SGU Episode 379
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| SGU Episode 379 |
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| 20th October 2012 |
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| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guest |
JIS: Jamy Ian Swiss |
| Quote of the Week |
You can do magic with science, but you can't do science with magic." - |
Erica Dunning (Brian Dunning's daughter) |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| SGU Podcast archive |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, October 15th, 2012, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
B: Hey, everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson.
R: Hello, everyone.
S: Jay Novella.
J: Hey, guys.
S: And Evan Bernstein.
E: Oh, good evening, my friends. How are all of you?
J: Good, what's up?
R: Super!
S: Quite well.
This Day in Skepticism (0:31)
- October 20, 1970: Norman Borlaug wins Nobel Peace prize for Green Revolution
R: So, the day that this podcast goes out, October 20th, marks a very important date in science history. So in 1970, a scientist received the Nobel Peace Prize. Can any of you guess who it was?
E: A scientist received the Nobel 'Peace' Prize.
S: Was that Linus Pauling, right?
R: Nope.
S: He got the Peace Prize.
R: Any other guesses?
J: I have no idea.
E: 1970.
J: Isaac Newton.
R: (laughs) They don't award them posthumously, so... no.
E: Yeah, right.
R: Okay, time is up.
E: (disappointed) Aww!
R: On October 20th, 1970, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Norman Borlaug.
E: Yes!
B: Oh!
R: For his contribution to the 'green revolution'...
B: Norman!
R: Which increased grain production throughout the third world. Yeah, he is responsible for possibly saving millions of lives.
B: Oh, how awesome is that? What a legacy!
E: Borlaug?
J: Cool!
R: Yeah, just for coming up with ways to grow crops that was more efficient, that produced more yields, particularly in Pakistan and India, during times when they had severe shortages of food, and even drops from the US weren't enough to protect people from starvation, so, yeah, his research went into saving many, many people. So, yeah, he has the Nobel Peace Prize, he has the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honor, and he's in the United States National Wrestling Hall of Fame!
B: Wrestling!? (laughs) What!? Didn't see that coming!
R: Yeah.
E: Wrestling with tough ideas!
J: What has he got? What'd he do?
R: He was a wrestler.
B: Oh my god!
R: I don't know, he was really into it.
B: What a Renaissance Man.
R: Yeah, in high school, apparently, he played several sports, but he was particularly into wrestling, and he was on the team at University of Minnesota. He was in the Big Ten semifinals, he introduced the sport to Minnesota high schools by putting on exhibition matches around the state. So, Wrestling Hall of Fame, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Who knew?
J: That's awesome!
E: And the Peace Prize winner, cool!
R: Norman Borlaug.
S: And he lived to 95. It's a good run.
R: (agreeing) Mm-hm!
B: Oh, wow!
News Items
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2:48)
S: Well, we have one Nobel science prize left over from last week that we didn't talk about, the Nobel Prize for 2012 in Chemistry. This one goes to two scientists, Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka, for their discovery and description of G-protein-coupled receptors. You guys familiar with that?
E: It's a rap artist!
R: Nope!
S: So, I mean, they're huge. G-protein-coupled receptors - they're present on -
B: They're really small.
S: On many cells, and they are responsible for cell signaling, essentially how cells can sense their environment and react to things like hormones. It's estimated that half of the drugs that are on the market have their effect through G-protein-coupled receptors.
E: That's a lot.
B: Wow!
S: That's a lot. Definitely a breakthrough in our understanding of cell physiology and biochemistry, so it's hard - it's one of those things where it's fundamental, it's not really the kind of thing that penetrates to public consciousness, cause it's kind of technical and wonky, you know, G-protein-coupled receptors.
E: Obscure.
S: But they're really fundamental to cell function and just - was a tremendous breakthrough that gave us a lot of - had a lot of applications. Now you take it for granted, we hear about them all the time.
B: Yeah!
S: You just take it for granted. This is how different drugs work, etc., how different signals work.
E: But they figured it out.
B: So when was this breakthrough?
S: Definitely worthwhile. So Lefkowitz started the research in 1968, using radioactivity to trace cells' receptors, and then Kobilka joined the team later and discovered the genes, the first G-protein-coupled receptor gene. Now there's something like over a thousand different genes, it's a huge family of genes. They control - these receptors are involved with perception of light, flavor, odor, response to adrenaline, histamine, dopamine, serotonin.
B: Flavor?
S: Yeah, obviously very fundamental to neurological function as well.
E: Do you think they stumbled on this accidentally, Steve, or do you think they were looking -
S: Oh no! He was looking for it. This is a very specific program of research that paid off very, very well.
B: So, what took so long to give them the prize?
S: I don't know, this is pretty par for the course for the Nobel Prize. They definitely like to wait a while to see the implications of researches - they have the luxury of giving it 20 years or so to really see how scientific discovery pays off.
R: Whether or not it's debunked.
E: (laugh) Yeah.
S: Yeah.
E: Or, say, whoops, this discovery causes mutations in all sorts of people, we shouldn't be tooling with this stuff.
S: Some monsterism.
DNA Half Life (5:39)
S: But there's one discovery, Rebecca, that probably will not be earning a Nobel prize: the discovery of the half-life of DNA.
R: Yeah, unfortunately, this discovery will only be earning the power generated by Michael Crichton's spinning corpse.
(laughter)
R: So, yes, paleogeneticists at University of Copenhagen and Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, looked into the DNA of leg bones belonging to three species of giant moas, which are those extinct birds that could disembowel you as soon as look at you, really awesome, impressive birds. And I think that the reason -
J: They're big?
R: Yeah, huge! Huge! Yeah, they reached about twelve feet in height, apparently, and they could weight up to about 500 pounds.
J: Wow, that's awesome!
B: Big, big boys!
R: Yeah, impressive birds. But the interesting thing about them is that they covered a decent swath of time that allowed researchers to collect 158 leg bones and examine the DNA to determine the half-life of DNA. And all of these bones had been found in identical conditions, so they were all at a temperature of 13.1 degrees Celsius for instance, they were all within five kilometres of one another. Everything was the same, pretty much, except for how long ago they actually died. So what the researchers found was that the DNA has a half-life of about 521 years. And that's more or less what it is. It's difficult to say for sure because even though they looked at a lot of different bones, they did only look at bones in a certain part of the world, so they don't really know for sure what bones would be like, say, covered in permafrost, or something like that. But they do have a pretty high degree of confidence that even in a bone at the ideal preservation temperature of -5 degrees Celcius, the DNA in it would be destroyed completely at a maximum of 6.8 million years.
B: Therefore...
R: And so, what journalists and other people have immediately jumped to realizing is that Jurassic Park could never happen, pretty much.
E: Except the creationists, they think it could.
R: (laughs) Right, right. Creationist Jurassic Park could still happen, but it'd be super-crappy, because the dinosaurs would all be vegetarians, blah blah blah. There's definitely no chance that any DNA would be left after 65 million years, considering that right now, they're estimating that it wouldn't make it 6.8 million years.
B: Even if we used lots of frog DNA to help out?
R: Yeah, I think... I think you would just end up with frogs, by the time you replaced... (laughs)
B: Ninety-nine point nine nine percent frogs!
R: Exactly, yeah. So it's sad news -
B: That sucks!
R: Yeah. And there are other factors that can make it even worse, apparently. Like how the bones are stored, after they've been excavated, the chemistry of the soil, and they say that even the time of year when the animal died might factor into how long it takes for their DNA to break down.
E: How come only now we're discovering what the half-life of DNA is? We weren't able to -
B: I think it was the - it was that moa find was key, right Rebecca? I mean, it was just the perfect find in terms of how consistent they were, how many there were, and the time frame - I think that was the big find, which -
R: Yeah, I would imagine that it's difficult to find a huge amount of bones that you can have such a spread of time. Six hundred years to eight thousand years, but still with the same soil conditions, within the same distance, so yeah, I guess it's a pretty important find, and it would be nice to find something else like that in a different part of the world, but I don't know what the chances of that are.
S: One thing I wondered when I was reading this is, does this - I know they said even under ideal preservation temperature of -5 degrees Celsius, every single bond would be broken in 6.8 million years. But does that include every possible condition, specifically, in amber, where there is no oxygen, no air?
R: The article does talk about in amber, and how that doesn't protect it because apparently a huge problem is reaction with water. But I don't know if amber perfectly protects it from that, because there's still water in the body that would damage it, you'd think. So I don't know. Oh, actually, there is a quote. Simon Ho, I computational evolutionary biologist at University of Sydney, said "This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect."
E: Too bad.
S: I wonder why it wouldn't though, since water seems to be so predictive of degredation rate.
R: Yeah, but there's water in the body, so maybe that would be enough, don't you think? Particularly if -
B: What's the water content of amber, too?
R: And if they - yeah -
S: So we have to mummify it, then encase it in amber.
R: Yeah. So what you need to do is go back in time, mummify a dinosaur, come on back.
S: Encase him in amber, and then put him in -5 degrees Celsius.
R: Yep.
E: Then, we'd have something.
J: (disappointed) Are we never going to be able to resurrect a dinosaur?
B: Not looking good, Jay.
S: It's hard to say never. What if we can take, say, a bird, and reverse -
B: De-evolve it.
S: Yeah, reverse all of the mutations that occurred - well, we got the dino-chicken, right?
E: Yep.
S: Remember that?
R: Wait, what was that? I don't remember that.
S: The dino-chicken!
R: Don't just say it again, like that's going to help!
(laughter)
R: (sarcasm) Oh, the dino-chicken, right!
S: Tyrannosaurus cluck!
B: The DC!
R: Oh!
J: Tyrannosaurus cluck!?
R: Tyrannosaurus cluck, I remember!
(laughter)
S: Research teams are doing that, they are doing mutations to reverse some of the changes that led from dinosaurs to birds, so you end up with birds with reptilian dinosaurian features.
J: That's pretty cool.
E: Well, that's something, it's not exactly recreating a dinosaur though.
S: No. It's something though.
R: I mean, you could make a theme park that could then go horribly wrong and result in terror, so...
S: You could.
E: Yeah, but after the slaughter it -
B: Aww, that's a stupid idea, Rebecca, it'll never sell.
Simulated Universe (12:15)
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S: Oh well, it doesn't really matter because the whole universe is a computer simulation anyway, right Jay? B: Oh, nice segway! Eh, someone tap the side of it, it's glitching again! E: Find the old program and run it. J: Well, Steve, this is actually freakishly interesting. Uhm, I was totally absorbed and blown away by learning about this and I actually even, uh, contacted our friend Brian Weck, ... S: Oh, cool! J: ... who, who lives in London now and he was helping me figure this stuff out, I got to ask him a couple of questions about it, so let me start by talking about a few things to give the background here. The universe at its most basic fundamental level is explained by quantum chromo-dynamics or QCD. This is a theory that describes the strong nuclear force and how it binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons and how these form a nucleus. So, that force actually is interacting on these particles in a very, very strong way and it overcomes the, uh, strong magnetic force because it's so powerful at that, at that very close range and it controls these particles. And the question is: .. the question is: what would we be able to learn if we could simulate these incredibly small interactions in a computer? And the scientists that are working on this wanted to see what kind of complexities arise out of that and if we're able to do that. They also think that a true simulation of physics on the level of .. on this level would, in essence, be equal to simulating the universe itself. Which, I find pretty mind-blowing. That thought, just thinking about the idea that we could create a simulation that's so accurate, that it would be, in essence, a small portion of the universe, all by itself.
Supersonic Jump (27:41)
Russian Geoglyph (36:10)
Who's That Noisy? (41:38)
- Answer to last week: Hulda Clarke
Interview with Jamy Ian Swiss (44:37)
Science or Fiction (1:02:15)
S: Item number one. The 1926 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Johannes Fibiger for his discovery of "a cure for cancer." Item number two. The New York Times announced that the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics was to be shared by Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, but they never received the award, it is rumored because neither man would consent to share the award with the other. And item number three. The 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine was shared by Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz for the development of the frontal lobotomy.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:15:07)
You can do magic with science, but you can't do science with magic.
Erica Dunning (Brian Dunning's daughter)
References
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