Weekend Roundup

Here’s a quick collection of recent news articles bearing on questions of origins, morals, fossils, outer space, science, health and Darwin.

1. Mars risks:  The dust on Mars may be toxic to humans.  New Scientist reported that evidence from the rovers shows the electrically-charged dust clinging to everything.  “If the dust is toxic and you bring it inside” a human habitat, a NASA scientist said, “it could be extraordinarily bad.”
2. Stem cell breakthrough:  The tools for repairing a broken heart may be inside you.  An optimistic article in Science Daily reported on a proof-of-concept study at the Mayo Clinic that shows a patient’s own stem cells (induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS) could be injected into the heart to repair damage.  “This study establishes the real potential for using iPS cells in cardiac treatment,”Dr. Timothy Nelson said of this first-ever application of iPS technology to heart disease therapy.  In the tests, “Bioengineered fibroblasts acquired the capacity to repair and regenerate infarcted hearts.”
3. Fathers get respect:  “Fathers are not dispensable just yet,” headlined a story in New Scientist, as if that would cheer up Dad.  Their “biological programming” to help raise children may have profound effects on the health of the young.  The article is accompanied by a picture of an infant feeling very happy getting nurturing attention from Daddy.  When Linda Geddens began her article, “You may tempted to think men are becoming an optional extra in the mating game,” who was she talking about?
4. Tiny furry feet:  Mammal tracks have been discovered at Dinosaur National Monument says PhysOrg.  Hundreds of prints smaller than a dime were discovered in an area open to the public on the park grounds.  “The tracks are a rare find, mostly because they were left at a time when the area was a hostile, vast Sahara-like desert where towering sand dunes seldom preserved signs of animal life.”  A park paleontologist called the find “astonishing.”  Mammal tracks are apparently interspersed with the dinosaur tracks.
5. Ammonia moon:  Enceladus has ammonia, announced a press release from Jet Propulsion Lab.  The ion and neutral mass spectrometer found the molecule emitted from the south pole geysers of Saturn’s little hyperactive moon.  Planetologists believe that ammonia, by suppressing the melting point, indicates the possible presence of an ocean under the crust.  Jonathan Lunine provided the automatic response: “Where liquid water and organics exist, is there life?”
6. Origin of Speciation still debated:  Science Daily pointed out that a debate you thought Darwin solved is still going on.  “The tremendous diversity of life continues to puzzle scientists, long after the 200 years since Charles Darwin’s birth,” the article began.  “However, in recent years, consistent patterns of biodiversity have been identified over space, time organism type and geographical region.”  Then they launched into a study that supports the controversial view of sympatric speciation – the idea that speciation can occur within a population without geographic barriers.

Readers may want to ponder an analogy put forth by one of the researchers in that last story about sympatric speciation.  He said, “One can think about the creation of species on the genetic level in the same way we think about the appearance of many patterns, including traffic jams.”  Does that mean we humans might be products of the very pattern we so despise in our daily commutes?  Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of The New England Complex Systems Institute and a senior author of the study, tried to elaborate: “Just as traffic jams can form from the flow of traffic itself without an accident, the formation of many species can occur as generations evolve across the organisms’ spatial habitat.”  If this is still not clear, his colleague Les Kaufman put a moral imperative on it: “Our insights can be applied to the immense challenge that we now face — not only to prevent the extinction of a large chunk of life, but also to prevent ourselves from quenching the very forces that fuel the continuous creation of new life forms on earth.”  Readers may be puzzled by considering traffic jams as creative forces for anything.  Other readers may be puzzled by why extinction should be prevented when we all seem to desire a smooth flow of traffic, not traffic jams.

Secular science news is a strange mix of good, bad, and ugly.  The price of intellectual liberty is eternal baloney detecting.