Blogs / Discoblog

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:

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…

So you know how if you’ve been handling coins you get that distinctive whiff of metal? Or how the water from the fountain in the back end of your elementary school tasted pretty much like the smell of those coins? You were wrong—metal has no smell.

According to a Nature news article about a recent study in the famous Angewandte Chemie Internation Edition, what we think of as the smell of metal is actually the smell of our own body. When we come into contact with metal, it catalyzes reactions among the slime of organic molecules that coats our bodies. When skin oils are exposed to iron and copper they can produce smelly aldehydes and ketones; for instance, touching iron can produce the ketone 1-octen-3-one, which has a mushroom-like, metallic odor (which, I’m guessing, can’t be good).

One thing (among many) that seems weird to me about this is that I could swear that I’ve smelled metal that hasn’t touched my skin or the skin of someone near me. Maybe it’s possible that someone touched it in the past and although they’re long gone, their fetid, decomposing skin oils linger on. Or maybe that’s an effect of being an animal—unlike, say a dog—that usually brings smellable items up to the nose rather than the other way around.

(Via The Daily Grail)

Stephen Hawking is getting divorced; no word yet on exactly what’s the story or if there’s any juicy gossip. It seems strange when we catch a peek into the imperfect private life of someone so phenomenally intelligent and respected. Then again, with all we’ve learned about Einstein recently—especially his sex life—maybe we should just conclude that even smartest scientists have regular, flawed lives.

Wikipedia—the Internet encyclopedia that anyone can edit—has gone through an entire dramatic cycle on a truly Internet-era timescale; over the last not-quite-four years, it was born, pushed on the user-generated-content craze, became the 12th-most-popular site on the Web, and is now experiencing a vigorous backlash for having pages that are written by kooks and/or full of errors. (”The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring,” says Discover’s own Jaron Lanier.)

Now, one of its co-founders is launching a competing online-o-pedia with a fundamental difference: its content will be written and guarded by editors, experts who would qualify based on “imperfect but effective” credentials like “degrees, professional society memberships, things like that.” As someone who’s seen plenty of Wikipedia writers’ errors, belligerence, and most-of-all, flat-out bad writing, I think it sounds interesting. But we here at DiscoBlog think there’s a lot to a name (clearly), and I’m more than a bit skeptical that anything called “Citizendium” is going anywhere—or perhaps I’m just bitter that my mouthparts hurt when I try to say it.

One reader offers a rejoinder in which he makes a fairly common mistake, writing:

Okay, let’s assume the prize is behind door #2. There are actually four scenarios, not three, that can occur in the game.
1. Contestant picks door # 1, Monte elimnates door #3, switching wins
2. Contestant pics door #2,
Monte eliminates door # 1, switching loses.
3. Contestant pics door #2, Monte eliminates door # 3, switching loses.
4. Contestant pics door #3, Monte elimnates door #1, switching wins.

No other combination of contestant and Monte actions can occur.

So there are actually four, not three scenarios that can play out. Two win. Two lose.

I’ve seen many people submit to this fallacy. First of all, the host’s name is Monty, not Monte. Show some respect—the guy’s a mathematical genius.

Second, the probability of initially picking the prize is 1/3. Sure, on those occasions when you’re fortunate enough to select the prize by your initial guess, gray-eyed Monty will nix one empty door half of the time, and another empty door the other half of the time; the probability of each being 1/6 and adding to 1/3. Parsing it this way, in one-sixth of the trials you pick the prize and Monty opens an empty door, and in one-sixth of the trials you pick the prize and he opens another empty door. The fact still remains that you’ll only pick the prize (initially) one-third of the time. So you better switch my friend!

I just got back from Scotland where I had two science adventures. One was visiting the Surgeons’ Hall Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. This included an exhibit on the history of surgery and a fantastic pathology exhibit with a display of disquieting abnormal tissue specimens. I will review this for the Web site in the near future.

The other was at the University of Glasgow, one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve seen (with a stunning chapel). I visited a small natural history museum called the Hunterian Museum, the oldest public museum in Scotland. Much of it was closed for renovations, but I did get to see some impressive fossils, including an ichthyosaur lush with spindly bones (left).

A few buildings away tucked in the department of zoology is the humble Zoology Museum, a large room and hallway filled with taxidermy animal specimens, each with a decades-old, hand-typed explanatory card. I saw my first pangolin (top), some monstrously large pickled worms (right), a leopard cat, and the skull of a blue antelope. The bluebuck, as the antelope is casually known, went extinct around the year 1800, and its remains are incredibly rare. They also have an impressive insect collection, including a Goliathus goliathus (right) found in 1770 floating down the river Gabon in West Africa. For 100 years it was revered by entomologists as the only known specimen of its kind, its species considered at the time to be the largest living insect and quite rare. Now these guys come a dime a dozen and it is barely noticed in this little museum-cum-study-hall for the lucky students of Glasgow.

NOTE: The Hunterian will be closed October 7 through March 7 for renovations.

It’s the Gallic version of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object: Are the French more into smoking or activist government? The latter, it seems, as they prepare to totally ban smoking from public places.

The journal Nature has joined the world of Internet peepshows: it’s offering an online sneak peek at a selection of papers that have been submitted but not yet peer reviewed or accepted for publication.

The early edition articles, which appear as posts on a blog, are open to the general public, but only scientists in a related field at an academic institution are allowed to reply with comments. Unlike traditional meaningless blog banter, however, these comments could actually influence whether an editor accepts or rejects the manuscript, according to the site.

A Wall Street Journal article (subscriber only) says this type of open intellectual forum could strengthen the papers that make it into the journal. Last year I sat down with Linda Miller, who is Nature’s U.S. executive editor, for an unrelated discussion on the peer review process. Based on her comments, I have a hard time seeing how beneficial the new system will actually be, at least in the short term.

For starters, said Miller, the normal peer review system is kept anonymous for good reason. Studies have shown that reviewers generate a bias toward authors they know, or labs they have heard of, whether they want to or not. In the regular system, reviewers don’t know who authored the report—but all authors are listed on the new site.

Also, while some authors are grateful to hear feedback, others aren’t, Miller told me. The new system lets researchers choose whether they would like their submitted paper to appear online. Guarded researchers, who are often the successful ones, might scoff at the new system, limiting the scope of scientific dialogue.

Finally, it remains unclear how much weight Nature’s editors will give these responses. “Good peer review relies on good editors making judicious assessments of the talents and skills of reviewers,” Miller said. “You send a paper to people whose guts you trust.”

Given the direction of research journals toward online formats, the idea behind the new system remains intriguing. But a brief glance at the site shows that, so far, many of the Nature posts have received no comments. Many other posts offer the message: “This paper is no longer available for commenting.” One post about a cooling effect in Saturn’s atmosphere did elicit five responses, but one suggests only that the authors check the spelling of their references.

Submitted for your appoval: A five-minute long science documentary by Wes Kim. I saw this over the summer at a little outdoor festival of high concept/lowbrow films put on by NYC’s Rooftop Films. I won’t say anything else about it. Okay, I will tell you that it is fake. And quite funny.