Saturday September 23, 2006
Blister Beetle Deception, Non-Standard Supernova, The Real Empty Nesters, Oldest Writing in the West, The Trouble with Physics
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Blister Beetle Deception
 Courtesy, Leslie Saul-Gershenz |
Life in the Mojave Desert can be tough and requires some creativity to survive, and few species are as creative as the blister beetle. They are parasitic creatures and their larvae need to get into the underground nests of a local solitary bee to feed on her provisions and molt into beetles. But getting across the desert is tough for a 2 mm-long larva. Instead of trying to walk across the hot sand, they form clusters on the stems of plants and collectively mimic the sex pheromones of a female bee to attract the male bees. Not only that, but they clump together into a mass that physically resembles a female bee. When the male flies in for a closer look, the larvae grab onto him and fly with him to a real female bee, then grab onto her when the two are mating, and fly with the female bee back to her nest. It's a case of chemical mimicry and collaboration not seen before in the insect world, and it was discovered by Leslie Saul-Gershenz, director of conservation at the Center for Ecosystem Survival in San Francisco.
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Non-standard Supernova
 Type-1a supernova - Courtesy, Dr A. Howell |
Like super-explosive peas in a galaxy-sized pod, type 1a supernova are all supposed to be the same. When a white dwarf star sucks up just the right amount of matter, it's supposed to explode with pretty much the same brightness as all other type 1a supernovae. This has been a useful fact for astronomers because it means they can use these supernova explosions, which they see all over the universe, to see how big the universe is and how fast it is expanding. Unfortunately, Dr. Andrew Howell, a post-doctoral fellow at the department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, has discovered a non-standard type 1a supernova. This star was probably twenty five percent larger than theory predicted it could be when it blew up, and the explosion was correspondingly brighter. If these supernovae can be more individualistic than previously thought, astronomers are going to have to be very careful using them as the universe's mile-markers.
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The Real Empty Nesters
 Pied Babbler - Courtesy, Dr. Andy Radford |
As humans, we're familiar with the problem of the "empty nest". Parents worry, when their children leave home for the first time, about whether the kids are going to look after themselves, and get enough healthy food to eat. One solution is to invite the children home from time to time and feed them a healthy meal. Well, we're not the only species that has these kind of concerns. The Pied Babbler of the Kalahari Desert, also seems to keep an eye out for their offspring after they've left the nest. Young babblers are very poor foragers; left on their own, they might not get enough food to eat. To help counter this, the parents look for food sources they can share with their offspring. When the adults find such a site, they call the young over with a special call. Any adult who tries to horn in on the good grub is sent packing, but youngsters are freely encouraged. This seems to help the new fledglings through those first few rocky months. Dr. Andy Radford, from Cambridge University, uncovered this bird behaviour.
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Oldest Writing in the West
 The Olmec Block - Copyright, Science Magazine |
One of the key features of many early civilizations is the development of a writing system. Almost anywhere you find an emerging culture, you find some form of visually recorded communication. Until recently, one of the few cultures where we didn't find writing was the Olmec people of central America. A paper recently published in Science Magazine gives us the first glimpse at a stone tablet covered with unique hieroglyphs. This pushes writing in the Americas back by almost 1000 years from the oldest previously found. Dr. Stephen Houston, from Brown University, was part of the team that made the discovery.
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- Dr. Houston's Paper in Science Magazine
Dr. Houston's Research Page at Brown University
A News Release on the discovery from Brown University
The Trouble With Physics
 The Trouble With Physics, by Dr. Lee Smolin |
The beginning of the 20th Century was a high point in the history of physics. Einstein and his colleagues left us the Theories of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics. Both of these have had profound effects on our modern technology. They've also left us with a problem. We don't understand how the two concepts relate to one another. If we try to use the equations from relativity to look at very small scales, we get answers that don't make any sense. The same thing is true in the other direction; quantum mechanics only explains the actions of very small objects. Throughout the last hundred years, physicists have looked for ways to unify the two theories. The leading candidate, for the last 25 years, has been string theory. But according to Dr. Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, this has led to a stagnation in the field of physics, as more and more resources are pushed at a theory that has yet to proven true. In his new book, The Trouble With Physics, Dr. Smolin explores why he thinks this is leading to a crisis in science.
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