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p. “Channel 5”:http://www.five.tv/ seems to be determined to disguise its informative documentaries cunningly with copious amounts of schlock. Exhibit A: earlier in the week I watched a documentary called “Killer Squid Attack”. That title could only be made closer to the Channel 5 archetype by inserting the word ‘Nazi’. I suppose that I could try to claim that I knew all along it would be interesting, but the truth is that I just thought it might be funny. Plus I’m a bit of a [“cephalopod-ophile(Dan Hon’s cephalopod links)”:http://danhon.com/ec/mtarchives/2003/08/09/preemptivelybowingtocephalopoidoverlords/index.shtml#000613].

p. Imagine my surprise when the documentary actually turned out to be quite interesting. True, there was rather gratuitous use of ‘Jaws’-like background music, and a lot of talk of aggression, ‘frenzied attacks’ and cannibalism. My view is that if you’ve just been caught on a barbed hook, yanked out of an environment in which you can breathe, and had a piercing to insert a scientific identification tag, you’re entitled to a certain amount of tetchiness.

p. The ‘killer squid’ in question are the Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), or—as they were dubbed in the programme—jumbo squid. Really, the word ‘jumbo’ should be reserved for food portions, which I suppose might apply to this species. “Jumbo squid rings, anyone?” They live in the Gulf of Mexico at depths of 200-700m, and are a pretty mysterious species. They are predatory, very curious about divers, and yes—they can be quite agressive, but then they are predators, and that’s really part of the job description.

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p. Let me tell you about the time I met a kagu. In case you’ve never seen a picture of one before, the kagu, Rhynochetos jubatus, is the national bird of New Caledonia, and was [“extremely endangered”:http://www.oneworldwildlife.org/newcaledonia.html] in the early 1980’s, getting down to about 60 or 70 individuals in the world. The kagu is the only surviving representative of an entire family of birds which was once endemic in New Caledonia. Their problem—as with many island bird species—was that they were totally unprepared by evolution for the introduction of mammals like pigs, dogs, rats and cats. In many ways, kagus are rather odd birds. They nest on the ground, bark like dogs, hiss like snakes when threatened, and can’t really fly. None of these superhero-like abilities equipped them well for dealing with ground-dwelling mammalian predators, and when the effects of habitat reduction were factored in, it looked as if the kagu was doomed to go the way of the dodo or the [“moa”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000260.html].

p. Luckily, a concerted effort was made to protect the species, lead by a remarkable man called Yves Letocart (who I was lucky enough to meet while I was there). Non-native predators were trapped or shot, and a captive breeding programme established to build the numbers up before reintroducing individuals back into the wild. Now, there are around 1,000 individuals in New Caledonia, and they are breeding successfully in the wild. Since they are an endemic species, this is 1,000 in the world—still a very rare bird, but in a much better state than before.

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There was a little piece in the Life section of The Guardian on Thursday about Tanya Streeter, who broke the world freediving record this week. I’ve had a passing interest in freediving since watching the Luc Besson film, ‘The Big Blue’, so I was curious to read more about Tanya. It seems that she has a slightly freaky physiology, which makes her ideally suited to freediving. Simon Donoghue—a physiologist at Oxford University—measured her blood oxygen level while she held her breath for five and a half minutes (five and a half minutes!), and watched the levels plummet:

“The [blood] oxygen levels she gets down to are something I’ve only seen in people who have had a cardiac arrest,” he says. While most people have a blood oxygen level of about 98% and anything below 80% is considered dangerous, after five-and-a-half minutes without breathing Streeter’s went much lower. The machine’s measuring range goes down to 50%, which is itself “not really compatible with human life,” Donoghue says. “Tanya went down off the scale.”

To which I can only say…blimey. I hope she carries some kind of SOS tag explaining this. If she was actually in an accident and they were monitoring her blood oxygen levels, they might prematurely decide that she was dead.

There’s a report in The Times covering a study done by Satoshi Kanazawa studying the age of peak achievements for high-flying (male) scientists:

In the study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, Satoshi Kanazawa, of the University of Canterbury, examined the biographies of 280 great scientists. He found that 65 per cent of the mostly male researchers had made their biggest discovery before their mid-thirties. Their “productivity curve” follows almost exactly that of male common criminals, whose illegal activities peak in late adolescence and early adulthood. The explanation, according to Dr Kanazawa, is simple: they are seeking to impress women with their virtuosity. “They do whatever they do to get laid,” he said. “Scientific productivity indeed fades with age. Two thirds will have made their most significant contributions before their mid-thirties.” Marriage, he found, dampens men’s drive in science and crime. Within five years of marrying, almost a quarter of the scientists had published their last work of any great importance.

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I’ve just watched a fun documentary on Channel 4: ‘The World’s First Time Machine’. It was rather dumbed down, but this—as it turned out—was just as well, because this branch of physics can explode the brains of the unwary (it nearly did with mine, anyway). They had some of the clearest explanations (no doubt very simplified) of the ‘great-grandfather paradox’, parallel universes, and how Superman could save Lois Lane that I’ve ever heard. They featured a physicist called Ronald Mallett, who is actually trying to build a time machine—rather touchingly inspired by a wish to go back and meet his father who died young.

Describing his experiment, he said that it was quite possible that when he switched it on, he might see a particle that (brace yourself for this) was the result of an experiment that he would do some weeks or even years in the future. That really made me go, “Wha?”

There’s a very interesting article in Nature this week by Jared Diamond about type 2 diabetes and the evolution of ‘thrifty genes’. The idea is that the genes predisposing people to this form of diabetes persist in the population because they have some selective advantage. One hypothesis is that these genes have an advantage in ‘feast-famine’ conditions, allowing people to gain weight rapidly and lay down a lot of fat in infrequent periods of plenty so that they are then more likely to survive the subsequent famine.

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Just when I thought that nothing exciting ever happens in our neighbourhood, I saw an interesting sign outside our local community centre: “British Association of Tortoise Keepers Open Day”. Woo-hoo! Pretty soon, hordes of happy tortoise owners were turning up with cardboard boxes—with holes cut in them, of course—containing their treasured pets. One particularly large tortoise was given a run around on the playing field, which it evidently found utterly thrilling. Some people might consider tortoises rather unexciting pets, but I think that they are fantastically mellow little creatures. Don’t even think about keeping one unless you know what you’re doing though: they take quite a bit of skill to look after properly, and—if you do keep it properly—will probably live longer than you will.

According to the Life section of the Guardian this week, crested auklets (Aethia cristatella) use scent to signal attractiveness. Apparently they smell strongly of tangerines. Interesting.

I’ve never encountered a bird smelling of oranges before, but it’s a little known fact that barn owls (specifically the back of barn owls’ necks*) smell lovely. I can’t really describe the scent, but it’s subtle, powdery, musky and quite addictive; tricky when you don’t have ready access to a barn owl supply. I was first told this secret by a falconer acquaintance of mine. I must have had an expression on my face which screamed ‘I think you’ve been sniffing something else entirely’, so she thrust her barn owl (called Wol) under my nose to prove it. It was really quite an experience.

*Probably all of the barn owl smells nice, but if you want to still have a nose after you’ve smelt the owl, the back of the neck is the safest spot.

I bought Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information last week. I’d never heard of the author before, but saw this book referred to in several places and got curious. Apparently the book got into Amazon’s top 100 non-fiction books of the last century. Since a lot of my work involves presenting quantitative information in papers, seminars or lectures, I thought it might be interesting.

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I was watching a program on Channel 4 yesterday called “Magnetic Flip”* yesterday, when Mr. Bsag wandered in some time after it had started.

Him: “Oh, so what’s the looming disaster that will destroy the Earth this week?” Me: “We’re going to lose the Earth’s magnetic field, and then all our atmosphere and water will get blown away into space by the solar winds, and we’ll all be very dry toast.” Him: [Long pause] “Right. What do you want for dinner?”

If you’ve watched any science programmes at all on TV, you won’t be surprised to learn that the whole ‘atmosphere being blown away’ thing was a bit of a device to get our attention. OK, so there is evidence that it happened to Mars, but the decline in the strength of our own magnetic field seems to have another cause: the polarity is about to flip. This is something that usually happens at fairly regular 200,000 year intervals, but as it’s 700,000 years since the last flip, we’re a bit overdue for one.

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I’m starting to like the new ‘Life’ section in Thursday’s Guardian. There are some interesting articles, like a piece entitled, “What does it take to cut off your own arm” about the climber who did a DIY amputation with a penknife. The answer was—not surprisingly— a lot of guts. The whole story made me feel sick just thinking about it.

The ‘Bad Science’ column is also a lot of fun. My favourite entry this week was the following, sent in by Derek Morris:

“As a retired physics teacher it was galling to see 300 years of science teaching set at nought by A Question of Sport. Ally McCoist’s team were given the task of arranging a number of balls from different sports in decreasing order of weight. They decided to test them by a rough experiment assuming the heavier would fall faster…”

Oh dear.

Having ‘Life’ and ‘Online’ in the same section is another reason why Thursdays are great, even if I do now have to read ‘Online’ back to front because of some rather weird layout decisions by The Guardian. You have to read ‘Online’ from the back forwards, and ‘Life’ from the front backwards, and then they meet somewhere in the middle. I think that might be a metaphor for my life…

Sometimes you can’t make this kind of stuff up: Prof. John M. Gottman has been using non-linear mathematical modelling of spousal conversations to predict divorce. (The title of the Chronicle piece is absolutely inspired!) This comment particularly caught my eye:

Biologists, who by definition don’t like math—they’re people who like science but didn’t want to study math, right?—have been resistant to mathematical biology, and often wonder whether the equations give you anything more than a redescription of what you already knew from common sense.

Er, that would be me, then. Though I slightly resent the idea that math (or maths as call it) is the natural choice for someone interested in science, and that biologists are somehow people who fail the entrance requirements and have to settle for second best. I’m hoping he was teasing us.

[via BoingBoing]

Moas. Big birds—very big birds. I’ve just watched a BBC program with the dreadful title Monsters We Met. This seems to be the latest programme of a genre I call “We-spent-thousands-on-that-CGI-how-can-we-reuse-the-footage?”. The programme itself was mostly not particularly good, unless you wanted to play the ‘spot the re-used clip’ game, but the moas caught my attention. To be honest, they couldn’t really help but catch my attention, though—as we’ll see later—they would have been better off if they were a little less conspicuous. The latin name of the largest of the 11 known species—Dinornis giganteus—is translated (with a bit of licence) on the BBC site as ‘giant surprising bird’. No kidding. Dinornis giganteus measured 2m to its back, and could weigh in at a hefty 200kg.

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I’m a bit late with this one (what the hell—the human genome has been around a few million years I’m sure it can wait a bit longer), but the final sequence of the human genome project has been produced. I read one of the most lucid and well-argued accounts of what this all means (or rather doesn’t) at Idlewords: and he’s not even a biologist! It’s well worth a read.

Apparently, if women have a wider computer screen, they match mens’ performance on navigation around simulated 3D environments. This is just the kind of excuse hard data I’ve been looking for to justify the purchase of an Apple 23 inch Cinema Display.

I read the article in the Guardian today about the differences between male and female brains by Simon Baron-Cohen (as far as I know, he’s no relation of Ali G). His hypothesis is that people have empathising qualities or systemising qualities. More women than men have a predominantly empathetic brain, and more men than women have a predominantly systemising brain. The basic idea isn’t exactly new, but there was a test you could take online to see which kind of brain you have. In the name of scientific research — and curious about what I would find, since even I regard myself as a bit of an odd fish — I decided to give it a go.

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