Cheerful Curmudgeon

Were you looking forward to another boring day on this run-of-the-mill planet Earth?

Researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and eight collaborating institutions report in this week’s Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth’s surface. Think that’s weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy.

Go read These bacteria use radiated water as food at IU’s web site. Once again, truth is stranger than fiction.

This is really important and the last day of the program. See the web site for complete details.

National TBIS Key Exchange Program

ScienceDaily reports in Deciphering The Mystery Of Bee Flight that scientists have finally figured out how bees fly.

Their wings beat over a short arc of about 90 degrees, but ridiculously fast, at around 230 beats per second. Fruit flies, in comparison, are 80 times smaller than honeybees, but flap their wings only 200 times a second.

When bees want to generate more power–for example, when they are carting around a load of nectar or pollen–they increase the arc of their wing strokes, but keep flapping at the same rate.

and

“This is one of those cases where you can make a mistake by looking at an animal and assuming that it is perfectly adapted. An alternate hypothesis is that bee ancestors inherited this kind of muscle and now present-day bees must live with its peculiarities,” Dickinson [professor of bioengineering at California Institute of Technology] says.

Maybe “survival of the fittest” may have to be replaced with “survival of the most persistent.”

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

When the Romans invaded ancient Judea, thick forests of date palms towering up to 80 feet high and 7 miles wide covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south. The tree so defined the local economy that Emperor Vespasian celebrated the conquest by minting the “Judea Capta,” a special bronze coin that showed the Jewish state as a weeping woman beneath a date palm.

Today, nothing remains of those mighty forests. The date palms in modern Israel were imported, mainly from California. The ancient Judean date, renowned for its succulence and famed for its many medicinal properties, had been lost to history.

Until now.

Elaine Solowey, a UCLA-educated botanist, living in Israel and specializing in the study of ancient plants, has successfully germinated 2,000 year-old Judean date seeds which were found on Masada.

Read the article. Imagine being able to touch (and maybe eat) a piece of Biblical history.

New Scientist ran an article on Monday titled, Mission to build a simulated brain begins. It opens with,

An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday.

The “Blue Brain” project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM’s Blue Gene design.

The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.

On the one hand, it reads like bad sci-fi. “Mission to outer space begins!” or some such grandiose scheme involving peta-hyper-chrono-drive spaceships and (gasp) mechanical brains!

On the other hand, it strikes too close to the heart dismiss lightly. We can get so caught up with fights like evolution vs. creationism that we lose sight of the real mysteries in the universe. The question of how brains actually work has intrigued me for decades.

I remember trying to get a handle on it back in college. I took two 400 level courses at the same time, Artificial Intelligence and Psychology of Thinking. (It took a bit of finagling for me to get into the psych course, since I had not taken any of the prerequisites, so here is a belated thanks to my parents. I told the professor that they had degrees in psych and social work so of course I was prepared for his class. Fortunately, the prof bought it.) But I digress.

I hoped that if I took AI and psychology at the same time, I might learn how our brains work from two perspectives and thereby gain a deeper understanding. I ended up being deeply disappointed. I learned that the shrinks knew more about aphasia than thought, knew a bit about what pieces of the brain were responsible for “vision” or “hearing” or “speech” but didn’t have a clue how any of them worked. From the geeks, I learned how to play go, that they didn’t have any solid ideas about how a brain “knew” stuff, and that the computers of the day weren’t anywhere near fast enough to approach solving the problem.

Today my hope is rekindled. Over the last few months, I have bumped into literature that the brain works more like an orchestra than a digital computer (The Music of the Brain). This seems much more reasonable to me. Rather than try to force the brain to work like the model that we have at hand, we may have found a model which more closely matches reality.

“Blue Brain” may just be a key component in this discovery journey. We may finally have the computing power to actually test our theories.

We’ve come a long way in the 25 years since I was at the University of Michigan. I can’t wait to see how much we know 25 years from now.