December 2010
8 posts
How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? →
Nathan Keyfitz, a Harvard professor of sociology and demographics, made an estimate that, updated in 1999, suggests 96 billion. Of course, most of human history lacks accurate census data, so any answer will consist of educated guesswork. The Population Reference Bureau guesstimated 106 billion in 2002, which would mean 6 percent of all the humans that ever lived, were alive in 2002. (PRB also has...
The animal world has its junkies too →
Pharmaceutical Journal:
One [species that uses hallucinogenic plants], appropriately for a Christmassy article, is the reindeer, which goes to great lengths to search out the hallucinogenic fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria) — the one with the white-spotted red cap that garden gnomes like to sit on. Eating the toadstool makes reindeer behave in a drunken fashion, running about aimlessly and...
2010 Roundup
2010 was a great year for science. Every year is a great year for science. Sure, we might not get an On the Origin of Species or an Einsteinian Annus Mirabilis every year, but there hasn’t been a single year in modernity that we didn’t learn something new and interesting about the world and ourselves. Science tumbled wasn’t as active this year as I would have wished, but we did...
Mice with two fathers produced using stem cell... →
Lizards with zero fathers? Ok. But now: mice with two!
Word Weirding →
You may be familiar with “semantic satiation”, the scholarly name for what happens when you repeat a word so many times it temporarily becomes meaningless to you. Equally interesting is what happens if, instead of repeating the word yourself, you listen to a tape of someone else repeating it. Here’s the result of one such experiment: The subject listened to the repeated stimulus...
Giant Insects A Thing of the Past →
In high school biology, I learned that the reason insects don’t get bigger than they are is their respiratory system based on trachea, which can’t efficiently deliver oxygen to every cell in a body above a certain size. A giant bug would need to use so much space for its respiratory system that there wouldn’t be enough space for other vital organs. Yet 300 million years ago,...