Smithsonian.com

Anyone dressing up as a mad scientist today? (courtesy of flickr user contains_caffeine)

It’s Halloween and if you don’t have a costume yet, obviously you’ve got little time to put one together. But that’s OK, because we’ve dug up a few ideas for easy costumes with a science theme:

1 ) Mad Scientist: Yes, it’s an obvious one, but it will be easy to put together. All you need is messy hair, a geeky t-shirt (if you don’t have one, just take a plain shirt and write a few equations on it) and/or white lab coat, perhaps some safety goggles or protective gloves, and a glass container (a beaker or Erlenmeyer flask would be nice) with some colored liquid, bubbling away with the addition of some dry ice.

2 ) The Pacific Garbage Patch: This idea, from the Mother Nature Network, requires only some blue clothing and whatever bits of plastic you’ve got lying around the house. Glue or otherwise attach the plastic bits in a large patch to your outfit, get a little background info on the problem so you can inform anyone who asks, and you’ll be good to go.

3 ) Schrödinger’s Cat: This is a classic example of a feature of quantum physics in which something can be in two states simultaneously. Schrödinger’s Cat is in a box and is both dead and alive. For this costume, you’ll need a box to wear (at least over your head, like idea number 1 here) with a flap cut out for your face. Give yourself whiskers and a cute cat nose.

4 ) Squid: There are plenty of reasons to love these undersea creatures. But the ability to make a squid hat using nothing more than paper and a couple of CDs (as seen here on Discoblog) is another.

5 ) Dark Energy or Dark Matter: Find a “My Name Is” sticker and write “Dark Energy” or “Dark Matter” on it. No one knows what either of them looks like, so your guess (whatever you’re wearing) is as good as any other.

(And if you haven’t yet carved your pumpkin, be sure to check out these ideas from around the Smithsonian.)

The Terkezi Oasis in Chad, as seen from Landsat 7 (Credit: USGS)

When someone at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center saw this image of the Terkezi Oasis in Chad, taken by the Landsat 7 satellite, he or she saw art and included it in the Earth as Art collection. But when I came upon it, and mentally rotated it by 90 degrees (as shown above), I saw a ghostly screamer with one arm raised in anger.

Admittedly, I had primed my brain for such a discovery, searching for Halloween-ish images in keeping with the season, but I probably would have seen a face even if I hadn’t been thinking of monsters and ghosts. We often find patterns in places where they don’t exist, whether it be a witch’s head in a nebula, initials in the echoes of the Big Bang or the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast.

There are definite advantages in being able to recognize patterns—when they are real, they can provide useful information about the world around us, information that can help us to prosper and stay alive. But we haven’t necessarily evolved to tell real patterns apart from false ones, as Michael Shermer pointed out in Scientific American a few years ago:

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

Shermer points to a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that examined the phenomenon and demonstrated that whenever the cost of believing in a false pattern (e.g., ghosts are real) is less than the cost of not believing in a real pattern (e.g., snakes of a specific color can kill), then natural selection will favor the belief in patterns, whether real or not. “Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things,” Shermer writes.

So if you believe in ghosts or witches or other things that go bump in the night, I guess you can blame evolution.

A little brown bat with symptoms of white-nose syndrome (Credit: Greg Thompson/USFWS)

Earlier this year, Smithsonian magazine published a story by Michelle Nijhuis about white-nose syndrome, the disease that is devastating U.S. bat colonies in catastrophic numbers:

The disease was discovered in early 2007, when bats in upstate New York started behaving oddly. Instead of hibernating through the winter, they flew into neighborhoods during the day, wandering dangerously far from their caves. “There would be three feet of snow and it would be 20 degrees—not bat-flying weather—and you’d see bats flying out and taking off into the distance,” says Al Hicks, then a wildlife biologist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “You’d know every darn one of them was going to die. It was awful.”

Later that winter, during a routine cave survey, New York State biologists found thousands of dead bats in a limestone cave near Albany, many encrusted with a strange white fuzz. During the winters that followed, dead bats piled up in caves throughout the Northeast. The scientists would emerge filthy and saddened, with bat bones—each as thin and flexible as a pine needle—wedged into their boot treads.

By the end of 2008, wildlife-disease researchers had identified the fuzz as a fungus new to North America. Today the fungus has spread to 19 states and 4 Canadian provinces, and infected nine bat species, including the endangered Indiana and gray bats. A 2010 study in the journal Science predicted that the little brown bat—once one of the most common bat species in North America—may go extinct in the eastern United States within 16 years.

When talking about the cause of the disease, we (the writer and editors) were careful in our language, saying only that it appeared to be caused by a fungus, Geomyces destructans. The scientists studying the growing disaster couldn’t definitively link the two.

Now they can. A new study, published this week by Nature, has confirmed the scientists’ suspicions. In the new study, the researchers exposed 29 little brown bats hibernating in the lab to G. destructans spores; all the bats developed the symptoms of white-nose syndrome (white fungus growing on the muzzles and wings). They also exposed 18 additional healthy bats to the fungus by housing them with sick bats; 16 of the 18 developed the disease, confirming that it can be transmitted from bat to bat. “The fungus alone is sufficient to recreate all the pathology diagnostic for the disease,” the study’s senior author, David Blehert, a microbiologist at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, told Nature.

Scientists are continuing to search for a way to treat infected bats and halt the spread of the disease. Their best weapons right now, however, are fairly crude and aimed at preventing the further spread of the fungus: cleaning shoes and gear after people have been in caves and closing off some caves altogether. But with the winter hibernation season closing in, it’s sad to know that more bats are sure to die.

A side-blotched lizard in Utah (courtesy of flickr user utahmatz)

You probably already know how to play rock-paper-scissors. Perhaps you’ve even participated in the world championships. But do you know about the lizards that live this game?

Side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana) are a small lizard species found in many states in the American West and Mexico. Males come in three varieties, each with a different throat color: orange, yellow or blue. Those throat colors announce to the lizard world what mating strategy a male will use. Orange-throated males are bigger and more aggressive, and they have large territories with several females. Blue-throated males have smaller territories with only one female, and they cooperate with other blues for defense. Yellow-throated males, whose markings and behaviors mimic those of females, are known as “sneakers”; they don’t keep a territory but instead cluster around and sneak into the territories of other males to mate with their females.

And like a big game of rock-paper-scissors, each variety has its pluses and minuses in the mating game. The result is that once every few years, the original study in Nature found, the dominant variety changes.

If we start with the orange males, they have the advantage over blues in terms of territory size and numbers of females they control. But with more territory controlled by orange males, the more opportunities for sneaky yellow males to mate, and then the yellow population begins to grow. But the yellows are vulnerable to the blues, who can easily defend their females because they cooperate with other blues, so then they take over. But then oranges mate with more females and grow in numbers again. Orange is most successful when blues are greater in number; yellows are most successful when oranges are greater in number; blues are most successful when yellows are greater in number. The result is a cycle that has persisted for millions of years.

But not everywhere. Further research into this species, published in PNAS, has found that there are many populations of this species that have lost one or two of the color varieties. The yellows were always the first to go; something (not yet known) had changed the game’s rules so that they no longer had any advantages over orange or blue. Some places had also lost their oranges and others had also lost their blues. And that loss of a color variety or two had further consequences: It was accompanied by rapid changes in traits like body size in the remaining lizard types, changes that could lead to the evolution of new species.

These lizards came up in a conversation among some of my friends earlier this year (a mathematician in the group told me about the lizards, which, along with the rock-paper-scissor game, have been studied in game theory). One of them was wearing a rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock T-shirt, illustrating that lesser-known variant of the game. I am disappointed to report, however, that I was unable to find any link between it and the discovery of the lizards’ mating strategy.

A group of scientists and statisticians led by the University of California at Berkeley set out recently to conduct an independent assessment of climate data and determine once and for all whether the planet has warmed in the last century and by how much. The study was designed to address concerns brought up by prominent climate change skeptics, and it was funded by several groups known for climate skepticism. Last week, the group released its conclusions: Average land temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 20th century. The result matched the previous research.

The skeptics were not happy and immediately claimed that the study was flawed.

Also in the news last week were the results of yet another study that found no link between cell phones and brain cancer. Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Denmark looked at data from 350,000 cell phone users over an 18-year period and found they were no more likely to develop brain cancer than people who didn’t use the technology.

But those results still haven’t killed the calls for more monitoring of any potential link.

Study after study finds no link between autism and vaccines (and plenty of reason to worry about non-vaccinated children dying from preventable diseases such as measles). But a quarter of parents in a poll released last year said that they believed that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children” and 11.5 percent had refused at least one vaccination for their child.

Polls say that Americans trust scientists more than, say, politicians, but that trust is on the decline. If we’re losing faith in science, we’ve gone down the wrong path. Science is no more than a process (as recent contributors to our “Why I Like Science” series have noted), and skepticism can be a good thing. But for many people that skepticism has grown to the point that they can no longer accept good evidence when they get it, with the result that “we’re now in an epidemic of fear like one I’ve never seen and hope never to see again,” says Michael Specter, author of Denialism, in his TEDTalk below.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you think I’m not talking about you. But here’s a quick question: Do you take vitamins? There’s a growing body of evidence that vitamins and dietary supplements are no more than a placebo at best and, in some cases, can actually increase the risk of disease or death. For example, a study earlier this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that consumption of supplements, such as iron and copper, was associated with an increased risk of death among older women. In a related commentary, several doctors note that the concept of dietary supplementation has shifted from preventing deficiency (there’s a good deal of evidence for harm if you’re low in, say, folic acid) to one of trying to promote wellness and prevent disease, and many studies are showing that more supplements do not equal better health.

But I bet you’ll still take your pills tomorrow morning. Just in case.

This path has the potential to lead to some pretty dark times, as Specter says:

When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don’t want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease.

If you don’t think that can happen here, think again. We’re already not vaccinating children against preventable diseases, something that will surely lead (and probably already has led) to lives lost. We have big problems to address in the coming decades—even greater changes to temperature, weather and water as the planet warms; a growing population—and we need to start putting our trust back into science, into the process that has brought us to where we are today, with longer lives, cleaner water and skies, more efficient farming. Because you have to admit, this is a pretty great time to be alive and it’s science that got us here.