Tales From The Lab

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My other compass is a cow

August 29th 2008 12:20

Meet Hamish, the hairy highland cow

I love these sorts of stories. A team of scientist is saying that cows have inbuilt compasses and can detect north.

They looked at thousands of images of cattle in fields on Google Earth and found that bovines seemed to be on a north-south axis regardless of wind, rain or sun. I always thought they angled according to the wind, but apparently this is an evolutionary hangover from the times they needed to make their long distance migrations. After all, homing pigeons, whales and turtles find their way around using the earth's magnetic field, so why can't cows?

Although this sounds really silly and I can't help wondering who funded them and why, it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), which is a really prestigious journal. Hell, I would have loved to get a paper published in PNAS... So there must be *something* to it.

As an aside, did you know that the earth's magnetic field is weakening and may one day change its polarity (ie south becomes north and north becomes south? The feeling among scientists is that the various animals would be able to cope with both scenarios but I do wonder if more whales might beach themselves, since they can be fairly easily misguided now...

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The truth about cats and dogs

August 20th 2008 10:25

Oscar is always watching

There have been a number of interesting dog stories lately but I'm a cat person and thus was amused to read that cats and dogs can successfully live together - but it's more likely to be happen if the cat was there first and was fairly young when the canine interloper appeared.

I've not lived in a household with a dog and cat, but I have lived with three felines who were old when they came together (It was messy) and they're clearly going to be dominant over a dog given a chance. They will not bend unless they absolutely have to so it comes as no surprise to me that a dog will more readily read dominance and other relationships in a household and fit in accordingly.

For example, the arrival of a cat after the dog will evoke the same uppity canine reaction as when a baby joins the family, but if the humans and cat (= baby) are already settled, then as a pack animal the pup knows where it sits and just settles in.

Successful relationships between cats and dogs can be characterised by those that have learnt each others' body language - the story documents a dog that instead of sniffing the cat's butt for information instead sniffed its nose, as other cats do. I doubt you'd see a cat sniffing a dog's butt... so it's the dog bending to the cat's will once again.

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Do moisturisers really help cause skin cancer?

August 15th 2008 09:45

Sunbaking is never a good idea but can moisturisers really contribute to skin cancer? (pic: theage.com.au)

Today AAP is reporting a study out of Rutgers University linking moisturisers and skin cancer in people who were heavily sun-exposed as youngsters.

The reason the scientists chose to look at moisturisers was that they contain sodium lauryl sulphate or mineral oil and these are known irritants. It would appear their hypothesis was that irritating the skin somehow increases the skin's susceptibility to UV radiation, and thus increases the risk of developing skin cancer.

Professor Allan Conney, said his findings "could help explain the incidence of some types of skin cancer in patients," especially those who have had lots of sun exposure."

Holy crap! I hear you say. Well, yes, that was my first reaction too. That's terrifying and to anyone who isn't listening, or willing to go past the first paragraph of the story it most certainly will remain so.

But if you go on, you'll read you'll read that dermatologists and scientists are saying the study is "highly artificial" and "premature, unhelpful and even irresponsible".

Why? The researchers used hairless mice and have not investigated any of this in humans. They used a cream that didn't contain the irritants and compared it to creams that did, showing that the irritant-laden creams significantly (ie statistically) increased tumour rates.

In perhaps the biggest understatement of 2008, Prof Conney acknowledges the significance in humans is still "unknown" and more studies are needed.

Now, I've only been able to get to the abstract, and I may be reading it incorrectly, but it appears they irradiated the mice for three weeks before adding the creams - and that these treated mice developed more tumours that grew more rapidly than the ones who didn't get the cream.

I cannot see the data so cannot comment further but I wonder if they took into account the way humans and mice differ (yes, we are similar in many respects but we're importantly we're quite different in others) or whether the irritants act on the skin's ability to mop up the cells damaged by UV radiation... I feel a rant coming on so will stop.

You cannot control everything in any experiment - you do your best to account for the variables and I'm sure these people are well-intentioned - but to make a sensational and alarmist claim such as this you would want to be damn certain of your results.

A study such as this does have a place in a dermatological journal and in time it may prove to be valid but the irresponsibility comes in talking to the media about it at this early stage. Cancer is no trifling matter and I cannot think of a single good reason why scaring people like this without conclusive evidence in humans can be justified.

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Cretinism, salt and bread - what do they have in common?

July 29th 2008 13:46

Eat iodised salt! (photo: UNSW Embryology

To most people, the word cretin is simply an insult on someone's intelligence but in fact cretinism is actually a very serious condition.

Definitions range from the slightly unhelpful "idiot: a person of subnormal intelligence" to the more precise "a person who fails to develop mentally and physically due to a congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones
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My favourite - flavoured breast milk

July 24th 2008 13:30

B - my favourite little boy in the whole wide world

Yesterday a friend's Facebook status update stated that she was pondering how one side dish of asparagus can go through the milk and turn a baby's poo green for three days. This in itself was a little more than I had really ever wanted to consider - in my world, green baby poo is someone else's problem.

But you can imagine my surprise when New Scientist and the BBC told me that breast milk can be imbued with different favours according to what the mother had eaten

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Unidentified bug roams London

July 18th 2008 01:10

The unidentified critter (photo: BBC)

To prove once again that we don't know everything about this planet or life on it, a previously unknown bug is roaming the gardens of the Natural History Museum in London. It appears to be harmless, but in spite of the NHM's collection of millions of creepy crawlies they've not been able to ID it conclusively, and scientists elsewhere are also struggling. We may, in fact, have a new species on our hands and that's always exciting.

It looks similar to the species Arocatus roeselii that is usually found in central Europe but that variant is bright red and feeds on alder trees. The new bug was first seen in the NHM gardens in March 2007, but there are no alder trees and scientists are supposing it may have switched to feeding on plane trees and therefore been able to breed to now be the most abundant bug in the garden

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Coal-generated CO2 capture

July 10th 2008 05:50

Loy Yang power station (photo: www.theage.com.au)

An interesting press release came through my inbox earlier today, which I imagine will hit the papers tomorrow: CSIRO has captured carbon dioxide from the gasses produced at a power station, which apparently is a first for Australia.

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Asymmetry = fashion disaster

July 8th 2008 11:10

Human League and Phil Oakey's hair (photo: BBC)

This article (Lopsided 80s haircuts 'counter-evolutionary') is a little old but it appeals to me, not least because a mathematician makes a funny.

For years we've been told that symmetry hooks into something deep in our brains and we find things that are symmetrical beautiful - ie that person you think is hot is likely to have one side of their face pretty close to being a mirror image of the other. And from an evolutionary point of view, that means they're a good genetic bet as they're more likely to be free of disease (did you know that diseased mothers in animal studies give birth to more asymmetrical offspring? So Wikipedia tells me

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You are what you read?

July 7th 2008 04:05

I couldn't sleep last night and turned on Radio National for some quality white noise but instead actively listened. The Book Show's lead interview followed up on a New Scientist story reporting on how specifically reading fiction allows us to be more empathetic - apparently the emotional journey we go on with the characters makes us better in person.

An interesting idea, although I wonder about the veracity of the study - what about reading biography (as the presenter asked)? And what about science or detective fiction as opposed to Jane Austen? I need to read more about this to work out what I really think

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Welcome

July 7th 2008 02:54

Welcome to what I think is interesting in the world of science.

I cringe at using the S word though as it's so loaded - people turn off when it comes up so I try to avoid it as much as possible. There are so many awareness and education programs across the world for the general public, students, politicians etc (and I have been a part of many of them) - but I've always shied away from ramming it down people's throats. You know the kind: "This is SCIENCE so it's fun and good for you", which implies that if you just know about it, you'll love it

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August 2008

3 Posts

July 2008