Now why on earth world you want to do that?
I’m catching up on PVRd episodes of Grand Designs, but that’s not what I mean by the title. I mean that – according to Pop Mech – you could become a (citizen) scientist.
It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but it does beat working in an office.*
* terms and conditions apply
Yes, they did.
We’ve had our fair share of whales washed up around here too, but this one was a bit different.
This is only the fourth fin whale to wash ashore in this area since 2010. But what’s really unusual is that the animal was still alive when it reached the beach, giving the scientists — who arrived just after it stopped breathing — the extremely rare opportunity to perform an necropsy on a fresh whale carcass.
Most often, large whales washing ashore have been dead for a while, and can be too decomposed to learn much from. “These large whales, by the time they wash up, they’re already severely debilitated. This is our first live whale,” said Shawn Johnson, director of veterinary science at The Marine Mammal Center.
It turns out that this whale was probably involved in a bit of a hit-and-run with a ship, resulting in something called subcutaneous emphysema. The heart – the size of a small child – and part of the whale’s underside showed signs of hemorrhaging, a possible sign of traumatic injury. A bloody area, about the size of a large trash can lid, covered the whale’s sternum.
Aside from that, says Johnson
“It’s in really great body condition”
Well, apart from being dead, of course.
But for all my facetious comments, the link above does give some interesting detail about what the scientific team did and how they did it.
I’m going to try and remember to pop over to the Marine Mammal Center website once they’ve got some results back and have a look at what they found out. For starters, here’s their version of events.
Too much to do, too little time to blog, so here’s some stuff I enjoyed to keep you going.
From some science: on the weird, hugely interesting and currently unexplained early spring peak in suicides in the Western world:
…people usually commit suicide because personal, social-system and environmental factors combine to push them to a new place of energized despair.
In this view, spring somehow adds weight to an already unbearable load. But how?
One traditional candidate, favored by both Dr. Jamison and Dr. Kaslow, is the “broken promise effect” — the sometimes crushing disappointment that spring fails to bring the relief the sufferer has hoped for.
To science meeting religion: and the push to erricate polio in Pakistan, which is up against strong – and deadly – opposition from local religious leaders:
On Sunday 16 June, gunmen on motorbikes shot dead two polio workers carrying out a vaccination drive in Peshawar, a crowded city in Pakistan’s north-west. One of the men who died was a schoolteacher, the other a paramedic. Both left behind grieving families. Their deaths bring the total tally of polio workers assassinated in Pakistan up to nearly 20 since last December.
To religion: as a paralysed child gets an answer to his prayers.
Said Angela Schlosser, a day nurse who witnessed the Divine Manifestation: “An incredible, booming voice said to Timmy, ‘I am the Lord thy God, who created the rivers and the mountains, the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. Before Me sits My beloved child, whose faith is that of the mustard seed from which grows mighty and powerful things. My child, Timmy Yu, I say unto you thus: I have heard your prayers, and now I shall answer them. No, you cannot get out of your wheelchair. Not ever.'”
That last link via @grant_mcdermott in response to my tweet about the lack of any response to the tens of millions of prayers being said for Nelson Mandela at the moment.
Ah, mad scientists! Dontcha just love them?
Some say that one local blogging microbiologist used to perform basic scientific experiments in his bedroom cupboards aged 11. All I know is that I never pulled a Blu-ray burning laser from its rightful home and mounted it inside a hollowed out flashlight, before shooting it at 100 sacrificial balloons.
Fortunately, this guy has pulled a Blu-ray burning laser from its rightful home and mounted it inside a hollowed out flashlight, before shooting it at 100 sacrificial balloons. And he caught their demise with a video camera, thus:
He even makes them come back to life again (but not really, it’s just the film played backwards).
At this point, the audience is split two ways. There’s the half which is going: “That’s SOOOOO cool! I wonder what else he can do with his laser?!?!” and there’s the other half who are going: “That’s SOOOOO scary! I wonder what else he’s going to do with his laser?!?!”.
Either way, let’s hope it involves puppies.
Link via Popular Science.
Brian Micklethwait has been prolific of late, for reasons detailed at the bottom of this post. That’s great for people like me, who enjoy his narrative style of blogging: I really like hearing about why he took the photo he took, what he likes about the photo he took, and why he was where he was to take the photo he took. It makes you feel involved, like a part of the story.
Last Thursday, he was on the new upper concourse at Waterloo Station in London (because he needed to use an ATM) when he noted (and photoed) these two billboards:
And he has responded to them. Rather nicely too, I think.
I was reminded of Dara O’Briain’s “Science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise, it’d stop” quote in Brian’s answer to the first question:
Science… has changed over and over again. And this is a sign of science’s intellectual seriousness and intellectual vitality. Lack of change, century after century, signifies the opposite.
There’s more, so go there and read, but I particularly liked this bit from his thoughts on the second ad:
The good news here is that the claim that the Qur’an is as scientific as real science is a huge concession to the acknowledged intellectual superiority of science. “We have been right all along, and science proves it!” But if they really thought that the Qur’an was the last word on everything, they wouldn’t be dragging science in to back the claim up. Science would be ignored.
Yes, good point. What exactly is the quranproject’s gold standard then? Are they really claiming that the fact that “we were here first” negates scientific theory? Or are they suggesting that scientific theory proves them right?
Either way, as Brian points out, comparing verses in the Qur’an to science’s version of the origins of the universe surely tacitly grants the latter a huge degree of legitimacy in their eyes, which is either a big step forward or a bit of an own goal.