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for December, 2011.
By Pam Eastlick
Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.
I thought I’d delve into the medical file and I found two stories that have more to do with the health of our heads than our bodies. Have you noticed when you’re surfing the web that a lot of people sure think that everybody else is out to get them? Yes, I know even paranoiacs have enemies, but research conducted at the University of Kent in England has shown that people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories if they are willing to conspire.
The title of the paper, published in the British Journal of Social Psychology was Does it take one to know one? and it looked at the responses of 250 undergraduates to 17 alleged conspiracies, like the ‘assassinations’ of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, the ‘faking’ of the moon landings and the ‘orchestration’ of the 9/11 attacks by the US government.
In the first study, participants were asked if they would participate in such conspiracies, if they were in a position to do so. The scientists discovered that when participants indicated a willingness to conspire, they usually found the same conspiracy theories to be plausible, interesting, and worth considering.
In the second study, half of the participants were asked to remember a time when they helped someone. The research team thought this would make people realize that they were moral people. When these participants were compared to a control group, they were less willing to conspire, and as a result, were less likely to take conspiracy theories seriously.
So I guess the bottom line is “If you’d do it yourself, you probably believe it happened.”
But researchers at McMaster University have uncovered something really mind boggling. You may not have any control over how you feel about conspiracy theories and a lot of other stuff because that ecosystem you harbor in your gut just may be doing your thinking for you. For the first time, scientists have conclusive evidence that the bacteria living in YOUR gut influence both brain chemistry and behavior!
The findings are important because several common gut diseases, like irritable bowel syndrome, are frequently associated with anxiety or depression. There’s also speculation that some psychiatric disorders, like late onset autism, are associated with abnormal gut bacteria.
Your gut is home to over a trillion bacteria. Most of the time we live in harmony with our microscopic ecosystem and they perform a number of functions vital to health. They digest much of your food for you; they protect against infections and provide nutrition for your gut cells.
The researchers worked with healthy adult mice and showed that disrupting the normal bacterial content of the gut with antibiotics produced changes in behavior. The mice became less cautious or anxious. This change was accompanied by an increase in a brain chemical that’s been linked to depression and anxiety. When the antibiotics were stopped, the gut bacteria returned to normal and so did the brain chemistry and behavior patterns of the mice.
In another experiment, the researchers colonized germ-free mice with bacteria taken from mice with a different behavioral pattern. They found that when germ-free mice with a genetic background associated with passive behavior were colonized with bacteria from mice with higher exploratory behavior, the germ-free mice became more active and daring. Similarly, normally active mice became more passive after receiving bacteria from mice whose genetic background was associated with passive behavior.
Feeling anxious? Aggressive? Depressed? Just take this pill containing a live bacterial culture and we can fix that! Scary, eh?
By Pam Eastlick
Greetings Everyone,
I have an early Christmas present for you! Several of you have commented on the fact that the Planetarium website hasn’t been updated in about a year now. It was originally done in Netscape (remember that?) and after I lost my office computer I could no longer update the site.
Enter Mr. Bill Kochman, a computer guru who has donated hours and hours of his own time to designing an absolutely awesome website. It will be updated monthly and probably more frequently since he has also included a blog. It may take me some time to start blogging regularly but it will happen! I’m still working on an updated show catalog for all you teachers and hope to complete that next month.
The Planetarium website is still hosted by the wonderful folks at Kuentos and it still features timely information about Guam’s skies and the UOG Planetarium shows. The address hasn’t changed, it’s still
www.guam.net/planet
I am very proud of it. Please visit soon and let me know how you like it.
And THANK YOU, Bill!
Pam
By Pam Eastlick
Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.
It’s been a long time since we delved into the animal file and I thought we’d do some ancient history with a couple of stories about every little kid’s favorite ancient animals, the dinosaurs.
Although we’ve sort of realized this all along, a definitive new international study coordinated by researchers at the University of New Mexico says that after the dinosaurs went away 65 million years ago, mammals got bigger . . . a LOT bigger, about a thousand times bigger than they had been.
To figure out what happened to mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the researchers collected data on the maximum size for major groups of land mammals on all the continents. Their study included horses, rhinos, elephants and mammoths, armadillos and a number of groups that are now extinct.
They discovered that mammals grew from a maximum weight of about 25 pounds before the dinosaurs went away to a maximum of roughly 17 tons when they had the planet to themselves. I think you’ll agree that’s a big change!
They also discovered what sets the limits for the max body size for land animals. It’s the amount of space available and the climate they live in. The colder the climate, the bigger mammals get because bigger mammals are better at conserving heat.
So . . . definitely the mammals got bigger after the dinosaurs went away, but exactly when DID they go away? There’s been some research about that too. It’s widely believed that the dinosaurs all died somewhere between 65.5 and 66 million years ago when debris from a giant meteorite impact blocked out the Sun, causing extreme climate conditions and killing vegetation worldwide. (It’s called the KT extinction). Now, researchers from the University of Alberta have dated the femur bone of a hadrosaur found in New Mexico at 64.8 million years.
That date suggests this particular plant eater was alive about 700,000 years after the mass extinction event many scientists believe eliminated all the land dinos. The researchers used a new technique that measures the rate that uranium turns to lead. Living bone contains very low levels of uranium but during fossilization (typically less than 1000 years after death) bones are enriched with uranium. The uranium atoms in bone decay spontaneously to lead over time and once fossilization is complete the uranium-lead clock starts ticking.
The researchers think there could be several reasons why the New Mexico hadrosaur survived the mass extinction 65 million years ago. It’s possible the vegetation wasn’t all wiped out and a number of hadrosaurs survived. The researchers also say the potential survival of dinosaur eggs during extreme climatic conditions needs to be explored.
The paper authors believe that their new uranium-lead dating technique will show that more dinosaurs survived the KT extinction and the end of the dinosaurs will have to be revised.
This doesn’t really surprise me. I’ve always found it a little difficult to believe that EVERY land dinosaur died in the KT extinction. It’s a big planet and apparently there are places even hadrosaurs could hide, at least for a while.
By Pam Eastlick
Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.
Greetings everyone, I hope you were able to see the total lunar eclipse last Saturday night. It was spectacular!
And now, I’d like to take a little poll. I want you to think about the electronic equipment in your home. How old is your TV? How old is your computer? Your cell phone? Your DVD player? Now, try to figure out the age of the oldest piece of functioning electronic gear in your house. I’ve got an ancient phone that’s probably 25 years old and that’s the oldest one for me. Does anyone have anything that’s 35 years old and still works?
Well, NASA does. In 1977 the Voyager space probes were launched and both of them are still working just fine, thank you very much, and they’re still returning astounding scientific data. And after almost 35 years, they’re finally leaving the Sun. No, not just the solar system. The Sun.
It is perfectly true to say that ALL the planets are inside the Sun because the Sun not only puts out energy, it also puts out particles. The solar system is embedded in a HUGE sphere of particles that extends far beyond the orbit of Neptune (and Pluto!). It does eventually end, however, and where it ends is called the heliopause (literally translates as ‘Sun stop’).
Both the Voyages are poised just inside the heliopause and they’ve discovered strange and wonderful things (some of which I’ve talked about in this column). Now, for the first time, the Voyagers have detected Lyman alpha lines from our own Milky Way.
So what’s a Lyman alpha line? It’s a line that appears in a spectrograph that shows where a hydrogen electron transitions from one particular energy level to another. We’ve seen lots of Doppler-shifted Lyman alpha lines generated by bright energy sources in other galaxies, but we can’t see the Milky Way’s Lyman alpha lines because our own Sun is so bright it drowns them out, just like city lights drown out all but the brightest stars.
So the Voyagers are now detecting two different kinds of Lyman alpha signals. Some come from those distant galaxies, and the other is from our own Milky Way, something we’re seeing for the very first time. The Lyman alpha signals from distant galaxies help astronomers understand how and when galaxies form.
The Voyagers are now in the heliosheath (just before the actual heliopause) and the Lyman alpha lines produced by the Milky Way are helping the astronomers generate a crude map of the actual edge of our Sun. The Voyagers are at that edge and they’re peering out into infinity.
Unfortunately, they won’t be able to do it forever. The Voyagers are powered by the radioactive decay of plutonium 238 and the Voyager astronomers estimate that both spacecraft will run out of power somewhere around 2025. They no longer rotate the spaceships to conserve power and data are recorded from a fixed direction. But both spacecraft are still returning data and making new discoveries right now. How much 35 year old electronic gear did you say you had that still worked?
I’m reminded of that quote by Sir Isaac Newton. You know, the one that goes “I’m sitting on the beach playing with pebbles while the vast and undiscovered ocean of knowledge stretches before me.” Thanks to the Voyagers, we’re just beginning to enter that vast, undiscovered ocean.
By Pam Eastlick
Greetings All,
Just a quick reminder that there’ll be a lunar eclipse that starts at
10:46 p.m. tomorrow night, Saturday, 10 December 2011. Maximum eclipse will occur between midnight and 1:00 a.m. on Sunday morning and the eclipse will be over at 2:17 a.m.
The Moon will be virtually straight overhead for the hour of totality and I suspect it will be a nice orangey-red. There won’t be another total lunar eclipse anywhere over Earth until April 2014.
And there’s more news. The bad news is that the Christmas star special effect refused to put in an appearance this year (I think the bulb is burned)so no Christmas show this year. The good news is that the 6:30 p.m. show is now "The Darker Side of the Moon: A Guide to Lunar Eclipses."
The 7:00 p.m. show is still "Quality Time with the Star Lady".
Please join us tonight or tomorrow night! The doors open at 6:00 p.m.
The shows are free! And don’t miss the lunar eclipse!
Pam
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Jim is, above all, a passionate eco-humanitarian who has developed his own science talk-radio show to inform The DEEP’s listeners about such newsy topics as global warming, shark-finning and reef protection as well as to explore earth’s many underwater and space mysteries. After
sailing 12,000 miles and visiting five countries Jim is back here, ready to explore the depths of the ocean to the deepest frontier, space MORE>>
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Star
Lady Pam Eastlick is an expert in both the stars
and seas as a graduate of the University of Guam Marine
Lab and the Director of the UOG Planetarium. |
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