks about people learning mathematical reasoning and hits it on the head when he talk about teaching people that they can attack a seemingly impossible mathematical question and, through applying the tools they have learned and a little creativity and forehead sweat, slay the beast and solve the problem.

For a long time now, I have been pondering why some people are comfortable with math and why others view numbers with fear and suspicion. Like it or not, math impacts people’s lives, and not just in the ways Wolfram mentions like figuring out if a statistic is bullshit or not.

Where math becomes vital is in the realm of money and finance. Everyone has to think about money in their life, and money runs on math. If you are not comfortable handling numbers, you cannot possibly figure out a budget and stick to it, let alone plan your retirement or avoid being scammed by financial hucksters who are counting on your unwillingness to deal with the quantitative world in order to rip you off.

So I am far less interested in teaching people calculus in middle school than I am in changing the way we teach math so that more people feel comfortable dealing with numbers and hence make themselves less likely to be victimized and bamboozled by people who just happen to be slightly more comfortable with math than they are, or at least can pretend to be.

In practical terms, most of us will never use anything beyond basic algebra. It is entirely reasonable to limit mathematical education for the average student to just the things they will have a practical use for in their adult lives, and leave the more advanced stuff as optional, for the kids with a genuine interest in math or in subjects where more advanced math will be needed.

I know that is blatant heresy to math teachers, who secretly think math is the greatest thing in the world and that everyone should be like them and love it for it’s own sake, and if they do not, they should be punished for it.

But I think that if we just relax our preconceived notions and look at math from a different perspective, one where it is treated like a fun game or as a useful skill, we might find that we can find all kinds of things to teach the kiddies that we would never have even glimpsed if we had stayed on the same old path.

I think math can be a lot more than what we teach today.

I think it can be a wonderful and powerful tool for understanding your world.

But it will never be that if we do not learn to teach it the right way.

What can you learn from Khan?

Turns out, damned near anything.

First, let’s get this out of the way. I am not talking about this guy :

Nor am I talking about this guy :

No, I am talking about Salman Khan, otherwise known as this guy :

I just watched that Ted talk recently, and it really has my mind abuzz with thoughts about education.

For a long long time, I have thought we do education wrong. We strap our kids down and force-feed knowledge to children like it is a bitter pill they absolutely must swallow, and then regurgitate, and then wonder why kids hate school, hate reading, hate learning, and hate their teachers.

Children inherently want to learn. Everything they do as play is a result of this instinct to learn, explore, and understand. They are born insatiably curious, and it only by diligent long-term torture that we beat that out of most of them.

Our model of education has not changed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it is very much an assembly-line model. Get the kids into one place, give them the information, ring a bill, everyone goes to the next information station, and at the end of work periods, quality assessment.

But children are not machines. The mind of a child is not some kind of tabula rasa just waiting for us to write on.

Children are living breathing human beings who desperately want to learn how the world works, but want to do it in an active and interactive manner that can accommodate all the different learning styles. Individualized learning is what is called for, and yet, teachers say they just don’t have the time.

Enter Salman Khan. His idea of education is remarkably like the one I have had since I formulated it way back in my college days when dinosaurs walked the earth and I took a course called the Philosophy of Education at UPEI.

But what he adds to the picture is this notion of “flipping the classroom”. That means that watching a Khan lecture on a subject is not the lecture, it’s the homework. All the kids show up to school having already has the lecture on the subject, and at their own pace, with as much backtracking and rewinding and looking things up as necessary to boot.

This frees up the teacher to spend all the class time actually helping the kids do the thing they have been taught. The teacher can circulate in the classroom and see who is struggling, and offer them help when they need it, but otherwise leave the kids to figure it out either by themselves or with the help of their friends.

For a long time, I have thought that our ancient model of education reduces the role of the teach to basically being a piece of audio-visual equipment. They are just there to broadcast the curriculum at the students and then test them on it. Helping them learn it and do it is a luxury squeezed in between lectures. For the most part, they just there to lecture.

And here’s the thing : lecturing is actually the least important part of education. It is the part of the job that is the most menial, repetitive, and unpleasant for both teacher and student.

Teachers hate repeating the same things year after year, and students hate being forced to sit still and do nothing but listen for hours on end. Nobody is happy. And yet we put up with it because it is “normal” so we do not even think about it.

But if you automate the lecturing, suddenly the teachers are free to truly teach, and the individualized learning model is not just possible but preferable.

Full disclosure mode : Admittedly, I would have thrived in a system like that. I was ridiculously bright and learned extremely fast. If I could have done the learning and testing on my own, I would have zoomed through my education at light speed, instead of spending 90 percent of class time bored out of my mind and wishing I was anywhere else.

Heck, I would have found work that actually challenged me. Imagine that.

But I also think all the other kids would have benefited from that kind of education as well. The slow kids would have gotten tons more teacher time to help them get through the rough parts. The bright kids like me would have been happy to zoom along on our own most of the time. And the average kids would greatly benefit from a system that lets them learn at their own speed and in their own way.

The great thing about a system like that is that it rewards curiosity and initiative, and thus harnesses children’s inherent curiosity and enthusiasm instead of punishing it like out current system does.

It’s a little like food. The child can always have more when they want more, and stop when they are full and need to digest what they have just eaten.

And if they get indigestion from something, they can always go to the teach for…. um, nevermind. That metaphor is best ended right there.

I hope that these experimental programs scattered hither and yon that use the Khan “flipped classroom” approach will inspire an entire educational reform movement that sweeps the world and finally puts an end to this terrible, outdated, inefficient, inhuman, inhumane, and above all wrong system we have all over the world now.

Don’t get me wrong. Even out current broken-down system of education is far better than no education at all. And I am most vehemently not saying that we should replace all teachers with computer monitors.

But the history of human technological progress has been a story of people coming up with ways to automate the part of the task that is most menial and repetitive and that takes the least amount of intelligence, and thus freeing up human potential to focus on the higher order parts of the task,.

There is no reason why we cannot do this for education with the technology of today.

Hey there all you bright little stars twinkling in the vast dark firmament of science! Time for another edition of your favorite science roundup, the Friday Science Whatever.

I am afraid I might not be shining so bright myself this week. I am feeling under the weather, and so you will have to forgive me if I don’t quite scintillate quite like I usually do.

Still, science marches on, and so do we. On with the show!

First off, I have a bit of science-ish content to share. It is, in fact, one of those marvelous moments when history and technology combine to create a window to the past.

Every schoolkid knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. But how many of us know what the man actually sounded like?

Until recently, absolutely nobody alive had heard his voice. But thanks to the discovery of a wax cylinder with his voice on it, and the miracle of lasers that can read the cylinder without harming it, we now have a sample of the great man’s voice.

The quality is, of course, atrocious, and so it is not quite like being there in the room with him. But it is like hearing his recording on the equipment for which it was designed, and that is also good.

As the article says, you can clearly hear the strict elocution in his voice. Makes him sound very prim and fussy, doesn’t it? Bell’s father was an elocution teacher, a job that has disappeared off the face of the planet these days, and good riddance.

All they did was make someone sound like a right git. Evidently, these people thought there was no such thing as OVER-pronouncing a word. Consequently, they pronounced the hell out of every word.

Give me the natural flow of speech every day. There is a happy middle ground between mumbling and elocuting, one where the speech is perfectly understandable but does not make one sound like they are speaking each word as a result of heavy torture.

That aside, well, aside, I absolutely love anything that makes me feel like I am traveling to a previous era. If you are keen on hearing history, there is an extensive collection of historical recordings, including many retrieved from the days of the wax cylinder, on that marvelous repository of manifold wonders, archive.org.

Sticking with amazing audio, let us turn to this fascinating story of a rare breed of monkey that may well give us a vital clue towards understanding how we human beings developed speech.

Most monkeys have a lip-smacking sound as part of their primitive primate vocabulary. Many of the higher monkeys have elaborated that into the ability to make very crude, grunting one or two syllable ‘words’.

But grunts, despite what Tim Allen says, are not speech. So how did we get to where we are today?

Enter the gelada, a monkey species closely related to baboons. They live exclusively in the highlands of Ethiopia, and they have taken lip-smacking vocalizations to a whole new level.

Here is an example. Warning, this is beyond freaky.

Weird, huh? It makes you want to look around for the human being making those silly noises. If it wasn’t for the science backing this up to the hilt, I would be tempted to call shenanigans and say someone just took human vocalizations and overdubbed them onto gelada footage.

You have to admit, that sounds a lot like speech. And tellingly, the geladas use these vocalizations not just as warning sounds or to convey information, but to socialize as well.

It reminds me of the nonsense sounds that human children make when they are at the developmental stage in between merely babbling and actual speech.

Makes me wonder how closely we are related, genetically speaking, to the gelada.

Next up, we have a great example of science fiction becoming reality in this story about the discovery of what might well be “water worlds”. ”

No, not Waterworld… water worlds. Worlds entirely covered by water. No land atoll at all.

That is seriously something that I thought was pure sci fi BS. A world entirely covered in water? Not even a tiny bit of land? Come on. You could never have an ecosystem that simple. And what about geology? How would a planet be warm enough to keep water liquid without heat from the core? And if there is heat from the core, surely there is enough tectonic activity to produce volcanic islands.

But as it turns out, water worlds are a real possibility, and so we can go ahead and imagine a single enormous globe-spanning marine ecosystem producing a variety of sea life that would dwarf what we have here on Earth, with all that land getting in the way.

Remember, where there’s water, there’s life!

And finally, in the pole position, we have this intriguing item about a possible vaccine for autism.

Or rather, against one of the main physiological symptoms of autism, namely the proliferation of a specific kind of gut bacteria found in abundance in autistic people.

Researchers at the University of Guelph (go Canada!) have devised a vaccine to combat the high levels of this gut bacteria, which at the very least should help autistic people with their chronic gastrointestinal
issues such as diarrhea.

But there is a more extraordinary possibility :

Some researchers believe toxins and/or metabolites produced by gut bacteria, including C. bolteae, may be associated with symptoms and severity of autism, especially regressive autism.

Granted, this is only a hypothesis and one far from proven, but it would be quite amazing to discover that this massive increase in cases of autism we are seeing could be stopped with just a simple vaccine.

Imagine a future without autism! No more children and adults trapped in their own cold and lonely worlds.

Well, that;s it for this week folks! Hope you enjoyed reading about these stories at least half as much as I enjoyed writing about them.

See you next week!

Exactly one month till I am 40. Nuuuuu!

Anyhow, hi there science fans! Time for the latest edition of that Friday Science Thing. We have a passel (whatever that is) of scientific awesomeness to explore and play with today, so let’s put on our water wings and dive right in!

Let’s start at the thinnest part of the edge of science, known formally as the ‘craclpot zone” : an Iranian scientist claims to have invented a machine that can tell you your future.

The press has been quite incorrectly calling this a “time machine”, showing their usual level of science fiction illiteracy. Such a device would not be a time machine. Those let you travel in time.

If this guy Ali Razeq is, to the surprise of the world, not nuts, his device would be more akin to the crystal ball of Gypsy legend. It would predict the future but it would not get you there any faster than the one second per second you are getting right now.

Details are, surprise surprise, murky and few. The claim is that the device :

“…easily fits into the size of a personal computer case and can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users…”

It does this, Razeq claims, using “complex algorithms”. Thanks Ali, that clears it all up.

Now, given a broad definition of ‘prediction’, you could easily make a program that makes basic deductions from facts about people.

Like, for instance, if a person is fifty, it would not be hard to guess that they will experience serious joint pain in the next five years.

But the real beauty of a scam like this is that nobody will know if it works for 5 years!

Next up, progress in that old favorite of ours, tissue engineering, or as they are calling it now (presumably because it sounds sexier), “regenerative medicine”.

Scientists have produced the first ever “lab grown” kidney, and it even works! Kinda.

They took an existing rat kidney, washed away the existing cells while leaving the highly intricate “scaffolding” in place, then used that scaffolding to build en entirely new rat kidney.

It even produced urine, which is one of the kidney’s most important functions. Sadly, once they transplanted it back into a rat (poor rat!), the urine production dropped to a trickle.

So this is not exactly a rousing success. But it is definitely progress, and I feel we can safely say that these people seem to be on the right track.

Kidneys are in high demand in organ transplant world, so anything that might lead to the ability to produce viable kidneys en masse would be a major medical breakthrough that could save the lives of millions of renal disease suffers.

Ideally, in the future we will be able to reproduce the entire prenatal sequence that leads to growing an organ in the first place, in the womb.

But at adult sizes… a baby kidney is not going to do an adult much good.

Next up, we have the Interesting Purely On The Basis Of Its Name winner of the week : some scientists are saying that the Earth may have a shadow biosphere.

Oooh, a shadow biosphere. Is it made of dark matter?

Sadly, no, or at least, no more than everything else is in this Universe of ours. The idea is that could be another biosphere made of an entirely different kind of life right here on Earth.

All us living beings on Earth, from the paramecium to the dolphin to us to the giant sequoia, are related. The Natives and other animists actually had that right. We are all based on the same type of carbon based biochemistry and are made of the exact same sort of stuff.

The shadow biosphere, if it exists, would be based on a totally different sort of carbon chemistry. Scientists estimate that, back in the days of the primordial soup, there was at least twenty different ways that life could have arisen from the primal goop.

If life did happen twice on Planet Earth, that would do wonders for another rave fave of this column, Drake’s Equation. It would greatly improve the chances of finding life elsewhere in the cosmos.

If this shadow biosphere does exist, though, it will only be on the microbial level.

Otherwise, to be honest, we would probably have found it by now. A strange creature that operates on an entirely different biochemistry than us would surely attract a lot of attention.

Finally, we have this bit of pure uncut scientific awesomeness… FROM SPACE!

Some kids wanted to know what happens when you wring out a washcloth in space, and our Man In The Sky, Canadian astronaut and current Commander of the International Space Station Chris Hadfield, took three minutes out of his busy day to check it out.

First off, wasn’t it freak to see him squirt the water onto the washcloth “sideways”? It looks totally unnatural to our Earth based eyes. But there is no up or down in space. The water was making it to the washcloth under its own pressure as it exited the squirt bottle alone.

And wow, what an amazing result! It is both unexpected and easily explained, as well as being extremely visual, making it an ideal illustrative case if you want to talk about zero gravity and/or hydrodynamics.

Due to how water behaves when exposed to air, any open container of water will have a layer atop of it that acts like a very thin skin.

That skin is called surface tension, and here on Earth, ut is a minor (but important) force. It really cannot compete with gravity.

But in space, there is no gravity, and so this minor force is all that is needed to coat Commander Hadfield’s arms in a slightly sticky sheath of water.

That is so cool it makes my toes tingle!

That’s all for this week, science fans! Tune in next week for a second passel of science and another very silly column name.

Hey there science fans! No cutesy framing device this week, because I am quit frankly not in the mood. I have a sinus headache right now and it has me feeling tense, restless, and grumpy.

I have taken a Reactine and some generic ibuprofen, and hopefully those two together, plus a little clearing of the escape routes, will do the trick and chase these pains away.

But for the moment, it feels like my entire skull is being squeezed on all sides by a fist made of stone. Makes me wish I could just push a button and my sinuses would just empty all at once.

Obviously, I would want to be over a sink when this happened.

Our first science story of the day is this rather fantastic idea : mining gold from plants.

Sounds like something out of Mother Goose, doesn’t it? Spinning straw into gold?

But the idea is not quite as straightforward as that. It goes more like this :

1. Plant a fast-growing leafy plant like mustard or sunflowers in soil with gold in it, like the soil that used to have a tailings pool from a gold mine on top of it.
2. After the plants are a goodly size, treat the soil with chemicals that make gold soluble in water. (Normally, it is not. )
3. The plants will then suck the gold up and concentrate it in its roots.
4. ??????
5. Profit

As you can see, they are having a little trouble with the second last step there. Turns out, it is harder to get the gold out of the plants than you would think.

Still, if it works for gold, it will also work for a bunch of other, nastier stuff like mercury, arsenic, and copper, and thus the process could be used to decontaminate soil which has been rendered toxic by various mining processes.

The idea of getting the gold out, then, would be to be able to fund the decon efforts by selling the gold, and thus make it self-sustaining or at least highly efficient.

All that from mustard and sunflowers!

Anyone for some mustard-flavoured sunflower seeds?

Next up is the science of… DARK LIGHTNING!

Sounds a little like what The Emperor was using to kill Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi, doesn’t it? Or a Swedish dark metal band.

But no, it is just lightning that creates no visible light, hence, it is ‘dark’ in the same way that dark matter is dark.

The article is a little on the unclear side, but from what I gather, there is no electricity involved either. It is an entirely different kind of energetic discharge than traditional lightning (light lightning? That doesn’t sound right. ), but accomplishes the same thing, namely, reducing the difference in energy between the thundercloud and its surroundings.

It is far more rare than the usual sort of lightning, though, which is part of the reason why it has taken a long time to track it down and prove it exists.

So what’s it like to get struck by dark lightning? It immediately grants you vast dark power over the gateway between life and death.

OK, not really. It takes the form of x-rays and gamma rays, and so if you got “struck” by it just once, it would probably do nothing to you at all. They would mostly pass right through you and you would likely never even know it happened.

But if somehow you got struck many, many times (maybe you are standing next to a dark lightning rod), it would turn you into the Dark Hulk probably give you a bad case of radiation poisoning.

Fun fact : radiation poisoning is considered one of the most painful ways to die, period.

Last for today, we have this amazing story about NASA and their plans to capture an asteroid and park it somewhere and then explore it.

It’s early days just yet (they do not even have an asteroid picked out yet), but it seems like an awesome prospect : find an asteroid in the 500-1000 ton range that is going to pass pretty close by Earth, send a satellite to wrap it up in a flexible canopy, maneuver vehicle and asteroid into a nice convenient point in the Earth-Moon system (I hear the LaGrange points are very nice this time of the cosmic year), and then send astronauts up to explore said asteroid, nice and close to home.

This video will give you the basic idea.

First, the satellite unfurls the capture canopy. (Very cool topography there. ) Then, the laser lets the satellite get a precise fix on the asteroid. Then, the satellite eases up to the asteroid, engulfs it in the capture canopy, and closes around it fully, like the neck of a drawstring bag when you pull the string. Then the satellite uses its maneuvering jets to get to position for primary thrusters to do a burn and take the asteroid to its final position.

Then, astronauts can just go visit it, take samples and drop them down to Earth, explore the asteroid and learn more about how they are made, and maybe even learn some things about what it would take to intercept and “nudge” an Earth-bound killer asteroid into becoming another near miss.

It could even lead to the first serious attempt at space mining. Even a relatively small nickel-iron asteroid represents an enormous quantity of metals and minerals. It might very well make economic sense to send miners up there to recover all these goodies, especially if there is our old friend gold up there, or similarly precious metals like platinum, rare earth minerals, and so on.

But at the very least, we humans will have reached out our hands to catch a (potential) falling star, put it in our (gravitational) pocket, and added a new (tiny) moon to our planet.

And that is no small achievement, is it Perry?

No, it is definitely not. (He was so much more fun than Bing Crosby, don’t you think?)

Seeya next week folks!