Author: David Bradley

Zoo Poo

This is one of those lovely science stories that is sure to catch even the tabloid media’s attention as well as give people the opportunity once again to complain about “what scientists do”.

According to CSIRO Livestock Industries scientist Andre-Denis Wright, droppings from rhinos and elephants at Perth Zoo are being put under the microscope to help scientists determine whether or not various strains of protozoa, which help break food down in the guts of “exotic” animals can be introduced into the guts of sheep and cattle to help them thrive in the harsh conditions of the Australian outback.

As part of the Zoo-Poo project scientists have so far sequenced the DNA of protozoa found in a range of faecal samples from rhinos, elephants, orangutans, and red pandas. The study will reveal the origins of various protozoa and identify common protozoal species found in animals from different parts of the world.

Wright is collaborating with rumen microbiologist Burk Dehority of Ohio State University. Dehority has previously found some of the same protozoa in different grazing animals from South America, Africa and Alaska. However, the protozoa from the guts of marsupials in Australia appear to be quite distinct. He has now received poo samples from the zoo animals including a “grab sample of faeces” from a rhino, collected by a zoo handler before it hit the ground. [Nice]

“Very large mammals like the rhino and the elephant eat voluminous amounts of roughage and they are able to take the soluble nutrients out and ferment them in the cecum and then they just pass the roughage out,” explains Dehority, “hey exist on the fact that they just eat volumes.”

He said little was known about how the guts of large animals worked and the research would assist in developing better nutrition for zoo animals as well as livestock.

Controversial Conjectures

Having a web presence attracts all kinds of unusual requests and suggestions. Many of them get shredded immediately, but some are so outlandish that they’re worth sharing.

What to make of an email addressed to the sciencebase feedback address and cc’ed to Science, Popular Science, World Science, and Scientific American, that begins:

“You probably heard of the impossible Perpetual Motion Machines. Some of you may even be working on some variations. We have found that scientists and textbooks have ignored the contribution of non-obvious energies such as air or gravity for centuries. Inventions that can directly extract energy from still air, water (floatation), gravity, magnetic fields and electromagnetic waves are possible. If you want to understand the theory and participate, read on.”

If emails could be written in green ink, you just know that this one would come on smudgy graph paper. The email goes on to explain how much work the correspondent and his colleague have carried out:

“We have done a great deal of research into the field of Cosmic Energies and we are convinced that their use will solve the Energy Crisis of the World and bring lasting World Peace. Cosmic Energies include still air, water (floatation), gravity, magnetic, electric fields and others. Such energy sources are non-polluting, abundant and inexpensive.”

It’s not so much the claim to have found a previously unrecognised and “perpetual” energy source, but that the invention will not only solve the energy crisis but also bring lasting world peace [Sorry, those words should have been in bold green with capitals, I think]. Oh, and cause global cooling and so solve the greenhouse effect.

Feel free to check out their website at www.energyfromair.com. It doesn’t work properly with Firefox unfortunately and even in their preferred browser (Internet Explorer) their “equations” don’t display properly. For some reason they illustrate their web slideshow with an old pair of glasses, some medals and a Chinese checker board, really don’t know why.

Regardless, anyone with just a smattering of physics education will be able to shred the underlying concept. Although the scientific paper they provide is, they say, “much too difficult for the non-scientist”. Thankfully, they have provided a “simple, easy-to-understand song for the layman in Chinese”. So, that’s alright, then, we can just read that instead. Apparently, responses to the song have been positive, “but we shall need the melodies”.

Phylum Arthropoda

A common search carried out by sciencebase visitors is “Phylum Arthropoda”. Innocent enough, of course, there are bound to be lots of followers of the site interested in insects, arachnids, and crustaceans.

Anyway, the best starting point to get plenty more info on the arthropods is, as usual, Wikipedia. But, if you’re after science lessons on arthropods then check out the K5 science lesson plans page and follow the link to the Columbia Education Center in Portland, Oregon, to get to the specific listings. If you’ve got a particular creature in which you’re interested, please use the sciencebase search box top right, we can’t guarantee that you’ll find what you’re looking for among the sciencebase pages themselves but there are usually other links on the site you can follow to find out more.

Spot the Difference

red spot junior jupiterLike an adolescent unfortunate, Jupiter has got spots and it’s all down to climate change. The latest images from the Hubble space telescope reveal details of the second red spot that formed in the atmosphere of the gas giant.

This dramatic change to the Jovian weather, nicknamed most unimaginitavely, Red Spot Jr., will provide planetary scientists with an unprecedented chance to study the storms and climate of our solar system’s largest planet. RSJ was formed as a white oval between 1998 and 2000 when three white storms merged, but Hubble’s latest snaps reveal that the planet’s climate is changing. When viewed at near-infrared wavelengths (specifically 892 nm – a methane gas absorption band) RSJ is almost as prominent in Jupiter’s cloudy atmosphere as the Great Red Spot. This may mean that the storm rises miles above the top of the main cloud deck on Jupiter just as its larger cousin is thought to do. Some astronomers think the red hue could be produced as the spots dredge up material from deeper in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which is then chemically altered by the Sun’s ultraviolet light.

Properties and Uses of beta-alanine

“What are the properties and uses of beta-alanine?”

beta-Analine is an amino acid formed metabolically from dihydrouracil and carnosine and used as one of the building blocks of proteins. Researchers have demonstrated neuronal uptake and neuronal receptor sensitivity to beta-alanine and so it has been labelled as a false transmitter replacing gamma-aminobutyric acid. As such, it is finding application as a GABA uptake inhibitor in treating a variety of disorders in which tremor is a serious symptom.

Searching, Always Searching

I find it endlessly fascinating the things visitors to the site search for…hopefully, a few sciencebase readers are at leasst vaguely interested too, otherwise these posts are a total waste of time. Anyway, a selection from the almost virginal monthly log for May reveals some nice topics:

wiffle ball science, what is the origin of the asteroid belt, x chromosone recombination, physics problems in movies, x-ray vision fact or fiction (also), obliquity earth.

Maybe some day I’ll write some short items on each of those, but for now you’ll have to settle for the links I found.

One final search query has got me stumped – what in fact is its size in ratio compared to the earth – well, if anyone can tell me to what the “its” is referring I might be able to offer an answer

Lost in Translation

Altavista’s translation service Babelfish, named for the critter in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, does a superb job of providing very rough translations between dozens of different languages. But, have you ever tried translating an English web page into French, say and then back again?

Martin G at Really Magazine thought that might be fun and contacted Sciencebase with a sample of text from the site that he had two-wayed using a little form he’s created in his blog to demonstrate what a site might “look like” to a non-English speaker using autotranslation (http://www.reallymag.com/2Xlation.htm).

Needless to say the results are not at all pretty, this was from a current item:

“In the visitor the chance which puts out their opinion with voice in order period me is late in small quantity and recently the conference, in order to arrange a new poll that le or comfort in order to manufacture in SciScoop location the hazard was in the mongering disease which covers.”

Basically, Mr G picked up on my announcement of the SciScoop poll on disease mongering. But you cannot really get a sense of that from the 2x translation can you, which might suggest that a non-English speaker viewing the site with 1xtrans switched on really isn’t going to get the best out of SciScoop.

Martin had this to say about the process, “I thought it gave a nice real-world overview of how the engines are coping with (the admittedly very difficult job of) auto-translation.”

Give it a whirl with your favourite blog or site.

Shipping News for Physicists

A real physical force that pulls together two metal surfaces separated by empty space does not tug on ships lying close at anchor, according to physicist Fabrizio Pinto, in today’s [email protected].

The “mysterious” Casimir effect is often illustrated by analogy with two ships floating side by side in a heavy swell and being pulled together, at least that’s how it’s been described in popular science articles. The notion apparently stems from a physics article published in 1996, which describes how an 1836 book, The Album of the Mariner, says ships should not be moored too close together because they will be attracted by a mysterious force.

Pinto is out to stem the tide of pseudoscience, however. He told news@nature that the idea is a simple misunderstanding. The Album of the Mariner says this attraction only happens in calm seas, not a heavy swell, points out Pinto. The only way a Casimir-like effect could be responsible is if the boats were moored in a choppy swell.

So the analogy is false, says Pinto. And there may not be any mysterious force at all pulling two ships together, whatever the conditions. “We have caught physicists in the very act of creating a myth,” he says.

So, what is the Casimir effect? Well, it’s not due to gravity, electrostatic charge, nor magnetism. That’s what it’s not. Essentially, it results from the resonance of the energy fields between the two objects. At least that’s what Wikipedia tells us, but what does it mean? Well it boils down to quantum fluctuations in the vacuum between the plates and for a lucid yet detailed description of how that causes attraction check out this PhysicsWeb article on the subject.

Incidentally, how would anyone navigate two ships in a vacuum to begin with?

Nugache P2P Bot

Just as email worms are at their lowest ebb for years, a new threat looms on the horizon – the P2P (peer-to-peer) bot. These insidious creatures worm their way through instant messanging systems (naming no names, but anyone using MSN and AOL products might just be at risk).

Rather than doing the usual email address look-up that is common to most mail worms, this form of malware, of which Nugache is the current threat being popularised by the media, bypasses address books and even circumvents DNS lookup (the tool that converts net addresses into a numeric IP address) and instead scans for other infected machines with which to hook up and create a P2P network. These are not to be confused with the networks that P2P file sharing software uses. Once established, encrypted packets of information can be transferred across the bot network all-but invisible to the usual detection systems.

It looks like most of the antivirus companies have responded with appropriate updates (is it the companies themselves that write these darned things, by the way?) and I’d recommend you do an update immediately, even if it’s not convenient to ensure you’re safe from Nugache at the least.

For those with an interest in the ins and outs of this particular worm, it opens a back door on TCP port 8, and installs a bot to wait for commands from the attacker. The command and control channel it uses is unique and it is difficult to block commands issued to the bot. Anyone looking for the perpetrator would simply see the various peers in the bot network making tracking them down almost impossible.

Benzene Soft Drinks Redux

One further thought on the benzene soft drinks story following on from sciencebase reader Ross Getman’s comment…

Bob Buntrock (of Louisiana State University) on the CHMINF-L discussion group mentions the recent C+EN article on this issue, (Dispute Over Benzene In Drinks, Bette Hileman, Chemical and Engineering News, 84(17), April 24, 2006).

Buntrock points out that when tests were carried out again in 2005, they revealed a very different picture of benzene levels than before. Apparently, previous tests by the FDA showed that almost four out of five beverages tested, even after “reformulation”, had benzene levels greater than 5 ppb, the US standard for tap water. The latest (preliminary) tests showed no benzene or levels less than 5 ppb.

“Since the first method involved heating samples at 100 Celsius for 30 minutes(!) [His exclamation] and the latest method uses headspace methodology “which does not involve much heat”, guess which method would appear to be more accurate,” says Buntrock. In his opinion, “considerably more decarboxylation of many acids or carboxylates will occur under the previous drastic conditions, which are extremely unlikely to occur under normal usage of soft drinks.”

Jacob Zabicky of Ben Gurion University, Israel, followed up Buntrock’s comment with a remark based on knowledge of the physical properties of benzene. “My gut feeling based on the relative solubility of benzene in water and its volatility from solution at ppb levels,” he said, “is that if there is any ppb level benzene at the start it will go with the fizz.” On the basis of the Henry Constant of benzene in water, Zabicky adds that, “The given value means that for every four molecules dissolved in a given volume of water one molecule of benzene is found in the same volume of headspace in equilibrium.” In other words if the headspace volume is large (i.e. the air above a drinks can as it is opened) compared to the volume of soft drink, then the benzene will be strongly depleted from it.