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Goodbye Blog! I’m headed to Negril, Jamaica, for a blissful week sans computer. See ya next year!
Merry Christmas Eve!
On Christmas Eve exactly 150 years ago, in the town of Molina de Segura in Murcia, Spain, a farmer, Rafael Martínez Fortún, saw “a magnificent ball of fire…descended majestically from the sky.” The fireball was a 317-pound meteorite, Spain’s largest on record.
Soon after the rock landed in Fortún’s barley plot, he commissioned and legally registered his description of what had happened.
From that description (which was published in the August issue of Astronomy and Geophysics):
Some people who were curious went to the site of the impact a few days later and they were all confused, without knowing what could have caused it. After moving the soil a little, and finding nothing, they completely forgot the event. Later, during the barley harvest, one of the workers noticed a hole caused by the meteorite and upon digging around with his sickle hit something hard, and he told his fellow workers, whose curiosity led them the dig deeper into the earth to see what they could find.
The rock split into many parts when it landed, the largest of which is now on display at the National Museum of Natural Sciences, in Madrid.
When identifying human emotions, individuals with fragile X show increased activation in the left hippocampus (B) and the right insula (C), compared with people who have autism.
Autism and fragile X syndrome are characterized by very different brain processes, even though the two disorders show similar social deficits, say authors of the first functional imaging study to compare the two disorders.
Fragile X syndrome is a form of inherited mental retardation that stems from a rare mutation in a single gene, FMR1, on the X chromosome. Like those with autism, people with the syndrome often have trouble interacting with others, maintaining eye contact, or acquiring language. Fragile X syndrome affects 1 in 4,000 males and half as many females, but as many as a third of them exhibit autistic features.
“Behaviors that appear similar in both conditions suggest to many researchers that autism and fragile X syndrome may also share etiologic factors,” says Ami Klin, director of the Autism Program at the Yale Child Study Center.
But this study’s results suggest that’s not the case, says lead investigator Kim Dalton, associate scientist at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“On the surface, [the two disorders] have similar behavioral profiles,” Dalton says. “But our research is showing that in the brain, there are more differences than there are similarities.”
“Graceful” may be the last word you’d think of to describe the elements of a typical building construction site: jagged chunks of raw material; piercing noises; flying debris; rough-and-gruff construction workers. Perhaps the one exception—poised, like the bird that shares its name, well above the fray—is the crane.
Hundreds of thousands of cranes are used throughout the world—for assembling heavy manufacturing equipment, for unloading freight from cargo ships, and of course, for building construction.
More than 30,000 cranes—24 percent of the world’s total—were operating in Dubai in 2006, according to a report from the organizers of the Conmex construction machinery exhibition. There are more than 2,000 high-rise buildings under construction in Beijing right now, each requiring at least one large tower crane and a slew of mobile cranes, according to the Beijing Lonely Planet City Guide. New York City’s Buildings Department estimates that 175 tower and mobile cranes are in use on any given day.
1. Take one chilly, snowy Friday night in New York when you’d much rather be inside than out.
2. Make chocolate macaroons, Hanukkah-style. Use Alton’s recipe, but add some blue dye to the crushed macadamia nuts before sprinkling them over the chocolate.
3. Once you’ve washed your hands of all that sticky greatness, clear a spot on your living room rug to play three intense matches of the best board game known to man: The Settlers of Catan. Whiskey optional, for those so inclined.
This week, I’ve been working on a story about the massive collections of health data kept by the Danish government. The Danes have a very long tradition of this: the Church of Denmark (Evangelical Lutheran) has kept a record of all births and deaths in the country since 1645. Now there are more than 200 registries in Denmark, keeping track of (among other things): every baby born in Denmark, her birth weight, birth complications, and her parents’ ages and smoking habits. As that baby grows up, a system of linked databases keeps track of every encounter she has with the medical establishment, from routine doctor visits to hospitalizations, and every drug that she’s prescribed.
What’s more, since 1982, every baby born in Denmark has donated a blood sample to the Danish Newborn Screening Biobank. The blood is used immediately to test for PKU, a genetic form of mental retardation that can be prevented by a special diet. But after the test is done, the blood is stored for future patient reference or general research use.
The various registries and biobanks hold millions of pieces of data, all numerically labeled so that researchers from around the world can analyze them without violating any citizen’s privacy.
In these tough economic times, everybody wants to save money. One of the most practical solutions might be to have a moratorium on holiday gift buying. The average American spent $859 last year on Christmas gifts, according to American Research Group. If we put that money toward credit card bills or mortgage payments instead, then could we dig ourselves out of this credit crisis, even just a bit?
Yet even writing down the possibility of killing Christmas presents makes me feel icky. We live in a gift-giving culture. Every night on the local news (and yes, I’m a big fan of the local news) I see another story of a poor mother who’s sacrificing [insert life essential] in order to buy her son/daughter [insert silly toy/clothing trend]. Why is this practice so revered?
John Tierney gives a few reasons in today’s New York Times: to strengthen family bonds; to avoid future conflicts; to redistribute wealth throughout the community; and, simply, just to feel good. Tierney tells the story of the Kwakwaka’wakw Indians, from British Columbia, who have put on extremely lavish gift-giving ceremonies, called potlatches, for hundreds of years—even when Christian missionaries tried to shut them down, and even during the Great Depression.
As Bill Cranmer, hereditary chief of the Kwakwaka’wakw, told Tierney: “Even in hard economic times, the potlatch has always been the structure that enables people in our society to work together.”
Now, back to my online shopping.
By Jonathan Aaron; Published in this week’s New Yorker:
Acting Like a Tree
When I got to the party and saw everybody
walking around in Christmas costumes,
I remembered I was supposed to be wearing one, too.
Bending slightly, I held out my hands
and waved them a little, wiggling my fingers.
I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips, making
a tree face, and started slowly hopping on one foot,
then the other, the way I imagine trees do
in the forest when they’re not being watched.
Maybe people would take me for a hemlock,
or a tamarack. A little girl disguised as an elf
looked at me skeptically. Oh, come on!
her expression said. You call that acting like a tree?
Behind her I could see a guy in a reindeer suit
sitting down at the piano. As he hit the opening
chords of “Joy to the World” I closed my eyes
and tried again. This time I could feel the wind
struggling to lift my boughs, which were heavy
with snow. I was clinging to a mountain crag
and could see over the tops of other trees a few late-
afternoon clouds and the thin red ribbon of a river.
I smelled more snow in the air. A gust or two whispered
around my neck and face, but by now
all I could hear was the meditative creaking
of this neighbor or that—and a moment later, farther off,
the faint but eager call of a wolf.
One of the most basic rules of science writing is to remove all uses of scientific jargon (you know, things like “phenotypes”, “protocols” and “paradigms”). Now there’s another good reason to avoid jargon: it distorts public perception.
From Mind Hacks:
A new study just published in PLoS One reports that simply using technical-sounding labels for newly popularised medical conditions changes our understanding of the condition itself, leading us to think it is more serious and more common.
The study is interesting as it speaks to the debate about disease mongering – the over-medicalising of problems that were previously considered unfortunate but normal parts of life.
I love science, and I love coffee. So how much do I love this video showing how astronauts drink the finest of beverages in space? SO MUCH. (Thanks, Daniel!)
