Australasian Science Magazine Issue July-August 2010
The True Believers
Why do we believe in God, resurrection, UFOs, clairvoyants and alternative medicines?
By Krissy Wilson
Are we pre-programmed to believe in weird and wonderful things that lack any significant scientific basis, and are some of us more likely to believe than others?
Krissy Wilson is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Tasmania. This is an extended version of an article that appeared in The Skeptic.
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The Young Visionaries
Truen Ibbotson experiences what it’s like to have restricted vision using special goggles designed by the Young Visionaries. Photo: Sharyn Wragg
By Mandy Thoo
Early-career scientists are using goggles that mimic common eye diseases to teach primary school children about their vision research and the importance of eye care.
Mandy Thoo is a Masters student in science communication at the Australian National University.
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A Matter of Taste
While food preferences vary quite substantially in different cultures, hedonic responses to pure tastes in isolation are relatively independent of culture or diet in adults.
By John Prescott
Newborn babies will smile when they first taste sucrose and wrinkle their noses at the bitter taste of quinine. What is the adaptive significance of such innate responses to taste?
John Prescott is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Newcastle.
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The Biggest Losers
An artist’s reconstruction of some extinct Australian animals (clockwise from top left): Genyornis newtoni, Diprotodon optatum, Procoptodon goliah, the thylacine (which survived in Tasmania until 1936), Thylacoleo carnifex (the biggest marsupial carnivore) and the giant lizard Megalania prisca. Image courtesy of the artist Peter Trusler and Australia Post
By Richard “Bert” Roberts & Barry Brook
New evidence tightens the noose on humans as the decisive factor in the extinction of the last of the megafauna in Australia and North America.
Prof Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Archaeological Science, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong. Prof Barry Brook is the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change in The Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide.
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Evidence for Indigenous Australian Agriculture
An Aboriginal village near the NSW/SA border in the 1840s.
By Rupert Gerritsen
The assumption that indigenous Australians did not develop agriculture is highly contestable, with a body of evidence revealing that they developed food production systems and in some cases lived in large villages.
Rupert Gerritsen is a Petherick Reader at the National Library of Australia, and author of Australia and the Origins of Agriculture.
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Climate Change or Natural Variability?
The long-term trend in annual rainfall for Australia from 1900 to 2009 is upwards at a linear rate of 6.33 mm/decade.
By Robert E. White
Meteorological records since the 1950s reveal a decrease in rainfall that is consistent with anthropogenic climate change, but a different picture emerges when looking at records since 1900.
Robert E. White is Professor Emeritus of The University of Melbourne’s School of Land and Environment.
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Ice Loss Accelerates Warming
The 28-year temperature trend for the autumn season. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
By Stephen Luntz
Climatologists believe they have confirmed what has been long suspected: the rapid loss of sea-ice from the Arctic is a result of a feedback cycle where global warming causes ice loss, which in turn causes more local warming.
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Security Cameras Get Smart
By Stephen Luntz
New security cameras will enable overstretched security staff to better focus their real-time surveillance.
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Helicobacter Protects Against Cancer
By Stephen Luntz
The bacterium that causes stomach ulcers provides protection against an increasingly common form of cancer.
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Growth Hormone Works in Part
By Stephen Luntz
The first scientific evidence that human growth hormone (HGH) benefits athletic performance has been produced. However, the effect is surprisingly narrow.
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Are Biodiversity Offsets Good for Biodiversity?
By Phil Gibbons
Policy-makers love biodiversity offsets while ecologists are wary of them. What's important is their impact relative to the status quo.
Dr Phil Gibbons is a Research Fellow at the Applied Environmental Decision Analysis centre at the Australian National University.
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Microbe Genes Could Curb Livestock Burps
Ruminant methane alone accounts for 31% of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions.
By Graeme Attwood
The DNA sequence of a microbe that produces methane in ruminants provides a target for vaccines and other drugs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.
Since their first domestication about 10,000 years ago, cattle, sheep, deer and goats have provided meat, milk and fibre for human use. Products derived from these ruminants are more commonly used than most people realise, with proteins derived from ruminants found in thousands of items ranging from sports drinks and processed foods to products used in oriental remedies.
It’s a Wiggly, Wiggly Universe
Figure 1. The Cosmic Microwave Background as revealed by NASA’s WMAP satellite. This is a picture of the whole sky in microwaves, and shows the fluctuations of matter in the Universe only 400,000 years after the Big Bang. The sky is covered in little hot and cold spots of size ~1°, corresponding to the distance sound can travel in the early Universe. Image: NASA / WMAP Science Team
By Karl Glazebrook
A map of the universe as it existed six billion years ago is close to completion, and may provide new insights into the physics of dark energy.
In the Beginning there was Light. But there was also Sound and Fury...
13.7 billion years ago our universe began in the Big Bang, when the whole of infinity was compressed to a singular point. While we do not yet understand the moment of singularity, cosmologists such as Stephen Hawking see that as their ultimate quest.
The Hazards of Synthesis
Richard Eckersley’s review paper was rejected by The Lancet for “self-plagiarism”.
By Richard Eckersley
Synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines is underused in research and has hazards for practitioners.
Last year I sent The Lancet a wide-ranging paper urging the need to rethink the science and politics of population health. The journal rejected the paper on the grounds of “self-plagiarism” and reported me to my university, the Australian National University. The ANU investigated and rejected the charge, saying I had not breached the Australian or ANU codes on responsible research.
Diabetes-Prone Gain More Weight
By Stephen Luntz
People with a family history of diabetes gain more weight than those without when consuming a similar diet, a Garvan Institute study has found. The research was published in Diabetologia.
Calorific requirements were carefully calculated for 17 people with a family history of diabetes and 24 people without. The sample was evenly balanced between men and women. Participants were encouraged to eat 1250 calories per day more than their requirement – similar to what can occur over the Christmas holidays.
At the end, those with a family history had gained 3.4 kg compared with 2.2 kg for those without. All participants were provided with support to lose the weight thereafter.
Wasp Gene Link to Autism, Schizophrenia
The NRXN1 gene exists in three species of Nasonia wasps.
By Stephen Luntz
Genes believed to be implicated in autism and schizophrenia have been found in the sequencing of the genome of three species of parasitic wasp, indicating they are extraordinarily ancient and essential for animal survival.
The protein neurexin 1 is linked to learning in species as diverse as mice, humans and honeybees. Defects in the protein are common in families where autism and impaired social interactions are common.
Bee brains are flooded with neurexin 1 when they learn to associate odours with food. The protein helps form connections between neighbouring neurons, providing the linkage essential to the operation of learning in the brain.
New Early Human Identified
Partial reconstruction of a skull of Homo gautengensis, a two million year old human species. Credit: Darren Curnoe
By Stephen Luntz
The human family tree is turning bushy with the announcement of yet another new species named Homo gautengensis by University of NSW anthropologist Dr Darren Curnoe.
H. gautengensis lived around the same time and place as “the missing link” Australopithecus sediba (AS, June 2010 pp.14–17), and is a closer relative of ours, belonging to our genus. Nevertheless, publication of the finding in HOMO – Journal of Comparative Human Biology has aroused much less media interest than A. sediba, which Curnoe attributes to the new species being a reclassification of previously known fossils rather than a new find.
The Jean Genie
By Stephen Luntz
Dr Yves Al-Ghazi is finding genes that can make better clothing, but plans to put his scientific training to a very different use.
Cancer charities raise money through “jeans for genes”, but Dr Yves Al-Ghazi is reversing the order, finding cotton genes that can make a better pair of jeans.
As a rule, those who use cotton are looking for fibres that are long, strong and fine. A large part of Al-Ghazi’s work is trying to identify the genes that make a plant produce such fibres rather than short, fat and weak ones. Uniformity of fibres is also highly desired.
A Better Deal for Meds
Australians are paying much more for medicines than they should.
By Ian Lowe
If you want cheaper medicines, get a prescription in New Zealand.
Why do pharmaceuticals cost much more in Australia than in New Zealand? Sydney University’s Philip Clarke and Ed Fitzgerald say Australians are paying much more than they should. They examined specific cases, such as one drug commonly used to treat patients with high cholesterol levels. The wholesale price of Simvastatin in Australia is about $30 per month for regular 40 mg doses. The same treatment would cost $1.50 across the Tasman. Clarke suggested in a recent newspaper article that Australians travelling to New Zealand might make a point of stocking up on the cheaper drugs.
"Blasphemy" Comes Before "Science" in the Dictionary
Creationists believe that the Earth and the universe in which it sits are only about 6000 years old.
By Peter Bowditch
Could there be a greater abuse of both science and Christianity than creationism?
Some years ago Australian geologist Prof Ian Plimer wrote a book about creationism called Telling Lies for God. On a Sunday night when I had nothing better to do I went to a meeting where someone from the Answers in Genesis Ministry (now Creation Ministries International) did just that.
It’s Raining on the Sun
A huge magnetic filament erupts on 30 March 2010. Credit: SDO/AIA
By David Reneke
Dave Reneke brings news from the space and astronomy communities around the world.
It came like a bolt out of the blue and lasted only a few seconds, but it opened up new questions and solved an old one about our closest stellar neighbour, the Sun. Scientists working with NASA’s new Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) have released the most astonishing movies of the Sun anyone has ever seen, including a massive eruption – one of the biggest in years.
Synthetic Life or Cellular Machine?
By Michael Cook
The creation of synthetic bacteria will increase the speed with which new organisms can be generated, and reduce the value of animal life to mere chemical devices.
It was described as a scientific earthquake, but Craig Venter was just a fraction more modest in summing up his team’s biotechnology feat in May. His synthetic bacterium was, he said, “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”.
It certainly was an impressive technology. As they reported in Science, researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute painstakingly assembled the genome of one species of bacterium and inserted it into another cell. The constructed cell began to function, dividing and growing like a natural cell.
It’s Life, But Not As We Know It
By Simon Grose
The creation of the first synthetic genome is the latest paragraph in the story of evolution.
The evolution of life on Earth is a fantastic story shaped by a multitude of random forces, from occasional massive meteor impacts to countless miniscule mutations. Craig Venter and his team at Synthetic Genomics are not the first non-random force to attempt to shape this story, but definitely the most ambitious.
