Intriguing science simmers just below surface
05:49 PM CST on Sunday, December 28, 2003
http://www.dallasnews.com/health/columnists/tsiegfried/stories/122903dnlivtomcol.113cb.html
By TOM SIEGFRIED / The Dallas Morning News
End-of-year science columns are usually pretty predictable. They either
recap the top science
stories of the year just past or forecast the science headlines of the
year to come.
But some years that system doesn't work so well. The journal Science 's
"breakthrough of the year"
for 2003, reported this month, was a retread of the publication's 1998
winner - "dark energy"
causing the universe to expand faster and faster. How boring is that?
So just for the sake of defying ordinary expectations, it might be fun to
try something different
this year. Let's forget the biggest breakthroughs and review instead some
of the obscure science of
2003.
It's not that nobody notices the obscure science - many scientists do -
but only the tips of the
research world's icebergs make themselves visible in the rest of the
world's media. Every month
hundreds of scientific papers appear that explore new ideas or phenomena
that don't qualify as
newsworthy (even though many are actually much more important than Michael
Jackson, Kobe Bryant and
Paris Hilton put together).
For instance:
. Diarrhea may have its bright side. There's no solid evidence, but a
paper in March in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested the possibility
that diarrhea induced by
E. coli bacteria may protect against colon cancer. In developing
countries, where such infections
are common, colorectal cancer rates are much lower than in developed
nations. And chemicals
produced in the course of such E. coli infections seem to possess
cancer-fighting properties, the
scientists noted.
. Molecular fragments called free radicals are known to damage cells and
may be responsible for
some of the cellular damage found in people afflicted by Alzheimer's and
Parkinson's. Attacking
free radicals directly may help in the fight against such diseases, but
another strategy would be
to go after trace metals that make the free radicals more dangerous in the
first place. In March, a
paper published in the journal Neuron reported that a chemical reducing
iron levels seemed to
protect some brain cells in mice. (Whether the iron-reducing chemical can
work in humans without
causing serious side effects remains to be seen, though.)
. Leeches are no longer as medically useful as they were in medieval
times, but they still serve
some scientific purposes. In June, physicists in Argentina reported (in
Physical Review E) the
construction of an "electronic neuron," an artificial replacement for a
real nerve cell. They
tested the device in the leech Hirudo medicinalis, showing that it could
transmit signals just like
a real neuron when properly adjusted. Much work remains before showing
whether such devices will be
of any help to people who lack a sufficient number of properly adjusted
brain cells.
. Speaking of a lack of brain cells, brainlessness might not be so bad
when it comes to playing the
stock market. Or at least it doesn't seem to matter much. An analysis of
London stock market data
showed that a hypothetical stock-trading population of agents with zero
intelligence - that is,
they place their trading orders at random - would reproduce pretty much
the same trends as all
those supposedly smart traders who do a lot of research and listen to
financial advisers on the
radio. In other words, the flux of bidding and asking prices for stocks
seems directed more by the
mere mechanisms of price formation than by any clever strategies chosen by
the traders, Santa Fe
Institute scientists concluded in a paper published online in September.
Makes you want to stop and
think before buying stocks. Or maybe not.
. Archimedes and Einstein would have voted for this one: When an object in
a fluid (say, a
submarine in an ocean) begins to move relativistically fast - that is,
close to the speed of light
- a paradox ensues. Einstein's special relativity theory says that such a
fast-moving object will
shrink (in the direction of motion), thereby becoming more dense, and
therefore sinking. However,
motion is relative, so an observer on the submarine might think the ocean
water is moving fast; the
water would therefore shrink and get more dense, so the submarine should
float. In Physical Review
D, Brazilian physicist George Matsas combined Archimedes' floating-bodies
principle with Einstein's
more comprehensive general theory of relativity to analyze the paradox.
The answer is, the
submarine sinks.
. In a series of papers posted on the Internet, German physicist Michael
Petri described a
hypothetical "holostar," a possible alternative to the accepted idea that
massive stars collapse to
make gravitational traps called black holes. Holostars would not crush
everything that falls into
them, like black holes, but would allow lots of internal activity. In
fact, objects flying around
inside holostars would appear to move away from each other at accelerating
rates, in much the way
that clusters of galaxies seem to be doing in the universe as a whole. The
apparent implication is
that the universe itself may merely be a big holostar.
And what's more, if that's true, the apparent acceleration of the universe
is not caused by "dark
energy," but merely by the properties of holostar space. In which case the
journal Science will
have to find some new discovery to keep winning its breakthrough of the
year award.
E-mail
tsiegfried@dallasnews.com
