Blogs / Discoblog

Weighing in at more than 103 atomic units, the superheavy elements help physicists explore freaky concepts like magic numbers and the island of stability, helping us understand why nature contains only a finite number of elements. But so far, all superheavy atoms have only been made synthetically by smashing nuclei together and hoping they stick. All of these new elements are pretty much useless because they decay in a few seconds at most.

But today, the physics arXiv blog reports on a possible discovery (pdf) of stable, naturally occurring superheavy nuclei, found lying around in a pile of thorium. When researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dug through with their mass spectrometer, they discovered a mysterious element with an atomic weight of 292, an atomic number of about 122, and a half-life greater than 100 million years.

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Ted Williams—two-time American League MVP, six-time league leader in batting, two-time winner of the Triple Crown, and the last player in MLB to bat over .400 in a single season—is thought to have had the best eyes in baseball. Despite getting hit in his right eye by a walnut as a boy, he had 20/10 vision—meaning if something was 20 feet away, he could see it as well as a “normal” person could from 10 feet. Williams denies the rumors that he could count the seams on an incoming fastball and watch it hit the bat—but says that “in the last 20 feet [he] could see which way it was spinning.”

Good vision is essential for athletes—and not just those trying to hit 90 mph fastballs with a stick. After Tiger Woods got LASIK surgery to improve his vision to 20/15, he reported that “the hole [looked] bigger and his ability to read greens improved dramatically.” He then went on to win the first first five tour events he played after having the surgery.

But visual acuity isn’t just about sharpness. It’s also about perceiving depth, color differences (although that doesn’t always help), reaction time, and field of view. In many cases, these qualities are more about the brain than the eyeball—and can potentially be improved with training, e.g., in the vein of brain games. Indeed, Williams himself noted that, “a lot of people have 20/10 vision. The reason I saw things was that I was so intense. It was discipline, not super eyesight.”

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• The hottest country code on teh Internets [sic]: .su—as in, the Soviet Union. Which, in case you somehow forgot, doesn’t exist anymore.

• Big prizes are spurring a new age in (and at least one blog about) space exploration. Now PETA hopes to do the same with a $1 million prize to the first mad scientists who can “produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012,” thereby sparing real animals from becoming meat. Note the stipulation about “commercially viable,” you home molecular gastronomists.

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• Dot Earth’s Andy Revkin offers a handy re-printing of Bush’s most recent speech on climate change, complete with helpful (and often enlightening) annotations.

• Feeling a little irate about Ben Stein’s new Intelligent Design lovefest, Expelled? Check out this hilarious video parody—you’ll be back to your cheery evolved self in no time.

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For all those creationists out there wondering how to approach peer review in their brand new “journal,” Answers Research Journal, take heart: the latest edition has some friendly advice.

Despite the centrality of peer review to the development of a scholarly community, very little is known about the biblical basis and Christian conduct of peer review. We find that peer review is rooted in several Christian virtues, such as reflecting Christ, being honest, seeking wisdom, humbly submitting, showing Christian love, correcting error, and being accountable. Given these principles, we recommend that creationists use a double-blind peer review system, wherein the identities of the author and peer reviewers are confidential.

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In case you still needed a reason to skip that Hardees triple deluxe burger: a new study has found that women with waists larger than 35 inches have a 79% greater chance of dying prematurely than those with a waist that measures 28 inches or less, regardless of whether the woman is obese or overweight. The Los Angeles Times writes that, according to the report, “[w]omen with the largest waists had twice the risk of dying of cardiovascular disease—even if their weight was normal—and a 63% greater chance of dying of cancer compared with women with smaller waists.”

The data, gathered by researchers at Harvard University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, consisted of 44,636 women at an average age of around 50, who were tracked over a period of 16 years. At the beginning, participants recorded their hip and waist measurements, and every two years they answered questionnaires about their health. Over the course of the study, 3,507 women died, with 1,748 succumbing to cancer and 751 to heart disease.

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Last week, we discussed how the science of smells is being used by law enforcement officials, who rely on the latest dog training techniques and technology to sniff out criminal activity. Now a new study shows that the animals with the fastest sense of smell known to humans—the masters of quickdraw in the great olfactory shoot-out—are none other than rats. The intrepid rodents can differentiate between odors in just 140 milliseconds—no doubt a trait that has long come in handy for finding open garbage cans. (more…)

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Researchers in Singapore say they have discovered a frog that has no lungs. Called the “Barbourula kalimantanensis,” the aquatic frog appears to do all of its breathing entirely through its skin. The frog’s shape—a highly flattened body that maximizes the surface area of its skin—allows it to absorb all necessary oxygen in its habitat, which is made up of cold, fast-flowing water.

David Bickford of the National University of Singapore, who found the frog during an expedition in Borneo, reportedly called complete lunglessness a “particularly rare evolutionary event that has probably only occurred three times.” The only other four-legged animals known to have no lungs are certain salamanders and one species of caecilian, “a limbless amphibian resembling an earthworm.” (more…)

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Transplanting organs is an inherently risky business, as the powerful immune-suppressing drugs that allow recipients’ bodies to accept new organs can readily cause infection, cancer, and other health problems. But if the organ itself is diseased, the results can be devastating. The AP reports that 15-year-old Alex Koehne, whose parents agreed to donate his organs once they learned he was close to dying of bacterial meningitis, in fact died of a rare form of lymphoma that wasn’t found until his autopsy. As a result, the patients who received his liver, pancreas, and kidneys also developed the same cancer.

Two of them died, while the kidney recipients are currently undergoing treatment for the disease.

Meanwhile, the family of Tony Grier—a transplant recipient who died after receiving a cancerous lung—suing the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the doctors who performed the transplant. His family claims that hospital officials told Grier he was getting the healthy lungs of an 18-year-old (a claim that the hospital denies) while in fact, the lungs came from a 31-year-old woman who smoked heavily and may have had a history of illegal drug use. (more…)

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20 Things You Didn’t Know About… is consistently one of the most popular items on discovermagazine.com. Next week Discover is releasing 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Everything, the book based on the column; the book comprises 20 original 20 Things… columns, much like the ones in the magazine (which also run on the site) but longer and more comprehensive.

As popular as the column is, every time we publish one we get a lot of feedback that we messed up in some way and/or another—we snubbed one fact, included something that everyone knows, etc. (Sometimes the criticism gets downright malevolent.) Now that we’re expanding the 20 Things… concept to the highbrow world of books, we want to make amends for any of our previous errors. We want to know—on the record, for all of the Internets to see—what we missed over. (more…)

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Another study–this one analyzing the largest social network ever–has found that people are connected by about 6 degrees of separation. Here, the sample consisted of 240 million people on Mircrosoft’s instant messaging service. And lo, when scientists finished with them, the “average path length” among the IMers was 6.6.

Nature News’ story on the study (login required for full access) finds this to be “spookily close” to Stanley Milgram’s original small-world study in the 1960s that started the whole six-degrees mania. But as DISCOVER wrote in February, Milgram’s experiment wasn’t replicated, suffered from an abysmally low response rate, and looked at people on mailing lists who were probably of similar socioeconomic status and thus more likely to share connections. (more…)

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A design student at University of the Arts London created this useful work of sci-art by putting unfamiliar units—such as “as many grains of flour as people on the planet”—on a measuring cup. The piece is part of his Domestic Science collection, which aims to help people “better conceptualize certain scientific constructs”—although the designer, Harry White, noted in an e-mail that “the measurements vary from being quite accurate to almost a joke, a reflection on the nature of measurement in science.”

His other pieces include evo-cut, a “set of cutlery designed according to the principles of population genetics and natural variation,” and You’re one in a million, “containing a million dots, one of which is yellow,” to help people “feel what a million and a millionth are like.”

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The German Beer Purity Law
has been on the books
for 500 years. Thank God.

Last Thursday we published an article about the 7 Most Exciting Moments in Science. Since then a number of readers have written in to point out (politely) that I missed the boat on a bunch of fantastically exciting moments on the list, such as Neil Armstrong’s one small step, Watson and Crick’s double helix and (my favorite) the German Beer Purity Law. What I maybe should have disclosed were the three criteria we used to judge the reputed exciting moments:

First, the stories couldn’t be of dubious veracity. That excluded Isaac Newton staring up at the moon through the boughs of an apple tree and Kary Mullis’s PCR epiphany while driving down Highway 1. (One should be skeptical of anyone who converses with glowing raccoons.)

Each discovery had to be a bolt from the blue. This excluded situations where years, and even decades, of hard work culminated in one shining moment, like the moon landing or the invention of the radio.

Finally, we gave extra credit to discoveries proven in the real world as opposed to just theoretical ones. Einstein’s theory of general relativity was exciting, fast, and important, but it wasn’t confirmed in the real world until 14 years later, when Arthur Stanley Eddington showed that the Sun bent the light of stars behind it. Einstein lost some points because the excitement of that moment was split in two.

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… after Mr. Wizard died. I fondly remember watching “Mr. Wizard’s World” on many an afternoon when I was a kid.

RIP Don Herbert.

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On Tuesday, February 13, the NY Salon will host a discussion, discourse, dialogue, and—okay, I’ll say it—a debate called The Human Footprint—Has Civilization Gone Too Far? DISCOVER’s fearless leader, Corey Powell, will take part in the debate, and judging by his position paper, he should have some good things to say. The event will be webcast from NY Salon’s Web site.

As for the other participants, they include Ronald Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason, an outspoken and intelligent libertarian magazine. If you think Corey is fearless, check out Reason, and Bailey in particular—his views on environmentalism probably don’t line up exactly with most DISCOVER readers (basically: it’s a load of bull), but he makes some interesting, iconoclastic arguments.

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In the spirit of keeping public television public, PBS is putting its viewers in power by allowing them to pick the station’s newest science show.

Whittled down from 19 solid submissions, PBS will air its three finalist pilots throughout January on Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET. If all of you democratic Web denizens out there can’t wait a month to give informed feedback, log on to pbs.org/science to view streaming versions of each pilot (all of them are currently awaiting your opinions).

Now, announcing the three candidates:

• Wired Science (airs January 3)—Essentially Wired Magazine repackaged for TV, the show will cover the latest developments in space exploration, biomedicine, robotics, military technology and more in a fast-and-furious hour of entertainment.

• Science Investigators (airs January 10)—This investigative number delves into mysteries such as 30,000-year-old Neanderthal DNA and the physics of a knuckleball baseball pitch—but it also aims to keep viewers up-to-date with new technologies like electric NASCAR stock cars and bacteria-powered iPods.

• 22nd Century (airs January 17)—The “what if” show for science television. A group of actors play out the possibilities to far-off scientific futures, starting with the new World Wide Web—not one of computers, but linked-up human brains.

While there is no “vote,” per se, viewers can offer feedback that runs on the Web site for all to see. Using this digital deliberation collected by the end of the month, PBS will pick a winner to graduate into a 10-week series that debuts this fall. But what about the losers? The station offers no word on this touchy subject, but DiscoBlog predicts plenty of YouTube spoofs in the future.

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Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall—best known, of course, for her online chat on Discover.com—appeared on the Charlie Rose Show last Tuesday. It should be clear which one is her and which one is Kissinger.

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Discover’s fearless editorial leader, Corey Powell, appeared on NPR’s Science Friday last week (at least his voice did). The show’s subject was best science books of 2006. But to get some truly deep context, they brought on Corey to talk about the best science books of all time, which we covered in our December issue and asked readers about online. Needless to say, he did Discover proud.

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In a man-eats-pig world, the pigs are now eating man. The Hindustan Times reported today that a three-year-old boy named Ajay in Delhi, India was recently eaten alive by a herd of domestic pigs. If you have a weak stomach for gore, don’t read this nugget we pulled from the story:

“Ajay’s skull, eyes, face and torso had been ripped open and eaten. Only his limbs could be recovered.”

Yesterday we discovered sea lions are increasingly attacking people—were these pigs just hungry, or has DiscoBlog scratched the surface of an Animal Farm uprising?

(We hope this doesn’t incline anybody to use pigs for dead-body disposal, as per the movie Snatch:

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Something is making a very low-pitched sound that is annoying people with acute hearing in Auckland, New Zealand. What’s making this rumble? Well, that’s million-dollar question—no one knows. Scientists (like those pictured at right) have been using funny-looking devices in an effort to find the source of this “Unidentified Acoustical Phenomenon.” This story may seem silly (especially when we see one ingenious scientist cupping his hand to his ear), but for those who can’t get away from the insistent noise, it can apparently be horrible:

Dr Moir said one sufferer, a man, was so desperate to stop hearing the sound that he deliberately tried to damage his own hearing by cranking up a chain saw close to his ears. “He said it was so bad, he couldn’t stand it. It was driving him mad.”

One scientist says he suspects it’s “gas pipes, sewerage pipes, [or] factories in the distance,” but we’ve not heard any confirmation on that. Stay tuned, as DiscoBlog will bring you the exciting conclusion of Unidentified Acoustical Phenomena as soon as we “hear” something…

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