Science

The Kids Are (Mostly) All Right… It’s The Adults I Worry About

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 4 Comments

My social algorithm may be broken. Lately I’ve been seeing a flood of sentimental posts lamenting how “kids these days” wouldn’t survive back in my day. Depending on the author, “my day” ranges anywhere from the 1950s to the 1990s, but the punchline is always the same: We were tough. Today’s kids are soft.

Those posts got me thinking about my own childhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One photo in particular comes to mind, taken when I was maybe three or five years old. We didn’t have a pool, so in the heat of a Northeastern summer, my parents would fill a five-gallon bucket with water and plop me in. Submerged up to my neck, surveying the backyard from my makeshift infinity pool, I felt like I was living in peak suburban luxury.

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Soft Pretzels and the Quantified Life

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 2 Comments

Some of my earliest memories are of having my foot measured at a shoe store in suburban New Jersey. I’m a little unclear as to why this memory is so vivid, but it might have something to do with those visits also being paired with a soft pretzel. I can still remember my mother scraping comically large salt grains into the trash before I could get a bite of strip-mall, de-salted pretzel. Salt wasn’t something I was allowed to have much of as a kid, so opportunities didn’t come along often. While most of that salty goodness ended up in the Meadowlands, the residual salt was more than enough to keep me happy before my mother needed to duck into Macy’s to discover the latest that early-1990s office-core had to offer.

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The Turn-On Test

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

The topic of sex remains a taboo in some corners of society, but evidence of our interest in sex abounds:

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The Politics of Poop

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 3 Comments

In the 19th century, a healthy fraction of the worlds attention revolved around poop. More specifically, bird turd islands.

From a modern frame of reference, this certainly raises a few questions:

  1. Were people in the 19th century ok?
    Probably not.
  2. Will bird poop raise my car’s resale value?
    No.
  3. Should I be investing in guano instead of gold?
    This blog does not give investment advice.

So what gives, why the poop obsession?

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What Are The Top 10 Funniest Gene Names?

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 5 Comments

In my experience, scientists as a group are generally pretty funny people. I realize that’s probably counterintuitive for some folks, but its a hill I’m willing to die on. Whether we are talking about an Ig Nobel or someone making their cat a coauthor, scientists niche interests and quick wit can really kill with the right crowd.

By far the group that takes this to another level is geneticists, particularly fly geneticists. I have yet to determined if fruit flies are just great joke writers, or if this developed as some sort of coping mechanism to deal with having to work in a fly facility. What I do know is that they love a funny or clever gene name.

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The Curious Journey from Heart Transplants to Pig Lungs

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / Leave a comment

Today, while cruising my Facebook feed, I encountered a truly incredible story. Science ran with the provocative title “In a first, pig lung survives and functions—briefly—in a person.” This covered the most recent study from Nature Medicine by the surgeon Jianxing He and his colleagues. The patient, was 39 year old male who had suffered an intracranial hemorrhage which had resulted in brain death.

In short, a genetically engineered pig lung, designed to survive in humans, was transplanted into this brain-dead patient. Instead of dying in hours these genetic modifications allowed the patient to stay alive with functioning lungs for 9 days. The patient was seen to be delivering oxygen and clearing CO₂. Eventually, after a problematic immune response, the lungs were removed for further study. The man was ultimately taken off life support in accordance with his families wishes.

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Blondlot’s Folly: The Science of Seeing Things

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

In 1903, French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot announced something extraordinary: a brand-new form of radiation he called “N-rays” after his home base at Nancy University. According to Blondlot, these mystery rays could make a barely visible spark a little bit brighter.

Soon, French labs were identifying N-rays everywhere. Possible sources of N-rays included:

  • A specialized gas burner called a WeIsbach mantle
  • An incandescent lamp called a Nernst glower
  • Heated silver and sheet iron
  • The sun
  • Living and dead bodies
  • Nerves
  • Muscles
  • Isolated enzymes

This list of sources remains so broad and varied one starts to wonder what couldn’t produce N-rays. The only limitation seemed to be imagination. By 1906, nearly 300 articles had been published on the topic. There was one small issue standing between Blondlot and immortality in Halliday and Resnick’s Fundamentals of Physics: N-rays don’t actually exist.

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Uranium: The Brightest Bad Idea in Diabetes Care

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

The use of radioactive compounds as medicines is starting to have it’s moment in the sun. Currently over 60 of these radiopharmaceuticals are approved worldwide, primarily for the purpose of diagnosing and treating cancer. Billion dollar acquisitions have a funny way of getting investors excited, though the specialized nature of these compounds leaves many companies struggling to fill a “significant talent shortage.” Of course, the story of radioactivity in medicine didn’t begin with billion-dollar deals, it began with the curious case of uranium.

Our story begins in 1789, when the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth decided to take a deeper look at what was essentially mining waste. A self taught expert in mineral analysis, Klaproth was busy doing analytical chemistry before it was cool. The hipsters among us may know him for his work on zirconium, but his early work on uranium is definitely one of his greatest hits. Klaproth had started some early work on the mineral torbernite, but eventually switched to working on a mineral that gold and silver miners knew well: pitchblende. This black substance typically meant that the gold and silver had been exhausted and that it was time to move elsewhere.

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No one ever expects an immaculate conception.

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 6 Comments

A friend of mine recently confessed to me that he preferred to think of himself as a virgin birth.  When I asked why, he said he likes to think that his parents never had sex.  I have no idea where he thinks he got his Y chromosome from, as his mother has only the two Xs, but I suppose invoking miracles to do away with inconvenient thoughts is hardly something he invented.  Much like industrial meat production and the effectiveness of sneeze guards at salad bars, the topic of parental sex is one item we would probably rather leave unexamined.

Some organisms don’t need to avoid this topic, Continue reading →

Try to stay still for your bone portrait.

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 4 Comments

I was recently at the dentist for a check-up and they had a chart on the wall, kind of like this one here.  In short it tells you how much radiation you’re exposed to when you engage in different activities.  For example flying from New York to Los Angeles exposes you to about the same amount of radiation as eight dental X-rays.  Believe it or not, flying exposes you to an increased amount of radiation coming from space.  A single flight across the ocean is no big deal but long-term elevated radiation exposure can increase your risk of some kinds of cancer, and it’s why workers that are exposed to elevated levels of things like X-rays are monitored to make sure exposure is kept to a minimum.

It got me thinking, while I listened to the slow and steady suction of spit from my oral cavity, “I wonder if Lois Lane, would have to wear a radiation safety badge?”  I am totally unsure about the radiation output Continue reading →