The viruses hidden in our DNA

I have heard about retroviruses and that HIV belonged to that family but not being a biologist knew nothing more about what a retrovirus was and how it differed from any other virus. This article by Carl Zimmer explains what they are and in addition says that new research about them has revealed that we all have a lot of retroviruses that invaded our DNA a long time ago and that over time have mutated to become either inactive or dormant. [Read more…]

Internet addiction

Two years ago, I wrote about research that found that those people who tried to multitask (i.e., switch rapidly between different cognitive tasks) were highly inefficient in procession information when compared to those who did the same work sequentially. They suffered in all three major areas that would be necessary to multitask: the ability to filter (i.e., to detect irrelevancy so as to be able to quickly distinguish between those things that are important and those that are not), the rapidity with which they could switch from one task to the next, and the ability to sort and organize the information in the brain so as to keep track of the results of their different tasks. [Read more…]

Who invented the average value?

All measurements of a continuously varying quantity (length, weight, mass, etc.) have some level of uncertainty (more commonly referred to as the ‘error’) associated with them, due to the limits of the measuring instrument or limitations of the measurer. In order to mitigate the effects of this, nowadays we take many measurements and calculate the average value of the quantity. [Read more…]

Talk today on the Higgs particle

For those of you in the Cleveland area who are doing nothing important this evening, I will be giving a talk at 7:00 pm today May 8, 2013 to the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry on the topic The ‘God’ Particle:The reality behind the hype over the search for the Higgs boson.

It will be at the Mayfield Library, 500 S.O.M. Center Rd., Mayfield Village.

Suicidal mice

Evolution by natural selection says that those characteristics that enable organisms to survive and reproduce more than others will tend to end up dominating the population. In that model, organisms seek to propagate their genes as much as possible. Suicide as a biological instinct is clearly not advantageous and should be selected against and disappear over time. So what are we to make of some mice that seem to commit suicide by actually running towards cats and being killed and eaten by them? [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 20: Concluding thoughts (and bibliography)

It is time to wrap up what turned out to be a much longer series of posts on the Higgs than I anticipated when I started it, probably with a lot more information than readers wanted to know! (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)

The story of the detection of the Higgs is a prime example of what Thomas Kuhn described as ‘normal science’ in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He said that most of the time, scientists are not seeking novelty but instead are carefully looking for things in which almost everything is known and anticipated, except for a few minor details. In the case of the Higgs, experimenters knew almost everything about it except its mass, and even then we had some idea of the possible range of values. It should not be surprising that the final confirmation comes as somewhat of an anti-climax. [Read more…]

What our ancestors may have looked like

The so-called ‘Cambrian explosion’ that occurred 500-600 million years ago saw the appearance in the fossil record of an extraordinarily wide diversity of life forms. Whether there was a sudden flurry of evolutionary advances at the time or whether that time marked the beginning of animal bodies that were fossilizable and so gave the illusion of an explosion of life forms is not clear. The suspicions are that it was the latter. [Read more…]

Stumping the stumpers

Recently someone told me that a friend of his was a science teacher in the American south who was teaching his students about anatomy and said that apart from a few small differences, the form of male and female skeletons were identical. He was nonplussed when a student said that that was not quite correct since men had one less rib! He of course knew where this weird belief came from but did not know how to reply and so quickly moved on. He later sought and obtained a teaching position in Ohio just to avoid having ot teach students who were so burdened with incorrect biblical knowledge. [Read more…]