Is the Internet Damaging Our Memories?

Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan in 1967. Credit: Yousuf Karsh, Library and Archives Canada, www.collectionscanada.gc.ca

Were he still alive, today would have been the 100th birthday of Marshall McLuhan. While most Canadians have heard of him, and might even be able to rattle off his famous, cryptic aphorism, “the medium is the message,” a complete understanding of his theories is beyond most, including some who think they know. Still, his general point – that the electronic media have fundamentally altered our consciousness – seems intuitive enough. On my smart phone, I have instant access to access to all human knowledge via the Internet. It’s an amazing ability, but like many people, I sometimes worry that having this super power has made me less likely to retain information myself. Is my own memory in danger of being made obsolete by Google?

I was thinking about this while reading through a study published in Science last week by Betsy Sparrow and her colleagues in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University.Continue reading

Misunderstood Mosasaur: New Genus Discovered

MosasaurMaastricht080910
Mosasaur skeleton at Maastricht Natural History Museum, The Netherlands. Credit: Wilson44691 via Wikimedia Commons

As you may have noticed, I’m a big fan of stories about extinct animals, and the University of Alberta can usually be relied on to crank them out at regular intervals. Last week, a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology proposed a major re-organization of the mosasaurs, sometimes called the “T-rex of the sea.”

Mosasaurs essentially looked like giant, sea-going crocodiles, with flippers for limbs and a big fluked whale-like tail. They were not dinosaurs; rather they were the biggest members ever of the order Squamata, which today includes all snakes and lizards. And I mean big; mosasaurs routinely reached sizes of 15 metres or longer. Continue reading

Happy First Birthday Neptune!

The planet Neptune, as seen by Voyager 2
Neptune, as seen by Voyager 2 (Wikimedia Commons)

Just after midnight on September 23rd, 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle stood at the telescope in the Berlin Observatory, calling out coordinates one by one to his assistant, Heinrich Louis d’Arrest. Despite the lateness of the hour, and the apparent tediousness of the task, there was an uncharacteristic tension in Galle’s voice, a certain expectancy. D’arrest, in the dim candlelight, dutifully checked off each entry on a map of the heavens. “Right ascension: 21 hours, 53 minutes, 16 seconds,” called out Galle. “Declination: negative 13 degrees, 24 minutes, 15 seconds. Magnitude 7.8.” There was a pregnant pause. “Sir,” came the reply, “that star is not on the chart.” The tiny speck of light would turn out to be the last undiscovered planet in the solar system.

Today (July 12, 2011) Neptune will finally celebrate its first anniversary, as it returns to the exact point in its orbit where Galle and D’arrest spotted it all those years ago. Continue reading

Gentle Giant – The Petermann Ice Island

Petermann Ice Island 2010
Calving of the Petermann Ice Island in August 2010. Credit: Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, NASA Earth Observatory earthobservatory.nasa.gov

Where were you when the Petermann Ice Island calved?

Ok, so maybe the date of August 5, 2010 doesn’t exactly stick in anyone’s memory, but it totally should. That’s the day when an enormous chunk of the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland, crashed into the sea, creating the biggest piece of floating ice the Arctic had seen in 60 years. Today, the battered remains of this frozen giant are still floating south, and are now within a few hundred kilometres of Newfoundland.

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Why Science Communication Matters

Earthquake damage near Abruzzo, Italy, 2009 (RaBoe via Wikimedia Commons)
Earthquake damage near Abruzzo, Italy, 2009. RaBoe via Wikimedia Commons

As you’ll know from my mission statement, the purpose of this blog is to help science tell its own story, in other words, to improve communication between scientists and non-scientists. While I believe this to be a noble goal, others may disagree. Sure, knowing about science might get you a better score down at your local pub trivia game, but you can drive a car perfectly well without understanding the subtle details of thermodynamics that make it go. Science, the argument goes, is interesting to a select few but not essential for the vast majority. If the general public doesn’t “get” science, so what?

Well here’s what: Last month, six Italian geoscientists were charged with manslaughter for failing to warn the public about the L’Aquila earthquake of 2009.Continue reading

Fukushima is (Thankfully) Not Chernobyl

Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant
Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant
The Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania experienced a partial, contained meltdown in 1979, with no casualties. Not all nuclear accidents are created equal.

Like everyone else, I’ve been closely watching the events in Japan over the last week. The tragedies arising from the earthquake and the resulting tsunami are powerful enough to defy easy attempts at explanation. Still, that hasn’t stopped us from trying, and a tension has emerged between those who see in the disaster hubris on the one hand, tenacity on the other.

Events like this, says the first camp, are reminders that we humans, like the rest of the life on this planet, are at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves. We can put men on the moon, but we can’t save ourselves from nature’s fury. By contrast, the second camp, while acknowledging the terrible reality of the disaster, is encouraged by the fact that human ingenuity has, if not averted it, at least drastically reduced its scale. The Sendai earthquake was a thousand times more powerful than that which hit Haiti just over a year ago. However, due to strict building codes, sophisticated warning systems, and prudent emergency planning, the death toll, while still significant, is over a hundred times lower. We cannot conquer nature, but at our best we can strongly curtail its destructive power.Continue reading

Boiling Water Trick Explained

A few weeks ago, this video (made by Samantha Stewart of Yellowknife) garnered over a million views on YouTube, and was picked up by both CBC and CNN.  It shows the seemingly magical instant transformation of boiling water into snow, which can only happen at temperatures below -30 C.

Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to try this out for myself.  My opportunity came sooner than I expected; here’s me replicating the experiment from the balcony of my apartment on a typical frigid day in Ottawa.Continue reading

The Tiniest Farmers in the World

Fuligo septica, the “dog vomit” slime mould

Just when you thought slime molds couldn’t get any more bizzare, some researchers at Rice University have caught them farming.

If you are already familiar with slime molds, you can skip over the next couple of paragraphs.  If not, get ready to have your mind blown.

Life, you see, is quite fond of befuddling our attempts to understand it.  While you may have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about if I say “plant” or “animal” or “fungus” or even “protozoan,” slime molds don’t fit neatly into any of these categories.  In fact, the things commonly lumped together under the title of “slime mould” exhibit a plethora of shapes and behaviours, ranging from things that look more or less like mushrooms (but aren’t) to things that look more or less like dog vomit (see illustration).  Modern DNA analysis shows that different species of slime mould aren’t even that closely related to each other, let alone anything else.Continue reading