cafecuriosity

Nice Cup of Hot Chocolate

A confession - I am partial to the occasional cup of hot chocolate. However, I rarely spend any time at all, thinking about the journey the chocolate undertook to make its way into my cup. Echoes of a much longer and much, much older chocolate expedition caught my attention this week. Researchers announced they had discovered theobromine a chocolate marker in the shards of ceramic drinking cylinders unearthed at the Chaco Canyon settlement in New Mexico.

Fingerprints on History

 The electronic age is going to be hell for historians. Paper records have a reassuring physicality and a surprising ability to endure, despite damp, fire and dusty neglect. Nor are they subject to capricious changes in industry formatting standards. Barack Obama's battle with bureaucracy to retain his Blackberry is well known. He is America's first truly digital President. While his speeches may be recorded for posterity, and the commentariate's take on his policy may live on thanks to YouTube, the digital divide poses problems of its own.

Frog Safe Haven Found In Columbia

While CafeCuriosity has been off exploring what triggers tourists' curiosity, an expedition to Columbia's Tacarcuna area of the Darian (a biological 'hot spot') near the Panama border has found curiosities of its own. Better known for its notoriously anti-curiosity drug cartels and endemic violence, the wild Darian region proved to harbor 10 amphibian species believed to be new to science

As Different As Cats and Dogs

Time for a confession. while I quite like dogs - particularly big boofy dogs, I'm basically a cat person. For years I put that foible down to cats like independence and general insouciance. Thanks to the U.s. National Science Foundation and some ex-Duke dudes, I realize its really because cats are curious and creep up on objects of interest. According to the study; 'Dogs Chase Efficiently, But Cats Skulk Counterintuitively', cast have just trashed the assumption by biologists that natural selection is all about energy efficiency. Here I was admiring my cats' ability to sleep 20 hours a day (2 hours play, 2 hours snacking) when in reality they were following their evolutionary path to success! While dogs are all balanced if bouncy kinetic energy, cats have traded off efficiency in exchange for the ability to slink along before pouncing on an unsuspecting cloth mouse and give it a good pummeling. Dogs like humans, have a gait that reduces their muscular workload by 70% while your cat manage only 37% at best. This explains why cats operate in short bursts and need so much sleep to recharge the batteries - here I was putting it down to pure laziness!  So te next time your feline has their paws up, remember they're only skulking counterintuitively! http://news.duke.edu/2008/12/catwalk.html   Image: Seti demonstrating counterintuitive skulking!, David Rymer, 2008

Snow On Mars

After all the arguments and pontificating about whether there had ever been water on Mars, it is amusing to read the latest announcement by NASA/JPL that their Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from clouds scudding 4 kilometers above the landing site on the Martian surface. Sadly the snow evaporated before it hit the surface, ruling out robotically crafted snowmen. Adding to the water focus was news pointing to the presence of carbonates in soil samples analyzed by the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer and the wet chemistry lab aboard the Lander. Carbonates typically form in the presence of water, indicating ice deposits found previously by the Lander in the 'Snow White' trench may have melted in the past. As data continues to roll in, the debates continue and the rest of us can sit back, relax and enjoy the spell-binding images capturing the many moods of Mars.   http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2008-183   Image: Soil sample taken from Snow White trench by the Pheonix Mars Lander, NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Excitement of the Unknown

There's nothing quite like the unknown to fire our curiosity - even when it involves something as unsexy as microbial fungi! Undergrads from Yale's 'Rain Forest Expedition and Laboratory' course have mounted expeditions to Peru and Ecuador in the past two years. The results have been spectacular - the Peru expedition discovered 135 endophytes (fungal and bacterial microorganisms living inside plant tissue) some of which probably represent new genera. After six months studying this batch of specimens, one was found to have anti-oxidant properties, while another reduces inflation in human tissue and actually turns off programmed cell death. Now the science is cool (in a geeky kind of way) but what's really cool is that 15 untrained undergrads can wander into the Amazon forest and emerge clutching new species of life unknown to science (or anyone else)! It's a fabulous way to engage future generations in learning. How pumped do you think those kids are about science now?  http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=5943  Image: Yale undergraduate Sun Jin Lee with her discovery of an extract from a fungal endophyte that reduces inflammation in human tissue and programmed cell death, Yale University

Shakespear Done Elephants Wrong

Elephants it seems have been done an injustice. For centuries, writers such as Shakespeare have described the noble pachyderm as perambulating on stiff, pillar like legs. Not any more. Thanks to a team lead by John Hutchinson from the Royal Veterinary College, London we now know elephants enjoy significant movement in their  shoulders, hips, knees and elbow joints, although disappointingly, their ankles proved to be springy rather than flexible. Taking a lead out of Hollywood's bag of tricks, the team borrowed a couple of elephant from Colchester and Whipsnade Zoos, ranging from babies through to big mommas, dotted their legs with balls covered in infrared reflective tape, before coaxing the elephants to run (more or less) in front of a battery of infrared cameras. The test animals recorded speeds ranging from 0.62 m/s to a respectable 4.92 m/s. Keen to pit the pride of England against the world's best, the team popped over to Thailand to test the legendary Thai 'racing' elephants. The elite elephants easily whipped their UK opposition, recording a giddy 6.8 m/s! Having analyzed the stop action motion from the film, the team found elephants operate at almost the maximum of the mobility range, placing them somewhere near a trotting horse for mobility. So there Mr. Shakespeare - now you know!

PS. The hardest part of the project was keeping the baby elephants from pulling the infrared markers for the high speed cameras off the adults. The little buggers kept tugging them off with their trunks!  http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/211/17/2735   Image: Asian elephant studded with infrared markers for the hgih speed cameras, Royal Veterinary College, London

Triumph of Industry Over Priorities

Dubai has many charms. Yet beneath its cosmopolitan and very bling bling exterior and high energy development pace, its day-to-day priorities can be baffling. My wife and I live in an apartment in one of Dubai's major beachside developments as the accompanying picture shows. It resembles Batman's Gotham City at first glance. (and some of the cars rival the Batmobile in size!) The development comprises six or seven clusters of six towers dominating the beachside environment. As I stepped out of my lift entrance to the underground car park in my block, I saw two of the building's maintenance staff, each astride a ride-on mini street cleaner industriously washing the white painted arrows marking out the traffic flow direction on the car park floor! Given that Dubai relies on desalination for its water supply, this was a very expensive buff and polish. I hope the cleaners were using recycled water! Still, those white arrows were gleaming in the garage's fluorescent lights!

The Long Tail of Curiosity

I've been enjoying Chris Anderson's The Long Tail recently. One of the more robust debates about the new economics of online life has centered on whether the rise of social networks has triggered a decline in mainstream cultural institutions and if so, whether this will produce a flight to the middle where opinions converge into some kind of nightmare American Idolesque programming. Given The Long Tail's core hypothesis is that endless choice creates unlimited demand I was keen to see how curiosity fitted into these new economics. Not unexpectedly, Chris' perspective owes much to abundance, "I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less." H egoes on to observe that while mass culture is under pressure, common culture - what which we share with others but not everyone will continue forming and reforming.

The music industry has form when it comes to resisting change even during its vinyl clad 'golden era' as Chris Welch's 'Peter Grant the Man Who Led Zeppelin' shows. Grant's unique approach to business and commitment to his band fundamentally changed the power relationships between rock bands, their record labels and the venue promoters who staged their live shows. In the process, Grant focused on the fans desire to see Led Zeppelin play - as the leverage behind his negotiating position. Choice for Grant was all about the fans and the band not the scarcity imposed by limited retail shelf space.

Weird Science: Tasmanian Tiger DNA Lives Again!

Definitive proof this week that one should never leave researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas alone, unsupervised in a lab together, when they announced the world's first use of DNA from an Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) to trigger a response in a mouse. After extracting DNA from a 100 year old specimen preserved in ethanol, researchers inserted the thylacine DNA into mouse embryos and stood back to see what happened! Apparently, the thylacine DNA kicked in and grew mouse cartilage. Why the ghoulish experiment you ask? Idle scientific curiosity I suspect, with a lot of rationalization about understanding how genes function across different species, future contributions to biomedicine, transgenic this, diversity that, blah, blah, blah.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/plos-wfd051608.php   Image: 1. Functional analysis of thylacine non-coding DNA fragment, Pask, AJ, Behringer RR, Renefree, 2. Thylaconus cynocephalus physiology, PASK 2008 et al, 3. Analysis of thylacine enhancer element