Science Made Cool

Saving Energy

I've been trying to save energy by burning more wood. It's an easy choice:  my house is surrounded by trees and if I didn't burn them for fuel I'd have to pay someone to take away the dead ones anyway.

But saving energy also uses energy. Yesterday I was splitting a log with wedge and hammer. I was using a hammer (made in China) to pound a wedge (made in India) to split locally grown wood in order to burn it in my stove (made in Canada). My chainsaw, happily, is a U.S.-made brand, though I expect at least some of its components come from abroad.

More Milk from Contented Cows

A couple of days after the swank, tradition-filled IgNobel award ceremonies, the new laureates gather at MIT for the standing-room-only Ig Informal Lectures. During the awards ceremony each laureate gets only a minute for their acceptance speech, so the Informal Lectures are where they actually get the chance to explain themselves. They still have to be succinct: each lecture is only 5 minutes long, and Miss Sweetie-Poo lurks in the wings to cut off any laureate who heads into overtime. 

This year, the first speaker was Peter Rowlinson, one of the winners of the 2009 Ig Nobel for Veterinary Medicine. Rowlinson and his coauthor Catherine Douglas showed that cows that are named give more milk than cows that are only known as numbers. (Their work was published in the March 2009 issue of Anthrozoos.) It’s only a little more milk – a couple of liters on average – but in a large herd of dairy cattle it adds up. And that, he pointed out, translates to real money.

What If . . . ?

We all know about the Chicxulub impact -- the famous "dinosaur killer" asteroid which smashed into Yucatan 65 million years ago and ended the Cretaceous era with a bang. It may have had help. Paleontologist Sankar Chatterjee, of Texas Tech University, has identified another ancient crater he calls "Shiva," near modern-day Mumbai in India. The jury isn't quite in on Shiva yet -- so far no other researcher has confirmed Dr. Chatterjee's research -- but the prospect of two simultaneous dinosaur-killer impacts sets my science fiction writing organs twitching. Stand by for some completely wild speculation.

Friday Parasite: Under My Skin

This is a mite you don’t want to meet. Unlike dust mites, which merely live off the crud of your household and may never set foot on your skin, Sarcoptes scabiei prefers to get much closer to its food source. It also eats skin, but it doesn’t wait for you to shed it. Instead, the mites burrow into the outer layer of epidermis, making tunnels where they can live and lay their eggs. Where they set up housekeeping, they cause intense itching, and the scratching that ensues makes wounds that bacteria can thrive inside. We call the itching and lesions scabies (and related species of mite infesting our furry friends cause mange).

Image: Jens Mattssen, National Veterinary Institute, Uppsala, Sweden