Science

This is incredibly interesting; I can imagine it becoming not merely scientifically interesting, but an intensely politicised battleground.

In a sense, though, it has a certainly (probably hopelessly naive) intuitive sense of rightness about it; all manner of undesirable genetic defects pop up in men because we don’t have spare copies of genetic material to correct defects, so perhaps the lack of corrective copies also encourages species-wide genetic drifts.

A really fascinating article on the thinking that went into turning Yucca Mountain into a nuclear waste repository. It's an interesting look at how they've throught through the challenges of building for geological time scales.

Kind of a shame it's for housing our crap instead of, say, the artifacts of our civilisation.

I read Douglas Adams’ excellent Last Chance to See soon after it was published; I found the section on the Kakapo particularly moving. Alas, however, the book is rendered forever outdated: there is no lst chance to see one of its subjects, the Yangtze Dolphin. It is gone.

Apparently the ability of a baby to suck nutrients from the mother is the fault of the father.

From this article on very cool research tracking plant and animal spreads between Polynesia and America, we get the gem:

Along the way the new research finally sinks the already fragile Kon-Tiki raft which Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl used in 1947 to show that Polynesians may have hailed from South America.

Um, no, retard, it doesn’t. In fact, the person this bumpkin interviewed says it doesn’t when asked. What sunk Heyerdahl’s theory is the genetic evidence that links Polynesians to migrations from East Asia, not South America.

If anything, it underlines one of the more important bits of Heyerdahl’s work: that the technology available to the peoples of the era really did allow them to reliably sail huge distances.

Is having a reporter who actually knows what they’re writing about—or at least capable of enough research to fake it well—too much to ask?

Once more I am living in the future; the Respectful Insolence blog details a drug treatment that could hammer a wide variety of genetic disorders; by acting on a common factor in mutation it could alleviate what are a wide variety of disorders with a common root cause.

The things you find in Borneo. Until it’s, you know, cut down for cheap furniture.

Genotyping claims to demonstrate link between gene, metabolising caffiene, and heart attacks. So where’s my test?

OK, so the title is a direct crib of the article’s, but that’s because they provide the perfect title. In the fascinating area od placebo research it appears that placebos may behave differently: in this case, administering placebo pain relief pills and ineffectual acupunture will result in different placebo outcomes: the patients getting fake acuptuncture feel better than the ones with fake pills.

The authors discuss the role of ritual in the placebo effect; one wonders if re-mystifying medicine would make it more effective for some people.

While channel surfing I happened upon a brief piece on a hawk I’d never heard of; Harris’s Hawk, Parabuteo unicinctus. What made it especially interesting is it displayed a behaviour which is incredibly uncommon in the largely anti-social world of raptors: hunting in packs.

The footage had five hawks chasing down a rabbit: after the first hunter tried a standard pursuit and failed, the other four began to relay, taking turns chasing the rabbit down. Eventually the rabbit managed to find a log to hide under; the hawks now positioned themselves on tall cacti in the area, while one of their number landed and waddled under the log.

As soon as the rabbit made a run for it one of the waiting hawks caught it, and the group shared the kill.

This is, as I say, very unusual. Amongst most hawks, eagles, owls, and the like, even mated pairs don’t usually display this level of co-operation. Neat.

Anyway, I wandered off and looked up information on them, which largely confirmed what I got from the doco, along with such tidbits as their habit of backstanding (as it implies, stacking themselves in towers by standing on one anothers’ backs), and their popularity in falconry (smart, social birds are easier to train):

• The Audobon Society’s entry in their database of birds on North America.
• The Carolina Raptor Centre’s page.
• Paul Frost’s entry on the Harris’s Hawk, from his site on raptors.
• The Washington Zoo fact sheet.