Monday: Hili dialogue

February 2, 2015 • 4:40 am

I have not yet looked out the window, but the news is dire: they didn’t plow the side streets in Chicago as snow was still falling last night, and so I will slog to work through deep snow. Still, it will be beautiful, and there will be no traffic. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the snow has melted some, and Hili dreams of romping through spring fields after rodents:

Cyrus: How nice that it’s warmer.
Hili: Yes, but it will be really idyllic when spring comes.

Hili

In Polish:
Cyrus: Dobrze, że jest cieplej.
Hili: Tak, ale sielsko będzie dopiero wiosną.

It’s still coming down

February 1, 2015 • 2:18 pm

Perhaps we’ll get 18 inches or more of snow today: it’s still coming down steadily and the wind is blowing hard, so the snow sometimes falls sideways. Occasionally a big avalanche drops from the roof of my building.

Here’s the pond outside my office; you can see snow piling up on the branches and railings:

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Not good thoroughfares for my squirrels!

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However, the rodents are dauntless, and are out nomming in the inclement weather. Here’s a wet squirrel eating peanuts and sunflower seeds that I put in a plastic box so they wouldn’t get too wet:

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Go home, squirrels! It’s too wet for you!

 

A living beetle in more detail than you have ever seen one before

February 1, 2015 • 12:45 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Take a look at this video. It’s a scanning electron microscope (SEM) study of a beetle. Nothing amazing there, except you’ll soon notice that the beetle is ALIVE. This is quite astonishing, because SEM is done in a vacuum and involves completely dehydrating the sample and then covering it with a conductive metal (often gold). None of that here.

This tour de force is the work of a group of Japanese researchers, and it has just been published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (£££, sadly).

In fact, I can’t read the article, even with my Uni password, VPN and the rest. So I can’t tell you anything about the beetle in question (can any reader ID it?), how long it survived, whether the process is lethal or not, or indeed anything more than what’s given in the abstract:

Although extremely useful for a wide range of investigations, the field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) has not allowed researchers to observe living organisms. However, we have recently reported that a simple surface modification consisting of a thin extra layer, termed ‘NanoSuit’, can keep organisms alive in the high vacuum (10−5 to 10−7 Pa) of the SEM. This paper further explores the protective properties of the NanoSuit surface-shield. We found that a NanoSuit formed with the optimum concentration of Tween 20 faithfully preserves the integrity of an organism’s surface without interfering with SEM imaging. We also found that electrostatic charging was absent as long as the organisms were alive, even if they had not been coated with electrically conducting materials. This result suggests that living organisms possess their own electrical conductors and/or rely on certain properties of the surface to inhibit charging. The NanoSuit seems to prolong the charge-free condition and increase survival time under vacuum. These findings should encourage the development of more sophisticated observation methods for studying living organisms in an FE-SEM.

How they put the Nanosuit around the beetle, how long it survived, and all the rest will have to wait until whatever glitch there is at the Royal Society has been fixed (or the University has paid its bill) and I’m able to read it.

A previous paper by the same group gives some more detail about the NanoSuit:

Most multicellular organisms can only survive under atmospheric pressure. The reduced pressure of a high vacuum usually leads to rapid dehydration and death. Here we show that a simple surface modification can render multicellular organisms strongly tolerant to high vacuum. Animals that collapsed under high vacuum continued to move following exposure of their natural extracellular surface layer (or that of an artificial coat-like polysorbitan monolaurate) to an electron beam or plasma ionization (i.e., conditions known to enhance polymer formation). Transmission electron microscopic observations revealed the existence of a thin polymerized extra layer on the surface of the animal. The layer acts as a flexible “nano-suit” barrier to the passage of gases and liquids and thus protects the organism. Furthermore, the biocompatible molecule, the component of the nano-suit, was fabricated into a “biomimetic” free-standing membrane. This concept will allow biology-related fields especially to use these membranes for several applications.

 This breakthrough might be particularly useful for studying the activity of structures at the surface of organisms; the  comment in the abstract about the lack of electrostatic charging in living specimens is particularly intriguing. We already know that bees and plants can interact through electrostatic charges, and it may be that this forms an important aspect to arthropod ecology.

Yasuharu Takaku, Hiroshi Suzuki, Isao Ohta, Takami Tsutsui, Haruko Matsumoto, Masatsugu Shimomura, Takahiko Hariyama (2015) ‘A ‘NanoSuit’ surface shield successfully protects organisms in high vacuum: observations on living organisms in an FE-SEM’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
h/t @ziyatong on Tw*tter

New study shows that 64% of Americans favor religion over science

February 1, 2015 • 10:20 am

A new paper by Timothy O’Brien and Shiri Noy in American Sociological Review (free download; reference at bottom) has gotten a lot of attention from the media. It shows that Americans are, by and large, friendly to science—but that the friendship stops when the science conflicts with people’s faith.

I’m not sure why this paper got so much press, unless people like the new trichotomy it proposes about American attitudes, as well as its trendy neologism of a “post-secular perspective”. For the results pretty much confirm what we all know: most Americans are religious, many of those religious people do accept science, but those who reject science often do so only when the science conflicts with their religion. To the authors of this survey, that means the Big Bang and evolution.

The authors analyzed already-existing data from the General Social Survey, a poll of Americans’ views taken every two years. Besides polling Americans on their demographic information (age, location, education, and so on), and on their political and religious views (denomination, strength of belief, views on abortion, fuel economy standards for cars, GMOs, etc.), it also got information on the subjects’ knowledge of science. They asked 12 “innocuous” questions (e.g., “Does the Sun go around the Earth or the Earth around the sun?”, “Are electrons smaller than atoms?”) and 2 hot-button questions (“Did the Universe begin with a huge explosion?” and “Did human beings develop from earlier species of animals?”). Finally, they got information on people’s attitudes toward science in general (e.g., agree or disagree: “Science makes our way of life change too fast,” or “Scientific research that advances the frontiers of knowledge is necessary and should be supported by the federal government”).

To analyze the data, the authors used a method with which I’m unfamiliar: “latent class analysis,” or LCA. It apparently extracts the number of classes of individuals that are necessary to best explain patterns in the data about science and science attitudes, assuming that attitudes among different variables are correlated, as they are. Before they did the analysis, they identified four possible views on science and religion, to wit:

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But what they found were three classes: all but the “postmodern” view, which the authors say would include those people who view both science and religion unfavorably, perhaps because they disdain all claims of truth. Instead, they found the data divided fairly neatly into the traditional, modern, and “post-secular” views.

Traditionals view religion favorably and science unfavorably, know less about science than members of the other two groups, but report stronger levels of religious affiliation (for example, 46% of them say that the Bible is the literal word of God compared to only 31% in the overall sample—a figure that is still astounding to me). Traditionals constituted the largest class: 43%.

Moderns, who have the reverse attitude (yes to science, no to faith) constituted 36% of the sample.  They know more about science and have more favorable attitudes about science than do members of the two other classes.  They are of course less religious than the other groups: for instance, only 3% felt that the Bible was the literal word of God.

And the post-secularists, who are friendly to both science and faith, composed 21% of the population. They are just as religious as the traditionals: 48% see the Bible as the literal word of God. But they are indistinguishable in scientific knowledge from the moderns—EXCEPT on three issues, issues on which post-secularists diverge strongly from moderns but aren’t quite as denialist as are traditionals. Those three questions, and the proportion of each of the three classes agreeing with them, are shown in the summary chart from PuffHo:

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(Surprisingly, moderns have lower agreement with the Big Bang than with evolution and continental drift.)  What do those questions have in common? They are the only ones that conflict with Abrahamic religious faith. Traditionals in general disagree with or are ignorant of what science says, but post-secularists reject the science when it implies that the universe started with a “huge explosion” (it didn’t really) or that humans evolved or that continental drift occurred over millions of years (it’s the “millions of years” that bothers them). I’m a bit surprised that post-secularists reject the notion of a Big Bang, because that’s largely compatible with theism, unless you believe that the universe was created exactly the way God said in Genesis, and even then you could metaphorize a tad and still make the story compatible with the Big Bang.

If you reject science when it comes into conflict with your faith, then you don’t have a truly scientific attitude, i.e., one that follows the facts wherever they lead. In toto, then, 43% + 21%, or 64% of Americans, deny science when it conflicts with their faith. 36% are with science down the line, with 88% of these accepting human evolution—one litmus test for evolution since it rejects human exceptionalism.

I’m actually pleasantly surprised at that 36%. It appears higher than the Gallup Poll’s recent finding that only 19% of Americans accept purely naturalistic evolution, but there is a big difference between the two results.  Gallup found that an additional 31% of Americans accept human evolution with the proviso that God guided it. O’Brien and Noy’s data don’t say anything about how many who accept evolution see God’s hand in it. Accepting theistic evolution is not being down with science, since you think God tweaked the process; and we have no idea what proportion of the 88% of moderns who accept human evolution—or, indeed of the 33% of post-secularists and 3% of traditionals who also do—see that evolution as guided by God.

In the end, I’m not clear why so much is being made of this study. Anyone who’s studied science acceptance in America knows that most people are science friendly, but that this friendship disappears when it involves issues that conflict with religion. After all, the U.S. is the world’s most religious First World country.

The inability to find “postmoderns” who reject both science and religion doesn’t surprise me. By and large, Americans are not morons, and if you’re not religious you’d have to be either an idiot or a postmodern humanities professor to reject science.

There are other interesting results of this study—the association between these three classes and political views, for instance—but since the study is free online I will leave you to read those bits for yourself.
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O’Brien, T. L. and S. Noy. 2015. Traditional, modern, and post-secular perspectives on science and religion in the United States. American Sociological Review, 80:92-115.

Readers’ wildlife photgraphs

February 1, 2015 • 8:15 am

Today we’re stretching the boundaries of “wildlife” again, so that this time it includes geology.  Reader Jonathan Wallace encloses some nice photos of the English coast that give some history:

These were taken from a coastal dune system a little way north of where I live in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.  During the last ice age there was a continuous land bridge across to the continent but this was broken when sea levels rose after the ice melted and there has been continual erosion of the east coast of England since then.  The current coastline was therefore in prehistoric times some distance inland, and the erosion of the dunes at this place revealed a band of peat beneath the sand created through the infilling of a fresh water mire.  Because of the anoxic conditions in the peat, wood and other organic material falling into it were preserved and, as can be seen in the pictures, there are lots of logs and bits of tree branch embedded in the peat and eroding out.  I believe the top of the peat layer has been dated to around 800 BC so a bit less than three thousand years old and the bottom layer is considerably older.  ‘Bog oak’ is commonly dug out of peat workings in Ireland and elsewhere and is often sufficiently well preserved to permit its use as a sought after wood carving material.

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The remains of trees preserved in peat:

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Finally, if you want your ration of critters, here are some lovely photos sent in by a new contributor, Keira from Australia:

Here are ravens from Matilda Bay on the Swan River, Perth, WA [“Western Australia”]:

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A raptor:

Here is a newcomer to the neighbourhood – a hobby falcon [JAC: probably the brown falcon, Falco berigora]. It was really windy and I don’t have a fantastic zoom lens. I think he’s a juvenile looking to establish a territory around here, ’cause he’s been here on 3 occasions.  I’m in the inner city – not at all rural.

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Finally, here’s Keira’s cat, a female named Fattee Cattee,  also described on her website:

I like this portrait of my fluffy girl – she looks very serious:

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