The Oyster’s Garter

Screw the whimper - apparently the world may end in a bang…a Death Star bang! According to the Nature News headline, “‘Death Star’ found pointing at Earth.” Is it aliens? Satan? Darth Vader?

No, it’s two spinning stars a mere 8,000 light years away. But they’re set to explode at any moment!!! Well, at any moment in the next few hundred thousand years. And when they do, they may send out a killing burst of gamma rays RIGHT AT EARTH!!! Well, unless the energy dissipates harmlessly in a supernova. Shhhh. It’s doom, Doom, DOOOOOOOM!

Nature News definitely didn’t stint on the doomsday scenario:

A gamma-ray beam might not kill us all immediately. First there would be a bright flash, possibly blinding people, says Melott, then after a few hours the effects would begin in earnest.

The gamma rays would break up molecules in the atmosphere, producing particular oxides of nitrogen that would start to eat up the ozone layer after a few hours, says Melott. Within a few days a quarter of the ozone layer would be destroyed, he suggests.

The ozone destruction would allow through enough ultraviolet light to cause severe radiation damage to plants and people. The nitrogen oxides would also cause acid rain that could kill off plants and algae.

Just like the Ewoks!

Lest anyone doubt women in science are anything less than badass, today’s Washington Post has a nifty profile of Katherine Kendall, a former cheerleader who studies grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. The story was inspired by John McCain’s repeated attacks on the bear DNA project as a waste of government money, the very project that Kendall happens to run. The government money Kendall gets goes toward counting the bear population in the park. They use DNA just to tell the bears apart (All look same!). Because bears can live in a wide variety of habitats, they make a useful indicator for the overall health of a system. If the bear population is doing well, there’s some chance the local ecosystem is too. Since we generally want our national parks to be healthy ecosystems, the money isn’t nearly so wasteful as when McCain says wistfully into his microphone, “Three million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Unbelievable.”

Anyway, back to tough scientists. Kendall’s research requires her to go out and, err, pluck the hair from bears to get their DNA. This is the scientist McCain is deriding for wasteful government spending.

Here are a couple of choice quotes that I hope will inspire you to read the whole story:

Kendall is one tough field biologist: She’s rafted wild rivers, forded swollen streams and hiked through remote backcountry for weeks at a time. She goes to places inhabited by all manner of large creatures with sharp teeth. She was once charged by an enraged grizzly. She stared the bear down.

Also this one,

As a woman in a male-dominated field, Kendall was used to being underestimated. But she also thought of all the things that could go wrong. She would be sending people to places 30 miles from the nearest road. And they’d be carrying bear bait.

To make it extra fun, replace “Kendall” with “Miriam” and “bear” with “shark” in that last one.

Anyone who has poked at sea cucumbers knows that they are really squishy when undisturbed, but tighten up like a wee warty sausage if you pick them up. Apparently researchers at Case Western have spent quality time in tidepools, because they are building a new polymer based on sea cucumber skin. The polymer will be rigid when dry and soft when soaked in water.  The researchers envision applications like brain electrodes and protective clothing.  I, however, hope they will take the imitation of sea cucumbers one step farther, and make a self-defense material that will hurk up a slimy mass of intestines on command.

Via Boing Boing

If I dine on a giant 1-lb sustainably caught shrimp for dinner, wash it down with scallop beer, and have maple-bacon lollipops for dessert, would that hold the world record for number of treyf courses consumed? YUM.

Then again, Eric & I immediately followed our Orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony with a New England-style clam and lobster bake. So nu? We better not move to Israel.

I’ve been looking forward to 21 for a while - it’s a movie about MIT students gaming blackjack tables at Vegas. The true story is chronicled in the book Bringing Down the House.  Now, I expected the actors to be way hotter than 99.999% of MIT students, because beating people with the hot stick is what Hollywood does. But I didn’t really expect them to sink so low as to cast a white dude as the East Asian team leader. As ultrabrown says,

Are you kidding me? A movie about math, MIT and gambling, and the lead was made white? Have you ever seen the pai gow tables in Vegas? And this after the success of Harold and Kumar. One step forward, two steps back.

Via Racialicious

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has made some mainstream news (spoilers in the link) with the latest volume of Buffy: Season 8. Since the whole silly to-do relies on spoilers, I’m not going to launch into it until after the jump. Since I need to fill some space for layout reasons, I’ll take this moment to inform the Whedon loving geek cosmos that Joss will begin filming the pilot of his next show, Dollhouse, on April 23.

(more…)

I am in the midst of writing My First NSF Proposal (Wudda lil’ scientist! Though actually it’s a mock proposal for a class). So in lieu of actual content, here is series of links themed “Marine Mammals: They will &%$@ You Up!”

• British couple gets too close to a anxious humpback momma in Hawaii, almost made into krill
• Orca has either bad aim or a wicked sense of humor - what IS it with kayakers?
• Though it’s aquatic, not marine, please fear the Compubeaver. It’s a computer! And a beaver! Now you can crunch number and trees with one handy device. It gives a whole new meaning to “dual processor.” The Compubeaver’s home page is not to be missed, where you can also meet his buddy, the text-o-possum.

The hobbit-people of Flores may just be stunted cretins with hypothyroidism, says a new study. (Apparently “cretinism” is an actual disease involving a deficient thyroid gland.) Or maybe the hobbit-people didn’t listen to Oprah and “swallowed too many words they were aching to say,” leading to their thyroid breakdown & teeny size. Oh, well. We’ll have to go elsewhere for our ring-destroying needs.

Photo from the National Geographic hobbit photo gallery

Alas. A roll of the d20 for the man who gave us Dungeons & Dragons, the game (and language) of many a socially dysfunctional youth. He died today at 69.
Oh, I can’t resist quoting the way CNN described Dungeons & Dragons:

Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that’s still growing in popularity.

Is that what geeks sound like when we try to sound cool? Anyway, no one since Tolkien has done as much for sword and sorcery entertainment as Gygax did.

Edit: For a truly belabored, but ultimately insightful, obit of Gygax and explanation of D&D, check out the Slate.com obit.

The Schmidt Sting Pain Index rates, well, the pain of insect strings. It’s compiled by one extremely dedicated and perhaps a tad masochistic scientist, Dr. Justin O. Schmidt. Zooillogix reported a couple months back in the index’s palette of pain:

1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

These descriptions are terrifyingly vivid, like a lightning strike to the eyeball! Doesn’t it make you wonder about the man behind the stings? Wonder no more - Zooillogix nabbed an interview with Dr. Schmidt. Sample question:

Was there a point that you regretted letting a particular insect sting you?

I never directly “let myself be stung” by anything particularly painful. Those that are really painful are quite good at stinging one without help. The worst stinging I received was probably by some black wasps (Polybia simillima) in Costa Rica. It was the only time I have ever seen that species, was ill-equipped at the time to collect the large nest, did not realize how good they were at penetrating bees suits and other barriers, and I absolutely needed that nest. The result was lots of nasty burning stings and a few irate colleagues who were nearby. Incidentally, most of my nasty stinging events are similar - they were serendipitous discoveries of a wonderful species that I needed and had no choice: grasp the moment, or lose it.

Apparently grasping the moment feels like burning (perhaps like a paring knife to a lemon-juice covered fingertip).