Cool Science – Page 2 – Nicolas Demers

SkeptiCamp 2010 II

On October 23^rd, 2010, several dozen skeptics descended on UBC for the second SkeptiCamp of 2010: a full day of science, education, questioning assumptions, and rap. Good times.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Jess Brydle had a jar full of candy corn at the back of the room, and attendants were invited to guess the number, with the closest guess winning a prize (an iPod Touch, I think). Though I tried to estimate the volume of a single piece vs. the volume of the jar, my guess (1050) was way off the actual number (around 770). On the other hand, it was almost bang on the average guess. Go me! Conformity over reality!

Google Maps

Jesse Brydle presented an interesting project: displaying bullshit and woo businesses on Google Maps. As you can see, there are a hell of a lot of them. If you look at the comments, (both on the map and Jesse’s blog post), it looks like it hit a major nerve with some of the local witch doctors—as well it should.

Reason Vancouver

Ian Bushfield presented an idea for a new Vancouver political party: Reason Vancouver. Though I approve of its mission statement of “developing policies based on reason and empiricism,” that still doesn’t tell me what those policies are going to be. Ethics (political or otherwise) is only partly based on reason and empiricism. Besides, I’m not convinced Vancouver needs an explicity secular party, since we all know facts already have a liberal bias. Still, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops.

Hamlet: The Skeptic Prince

Joe Fulgham made a good case for Hamlet being a good proto-skeptic. When the guards tell him they’ve seen a ghost that looks like his dead father, he accepts that ghosts may exist, but grills the guards, asks for details, and withholds belief until he sees the ghost for himself and talks to it. Even then, after he’s told explicit details of his father’s death, he decides to get a second opinion and trick the truth out of Claudius. The theme of Hamlet (as Joe explained, I’m only familiar with the basics) was that giving in to his passions is what destroyed Hamlet. If he had stuck to reason (and yes, skepticism), things might have been different.

I’m not totally convinced of his conclusion that Shakespeare himself was a proto-skeptic, and spoke through his characters, though. C.S. Lewis (just to pick one example) wrote a couple of skeptics in his Space Trilogy, but he himself was far from one.

Baba Brinkman’s Rationalist Rap

Meet Baba Brinkman, “the propaganda wing of skepticism.” He brought the house down with his rationalist anthem, “Off That!” Totally awesome.

I got witnessed to!

When I got back to my car in the pouring rain, I noticed a little soggy piece of paper stuck in my car’s windshield. For a second I was afraid it was a ticket (though I hear parking tickets at UBC are only a problem for UBC students), but it was something very different:

Why settle for “OK”?

And if you read the Bible, you’ll see Jesus is the most inclusive person ever.

With love,
A brother.

Sigh. Just like that hip-hop drive-by witnesser of years ago, here’s a guy who couldn’t help reacting to my “Born OK The First Time” and “Celebrate Diversity” bumper stickers. I’m slightly impressed that he took the time to write his note in the rain, but very unimpressed at his blinkered world view. Well, I didn’t get angry this time, just shared the note with my atheist friends at the pub afterwards and we all had a good laugh.

Vancouver International Film Festival Review: The 4th Revolution: Energy Autonomy

The 4th Revolution is a showcase of the future: the technologies, the vision, and the visionaries that will take us away from a reliance on fossil fuels, and towards clean renewable energy for everyone.

Guess I should finally blog about the last movie I saw in the VIFF, and by far the most uplifting.

It’s possible. There are so many bright, dedicated people all over the world, from Germany to China to Mali to Bangladesh, working tirelessly in ways big or small to change lives or change minds: designers making electric cars look sexy, neighbours cooperating to upgrade an apartment building with solar generators, the economist who pioneered microlending, the people installing small solar panels in rural Africa.

Energy autonomy is more than just saving a few bucks on your electric bill. First, it’s about saving a lot of bucks on the electric bill. Solar panels on individual buildings or houses, combined with other upgrades to cut down on, e.g., unnecessary air conditioning, can cut external power consumption drastically. But it also means economic autonomy. The Mali Folke Centre is a case in point: by promoting the use of solar energy in regions where electricity is extremely rare and expensive, they allow people to regularly work after dark. Not a big deal? But as programme coordinator Ibrahim Togola explains, it opens the door for people to create new enterprises, and move Mali away from a purely resource-exporting base for its economy.

The stakes are enormous, and so are the obstacles: lack of political will in many countries, not least being the USA; entrenched interests in the coal/gas/oil industry, and the simple fact that reworking out energy infrastructure will be a difficult process. But the general consensus is that the transition is indeed possible, and so the movie ends with a positive note.

Vancouver International Film Festival Review: The Eye 3D

This hour-long film takes us on a tour of the Very Large Telescope array in Cerro Paranal, Chile—the most powerful deep-space telescope in the world. We hear the scientists and technicians describe their work and discoveries, and through them get a tantalising glimpse of the cosmos.

I expected to see lots of grand starscapes, as in that IMAX movie on Hubble, but we only see a little bit of those right at the beginning, to get us in the mood. The rest of the movie is very down to earth, a lot of it dealing with life at a compound in the middle of nowhere, and the nitty-gritty details of scientific research and making those ginormous telescopes work. And you know what? This was just as inspirational. The people there absolutely love their work: the phrase “dream come true” comes up at least twice from resident scientists; one relatively minor technician also waxes rhapsodic about the VLT’s work in pushing back the boundaries of knowledge, and awesomely refers to the community of workers as his second family.

But we also hear about the science, and it is beautiful: from the supermassive black hole at the core of our galaxy (indirectly detected from tracking the movements of nearby stars, themselves detectable only by the VLT), to another scientist’s research into extragalactic black holes and how our own black hole applies to that, to monitoring the ancient light of unbelievably faraway galaxies… Man, working there really would be any astronomy geek’s dream come true.

The ESO is planning an even larger telescope array, called the Extremely Large Telescope. The location still hasn’t been decided as far as I know, but one candidate site is not too far from the Cerro Paranal—it’s really an ideal region, high up and very dry all year round. Even now the next generation of astronomers, in high school or university, are dreaming and working and a select few will get to work on the ELT, looking for Earth-like planets around distant stars and studying light remnants from the first generation of galaxies.

PS: The movie was in 3D, which I found pretty unnecessary. I’m no fan of 3D to begin with, and with most of the scenes being talking heads, or indoors, I really didn’t see why I had to wear an extra pair of glasses. Meh. Still, that was the only sore point.

Skeptics in Victoria

It was totally a last-minute thing. Some of the the Skeptics in the Pub crowd had been talking about a weekend trip to Victoria, but that had been scheduled for mid-July, then rescheduled to… later. Then, at New Bright Lights on Friday I heard that it had indeed been rescheduled, for that weekend. Well, fortunately my plans for the weekend had fallen through, so it was an easy decision. Rides, a place to stay, a clean pair of underwear in my bag, and I was good to go.

I figured I had to be back in Vancouver by noon because I was taking care of grass dropin volleyball and I couldn’t find someone else on such short notice. Then again, it would probably be raining, which let me off the hook. Then again again, what if it didn’t? Then again again again, you only live once.

So I was up early on a grey Saturday morning, off to take the ferry to Victoria. A few other skeptics were on board, so we hung out and—well, honestly, half the time we were all playing with our respective iPhones / iPads. But in a hanging-out sort of way.

Plans for the day were left deliberately vague. We had talked about going up to the Observatory, but that wasn’t happening in this weather. So, first order of business: lunch. Then, the Royal BC Museum. I’d only been there twice, and not for a long time. When was the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit? I think I was even still in school back then. So yes, a long time.

I went through all the exhibits: Natural History, First Nations, Century Hall, and took hundreds of pictures of the fossils, the skeletons, the bugs on pins, the sculptures, everything. I drank everything in, recording (or attempting to record) every single detail of my visit. Of course, most of my pictures didn’t turn out so great, and some just weren’t that interesting the day after. Why on earth did I take pictures of rows of dragonfly specimens—pretty though they were—and the signs identifying their species and sex? I mean, points for completeness, but I think I crossed a line somewhere.

Though if I did, I think the museum crossed it too. Now that I think about it, that exhibit is called “Behind the Scenes”, and all those shelves full of specimens and fossils and snakes in jars are supposed to give us a glimpse of science as it is actually practiced. Good job!

After a couple hours of this, a few of us went to see the IMAX movie on the Hubble space telescope. Frankly I was a bit scared of motion sickness—I’d had bad experiences in IMAX theatre—but everything was fine. And the movie itself? Awesome beyond words. I don’t know what impresses me more: the guts of the people who strap themselves to a giant controlled fireball to lift themselves out into the blackness of space, the ingenuity of the people who designed said fireball, the Hubble, and all the instruments to maintain it, or the breathtaking beauty of the universe as revealed through the telescope.

Some of the Hubble images, like the Pillars of Creation, are pretty common nowadays. Others, like Saturn’s Aurora Australis, a little less common. But what this movie showed us was beyond anything I’d ever seen, beyond the wildest sci-fi because it’s not just beautiful and awesome, it’s also true. That faraway stellar nursery (whose name I forget, could have been the Orion Nebula) whose newborn stars have carved out a deep canyon in the surrounding gas with their fierce solar winds; the faraway galaxies, pretty spirals or weird distorted shapes; a fantastic assortment of light and colour, all in 3D.

And then the gift shop had to spoil it for us by selling healing crystals to realign your chakras and increase your spiritual energy or whatever else. I notice they don’t have any stone to cure your gullibility.

After that we went out to hang with Daniel Loxton (author of the excellent children’s book Evolution and editor of Junior Skeptic magazine) in his cluttered and awesome studio, where Transformers posters competed with dinosaur models and old UFOlogy books. After dinner I and a friend decided to go on a ghost walking tour of downtown Victoria—hey, I’d never been on one, and they promised “narrow streets and back alleys” and a bunch of ghosts. Sounds like fun even if you don’t believe in ghosts.

UPDATE: And here it is

New Bright Lights: Magic and the Lying Brain

The New Bright Lights lecture series started off this morning with the topic of memory, perception and self-delusion. Three fascinating presentations, though one really rubbed me the wrong way.

Lon Mandrake

Lon Mandrake learned magic at his father’s knee, and has cultivated a sense of wonder about the natural world since childhood. As a teacher, he uses magic tricks to both instill the same sense of wonder in his students, and to get them to think scientifically. Magic tricks are followed up with encouragement to come up with hypotheses and experiments, to try to get at the truth. As he stressed during the Q&A session (in response to a question about fake psychic vultures like Sylvia Browne), he prizes openmindedness. He was a little less emphatic in condemning that evil harpy than I’d like, but sure, I’ll go along with it.

He performed a couple of amusing tricks (one of which went wrong, but the subject was a good sport), but it would have been awesome if he’d focused more on science-related demos and less on mentalism.

Rob Hadley

Rob Hadley is a hypnotist, performing on stage, working on patients in a therapy setting, as well as consulting for video game companies to make the gaming experience more immersive. He talked for a bit about the theory of hypnosis, how it was just an altered state of consciousness, with no real trick or magic to it, and then brought a few people from the audience up on stage to be hypnotised. That was kind of fun, and I for one let myself go with the “you are feeling very relaxed, your eyelids are very heavy” bit; out of the four audience members only one really went under, which looks pretty much par for the course.

The really worrying part came when he told us about a patient of his who he’d helped get rid of her budding alcoholism with a little hypnosis… and a homeopathic pill. Immediately the row behind me (all CFI skeptics) started grumbling. The grumbling got worse when Hadley defended homeopathic medecine, arguing that the pill he gave was meant to relax but he’d never told his patient that, therefore it couldn’t be the placebo effect, and concluding with “It just works.” During the Q&A one audience member really laid into him, calling out his, quote, “ignorance of medicine” and lack of ethics. Hadley got defensive (which… is understandable), but couldn’t defend his use of homeopathy except by vaguely quoting some UK studies which shows an efficacy far above the placebo effect.

While we’re talking about ethics, another audience member questioned why he consulted to make some games more immersive, thus making it more likely for players to get addicted, while also curing addictive behaviour. Hadley replied that he worked to make games more enjoyable, and while he agreed that some people would abuse them, he couldn’t be responsible for players with addictive personalities. Which I guess is fair, though still troubling.

Rob Teszka

Rob is a cognitive psychologist working in UBC’s BARLab, and his talk is all about how our perception, memory, attention, and cognition in general is way less reliable than we’d like to think. His talk was just an entertainingly presented string of studies, from the Adelson illusion to that famous video of the gorilla (a new one, actually, with more unexpected details, because too many people had seen the old one), to that guy with the severed corpus callosum (which I’d seen before, but was still damn cool). The brain’s a weird thing, and I’m glad there are people studying it like this!

Vancouver Skepticamp

That was a really awesome day. I’d never gone to a Skepticamp before, had only heard about it a few weeks before, and didn’t really know what to expect. I was sort of imagining a big convention, sort of thing, with panels so I could pick and choose which brilliant presenter to study at the knee of. But no, it all took place in one auditorium at UBC, from 10AM to 6:30 (with a lunch break), an audience of about 80 people, and 16 presenters (more if you count the Radio Free Thinker people separately) expounding on a wide range of topics, from the scientific to the social to the philosophical.

That was a really awesome day. I’d never gone to a Skepticamp before, had only heard about it a few weeks before, and didn’t really know what to expect. I was sort of imagining a big convention sort of thing, with panels so I could pick and choose which brilliant presenter to study at the knee of. But no, it all took place in one auditorium at UBC, from 10AM to 6:30 (with a lunch break), an audience of about 80 people, and 16 presenters (more if you count the Radio Free Thinker people separately) expounding on a wide range of topics, from the scientific to the social to the philosophical.

It’s always a thrill to be in an explicitly skeptical space, where everybody’s speaking the same language, and you don’t have to worry about offending or confusing people by talking about “woo” or “the FSM” or “argument from ignorance” or whatnot. But even aside from that, and especially seeing as it was billed as a community participation event where anyone could register as a speaker, the level of polish was generally quite high and with just a couple of exceptions I really enjoyed the presentations. They were informative, funny, inspiring or infuriating, sometimes all four at once.

The best part of the event for me, though, wasn’t so much the talks, but the Twitter conversation happening in parallel; a half a dozen of us shooting comments back and forth, looking up and posting links, and it was so exhilarating! I’d never been part of such an online conversation, with so many interesting people who had been strangers a minute before. I felt like I was contributing to something greater than me, something important, unlike short back-and-forths in Facebook statuses.

Or maybe I’m overdramatizing this. I don’t care; it was a rush, and I can’t wait for my next opportunity. At least now I’ve figured out how to use hash tags. And another thing I’ve learned: next time I’ll be sure to bring a portable charger or something. Oh, my poor battery! That might explain why the twittering slowed way down in the afternoon; I guess everybody’s laptops and phones were running dry.

I’ll just post some thoughts on a few of the presentations, because otherwise we’d be here all week.

Fred Bremmer: a demonstration of Charpentier’s Illusion
Dr. Steve Wiseman: The Troubled Relationship between Psychiatry and the Church of Scientology
James Bernath: Private programs for going into space
Greg Bole: Defending Darwin
Shannon Rupp: Rational Journalism
Dr. Jaymie Matthews: Who Needs Paranormal?
Gerry Armstrong: Scientology

Fred Bremmer: a demonstration of Charpentier’s Illusion

Basically, this involves underestimating the mass of a large but light object (in this case, an empty styrofoam cooler) against a smaller object (medicine bottles partly filled with copper shot). There are various theories about why we do this, but it’s very predictable, and in the end only three people in the entire audience got the mass right. Actual masses of the medicine bottles: here. What the audience perceived: here

The moral of the story? Skeptics, being human, aren’t free of biases and flawed perceptions. But we are more aware of them, and more willing to subject them to rigorous reality checks.

Dr. Steve Wiseman: The Troubled Relationship between Psychiatry and the Church of Scientology

Wow, that was some impressive airing out of LRon Hubbard’s dirty laudry, some of which I knew—that Hubbard was kind of a dismal failure at everything until he lucked into the Dianetics scam—some of which I didn’t: where did he first publish an essay on Dianetics? A cheesy sci-fi magazine. Awesome. Or should I say, “Astounding”? Plus, some interesting history about early psychiatric pharmacology, and how some of those successes seem to be directly linked to the rise of Scientology and LRon’s paranoia.

James Bernath: Private programs for going into space

Mr. Bernath is very skeptical of the viability of privately-funded space flight, because so far they haven’t gotten anywhere near what government programs have achieved. Which… I don’t think is a fair conclusion. I agree that there are tremendous technical problems, especially if you want to transport humans into deep space (or, hell, even as far as Mars). Not that humans can’t get there, of course, but casual tourists are right out. We won’t have a Mars Hilton on the Valles Marineris anytime soon. Two parts of his presentation grabbed me, though:

Bernath also dismissed the idea of space elevators, since he saw too many problems just with getting the damn things up, not to mention docking spacecraft at the top. But my view is that since Arthur C. Clarke could imagine them, I believe they’ll be a reality some day, so nyah! Which is perfectly objective and rational, totally not magical thinking in any way. Really. Shut up.
He brought a few interesting space artefacts to pass around. The best was a fuel tank from a downed Soviet satellite, which crashed in a Saskatchewan farm in 1981. Doesn’t look like much, a dark metallic sphere, with a weird nipple-like bit where reentry caused it to melt slightly. But it used to be up in space! I held in my hand something that floated in orbit high above the Earth! That’s… really fucking cool.

Greg Bole: Defending Darwin

Greg Bole is a Darwin impersonator. Didn’t think there was such a thing as a Darwin impersonator? Yeah, neither did I. I guess they get most of their business at events such as the Cambridge Darwin Festival. (Too bad Bole didn’t give his talk in costume, though.) The focus of his speech was on Ray Comfort (he of the banana as proof for God—no, it’s no better than the Babel Fish) and his plan last year to distribute copies of The Origin of Species, with a special new introduction. Of course, Bole points out, Comfort’s spiel is really nothing new. It’s just the same tired old canards creationists have been trotting out for decades. An audience member asked him if creationists have advanced any new arguments, in light of recent advances in genomics or paleontology. No, he said, it’s always the same old crap, maybe dressed it up a little (ie: Intelligent Design) but essentially unchanged.

Shannon Rupp: Rational Journalism

Rupp, a journalist herself, says, “Only journalists are in the business of journalism. Newspapers are in the business of eyeballs.” Editors and publishers don’t care about accuracy, or even truth, as long as it gets people buying their papers—and thus making advertisers happy, which is where their business really lies. Checking facts costs money, and it’s the easiest thing to cut because not many people notice, and fewer care. Besides, writing puff pieces is much safer since advertisers don’t get alienated, readers don’t get alienated, and you won’t get sued. in short, the whole system is set up to penalise good journalism and reward sloppy, shallow writing.

But, Rupp warns, don’t just blame the evil media and evil advertisers. Schools and universities, which should be in the business of educating, are also peddling woo and confusing students with pseudoscience. Just as a for instance: Royal Roads University offering a course on astrology. The university gets more money, but also gets inextricably linked with the astrologers and entrail readers and whatnot. The latter get recognition and prestige, while the university’s reputation gets tarnished.

Dr. Jaymie Matthews: Who Needs Paranormal?

Ah yes, Jaymie Matthews. I remembered him from a CFI talk he gave a year ago, about the MOST deep-space telescope. It’s so obvious that he loves his work, because it’s cool science and because it reveals so much of the beauty of the universe. How many exometeorologists—ie: people figuring out weather patterns on extrasolar planets—do you know? One line he said really stuck with me: “Paranormal is the new normal; normal is the new paranormal.” Paranormalists’ myths and imaginations are really very small and petty when you come right down to it. Especially when it’s Nazi-flavoured occult crap being peddled to suckers. Reality, as revealed through science, is the thing that’s mindbogglingly weird and crazy and enchanting.

Gerry Armstrong: Scientology

This is the personal account of an ex-Scientologist who has been persecuted by the Church of Scientology for decades now. His talk—the attempts on his life, the harassment, the insane lawsuits—just drove home how disgustingly evil the Clams are. Read more on gerryamstrong.org

In conclusion

I had such an amazing time, and I’ve already marked down the next Skepticamp’s date (October 23^rd)! Meantime, here are more pictures!

“Listening to the heartbeat of a star in its womb”

Last night I attended a meeting of the Center For Inquiry Vancouver, with invited guest Dr. Jaymie Matthews, mission scientist of the MOST project. MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars/Microvariabilité et Oscillations STellaires) is Canada’s first space telescope, studying minute variations in stars’ light output to understand their inner structure, as well as detecting any planets that may be orbiting them.

In the over 5 years since its launch, MOST has studied hundreds of star systems, upending a few theories, confirming others, and generally expanding our understanding not only of others stars, but our own as well.

The event was named What if Galileo had a Space Telescope? in reference to Galileo’s groundbreaking observations of celestial bodies, which forever altered our perception of the universe and our place within it. Dr. Matthews argues that we are currently going through a similar revolution, what with new cosmological theories like dark energy (to explain why the expansion of the universe is still accelerating), and our continuing quest for Earth-like exoplanets, further putting our home in its proper perspective.

Unfortunately, MOST’s imaging technology doesn’t lend itself to pretty pictures like, say, the Hubble Telescope. Still, the words, simple graphics and animations are enough to fire the imagination. This is head-spinningly exciting science! I’ve read up on some of it over the years, but I’d never heard of MOST and had no idea so much was being done right here in Canada!

“There is grandeur in this view of life…”

In the last chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin recapped all the evidence he so carefully and meticulously presenting for his theory of common descent. And then took a step back to ponder where it was all going, and what it all meant.

In the last chapter of The Origin of Species, Darwin recapped all the evidence he had so meticulously presented for his theory of common descent. And then took a step back to ponder where it was all going, and what it all meant.

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become!

He predicted that the theory would open up rich new fields of scientific research in biology, geology, paleontology, psychology and anthropology. Armed with the understanding that all individuals of all species are related, however distantly, that species have been shaped by their environments over the eons, scientists would look backwards, and outwards, free of counterproductive labels and dogmas, answering many current questions and discovering even more interesting questions to ask. This prediction would prove to be correct. As Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

And then he went one step further:

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

What ennobles them? Simply having such a long and complex history. They—and all their ancestors—were lucky or tough enough to survive everything Nature could throw at them. Every being now living, worm or eagle, peasant or aristocrat, is descended from a long line of survivors. That’s a pedigree anyone should be proud of.

Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct.

Is it all doom and gloom, though? Not at all.

As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

I don’t know about that “perfection,” but hey, that’s Victorians for you.

It’s interesting to note how Darwin’s attitude contrasts with that of creationists, then or now. To them, the idea of being related to apes is just as abhorrent as the idea the Bible isn’t literally true. Animals aren’t ennobled by their connection with us; it’s we who are demeaned by our connection with them. The only way Humankind can be seen as special is through our creation, not our history or achievements. And they certainly don’t look forward to a far distant future where our descendants—however different they’ll be from us—will continue to thrive.

The book concludes with a final appeal, not to the truth, but the beauty of his theory.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Darwin’s no poet, I grant you, but this passage works. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the theory of evolution—with its notions of deep time and the fundamental interconnectedness of all living beings—tells a far more satisfying story than any creation myth our various cultures have cooked up. Our long journey from the trees—and before that, from the swamps and the seas—has made us what we are, flaws and all. We dishonour our ancestors by ignoring their struggles, their achievements, and yes, their failures. We honour them by remembering their lives, and continuing the journey they made possible for us.

Happy 200^th, Mr. Darwin.

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?

Let’s check…

Not that doomsday crackpots haven’t tried to stir up fear of black holes swallowing the Earth, and whatnot.

Let’s check…

Not that doomsday crackpots haven’t tried to stir up fear of black holes swallowing the Earth and whatnot. Here’s what the scientists actually expect to find.

And because the world needs more cute nerds putting high-energy particle physics to music, I present you with…

Nature’s Mothers

Surinam Toads—spectacularly fugly critters native to northeastern South America—have a rather odd means of reproduction. After mating, the male presses the eggs onto the female’s back. The eggs stick to her skin, which begins to grow over them. A few months later they emerge as toadlets, having already hatched and passed through the tadpole stage. Check it out, it’s equal parts gross and cool.

* Though let’s face it, the way my species does it isn’t any prettier, and probably a lot more painful.†

† And giving birth from your back isn’t even the weirdest example of parental care Nature’s got up her sleeve. For instance, I learned very young that seahorse males receive eggs from the females and incubate them in a special pouch. Which honestly raises the question of how you label the sexes: is it just a matter of gamete size? Or who’s fertilising what? Because if the female has an organ to deposit eggs in the male‘s pouch, then… who really wears the pants in the household?

(Digression: I’ve long thought that if seahorses ever had a pro-choice movement, it’d be headed by males.)

But my personal favourite has to be Caecilians: an order of amphibians spanning a couple hundred species that, like us but unlike all other amphibians, practice internal insemination. Three-quarters of them give birth to live young. And the mother feeds them herself—no, not with milk. And not with prey. With her own skin. Hey, don’t knock it: that stuff’s apparently chock full of nutrients, and allows the little darlings to grow to 10 times their birth weight in a week.‡

‡ I wonder if that’s how mammals evolved? Did our ancestors start out nibbling their mother’s skin, move on to lapping up her sweat as soon as she got sweat glands—better for the mother, because skin was getting expensive, what with fur and all the various bits needed for warm-bloodedness—and kept enjoying the milk from modified sweat glands?

(Surinam Toad video link via Pharyngula. Proper use of daggers and double-daggers courtesy of RomanBoldOblique and Wikipedia.)