Blogs / Discoblog

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

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.”

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.

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

RIP Don Herbert.