This is going to be my final consistent science post in a while, since i'll be going back to my home country, England, for 2 weeks. It's been a long time so I expect to post more casual stuff in that time for the most part, but who knows. I'll talk about that more in a post tomorrow.
Anyway what the hell did I learn this week?
Monday: The Language Myth
Evolution is a funny thing, and although it appears, like the big bang, to be this driving force pushing forward from a single point in ancient history, its unclear how exactly life began. There are in fact several possible options and it isn't ruled out by any means that abiogenesis actually occurred more than once, modern life just happening to originate from the most successful branch.
A rather large international team, with the Max Planck institute taking the lead did a fairly substantial report on this. Basically, Looking into 81 Austronesian languages which all share a language family an geographic region, they found that Lexicon and Grammar actually 'evolved' separately via significantly different processes, with grammar changing more quickly due to social influence and lexicon being more rigid, and changing when new languages were created in the vicinity.
Tuesday: Quantum... fluctuations. (In the theory)
I've always seen Quantum Mechanics as a rather steadfast field of science. General Relativity has all the answers for its purpose, but it also has limits. With Quantum science, it's almost as if there is no limit and it may one day just engulf the rest of science.
That being said, it's always up for an update from time to time. It turns out that Quantum Mechanics (QM for now) can't explain some functions of the heavier elements on the periodic table. General Relativity is, bizarrely, needed to clarify things for the last 21 elements.
This seems counter-intuitive, because QM is specifically the 'science of the small', and Relativity serves to explain galaxies other huge, noticeable effects.
But when it came to looking at Berkelium (Bk), a heavy atom which I can safely assume was discovered in Berkeley, US, was not following the rules. The rules of QM are final. They are gospel, you can't just mess around with them!
Apparently I'm wrong however, because the electrons in the elements of Berkelium and higher don't behave like all the other elements. They do not line up, and instead act totally opposite to how they are predicted to.
In the clearest way I can explain, General Relativity states that Mass gets heavier the faster it gets. When you approach light speed, mass becomes infinite, which renders the very idea impossible.
Electrons in these heavy elements move around at a substantial fraction of the speed of light due to the highly charged nucleus of the atom in question. This makes them heavier. This kinda violates the normal behaviour scientists have understood this whole time.
If you want to try this experiment yourself, good luck. There's about 15 milligrams of Berkelium in the world, and half of it decays within under a year and rendered unstable.
Wednesday: The enduring Hell of Vietnam
This is not so much what I learnt this week, but one I learnt some years ago that I've been reminded of, and others should know.
When I lived in 'nam, I saw a lot of horrible things. One striking image that is always in my memory is of a poor young boy walking around selling gum for a living. That in itself is fine, except his feet were on backwards. I'm not making this up! He was walking around with his feet on backwards and honestly, this was not any more unusual than any of the others. I was always shocked at the lasting effects from the Vietnamese war. Kids barely 18 years old, one or two generations past, still reaping the results of Agent Orange and other gases of death, in a country too poor to adequately support them.
73 million litres of chemical doom was dumped on the country by the Americans which also devastated natural vegetation and other wildlife. Almost 5 million Vietnamese were subject to Agent Orange directly, but the stuff went into the soil, the crops, the rice the food chain and the lakes and rivers.
Agent Orange isn't as horrible as Napalm for example. What happens is that people start dying from Cancer at alarming rates. But these people still have children. And these children suffer from incredibly bad birth defects - mutations, physical and mental.
A short trip to the famed museum in Ho Chi Minh City is enough to make the most stoic lumberjack cry, or at the very least feel shaken and very uncomfortable with their own existence. Pictures line the walls of individuals with missing limbs, or worse, twisted, bent limbs, or limbs that go inside their body, or eyes that pop out in weird places, or pointy, freakish skulls with half a brain missing. The variations are staggering. (I've decided against posting a picture of these examples because, well, they seriously put a downer on your mood. Especially if you're American.)
This, now, is passing through to the third and even fourth generations. Aside from that, the aforementioned soil and water are still showing the effects of the pollution of dioxin, the active ingredient in Agent Orange, messing up the growth of trees and plants to this day, and still working its way through the food chain.
Some of the attacked locations; forests that serve as habitats for rare tigers, elephants and more, were damaged beyond repair. A total write off. Due to the death of a lot of greenery, soil erodes faster and floods are made worse, making lives much worse for individuals today who are already very much living in poverty.
As a quick science aside, the dioxin in question doing most the damage to people is formally called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD, and is a byproduct of the herbicides used. This should be an important thing to note; the dioxin was not at the time understood to be part of the weapon. American Soldiers occasionally were affected too by naively re-purposing the drums of the compound as barbecues or other stuff like that, thus getting into contact with it.
Short-term exposure to dioxin can cause darkening of the skin, liver problems and a severe acne-like skin disease called chloracne. Additionally, dioxin is linked to type 2 diabetes, immune system dysfunction, nerve disorders, muscular dysfunction, hormone disruption and heart disease.
Developing fetuses are particularly sensitive to dioxin, which is also linked to miscarriages, spina bifida and other problems with fetal brain and nervous system development.
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Thursday: Pesticide Honey
This one I saw numerous times during my perusals of various science tags on Steemit, and it annoyed me how even high-ranking users with reps of 68+ were so lazy in reporting on it.
Most 'reports' on Steemit said this: 95% of honey is laced with bee-killing pesticides.
Fine, but the reality is more '75% of honey has trace amounts of the pesticide which can be detrimental to bees'. Which is still a terrible statistic. 75% of honey worldwide has a kind of compound that acts as a nerve agent on bees. And I thought I was done talking about Agent Orange!
Bees have the crap kicked out of them by disease and, well everything attributed to colony collapse disorder, the mysterious phenomenon we blame on mites, pesticides, humans, fungi, viruses, the French, whatever really. And now the bee's own food is poisoned! 75% shows trace amounts and may not damage the bees, but 34% of all honey had high enough concentrations to do real damage that threatens their survival
Testing for acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, thiacloprid, and thiamethoxam, which are recent nerve agent-type pesticides used around the world, researchers found that 10% of the honey found had amounts of all of them, whereas 30% had just a single one and 45% had two or three. It should also be noted that the worst affected area was North America with 86% affected, with South America faring best with a still worrisome 57%.
Let's not forget the importance of bees as natural pollinators. We are basically doomed if they go extinct.
Friday: Circadian Neanderthals
Terrible title. Though we don't know a lot of things about why we humans interbred with neanderthals, the fact is we now know that to be the case. Even more, we know what effects that has on us and our anatomy. Typically we believed, for example, that given the northern location of neanderthals, ginger hair was something we inherited from them, but it turns out in a recent look at things by geneticists that this isn't true at all. In fact, they didn't even have the genes for ginger hair at all - it is a uniquely human trait and gene.
Even more, the genes of neanderthals had no influence on our skin colour as well as hair, but they did share with us their circadian rhythm. Our natural body clocks are different depending on which latitude we tend to live in on Earth. The determining gene here is called ASB1 which is found much more often in Northern populations compared to those nearer the equator, and determines whether you're a 'night owl' or not, and is also related to narcolepsy.
This has some real world applications, because understanding this gene helps deal with issues related to our circadian rhythms, including obesity, sleep deprivation and even diabetes.
So there you have it, a rather grim week, I suppose, but what's the point in being happy if you have no misery to compare it to, eh?
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