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Stupid Science Questions 2

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10:25 / 02.02.05

Thank you! -I certainly didn't know that before, so all my 'Blaaaaaargh, I can almost remember it' posturing was clearly nonsense.

15:31 / 14.02.05

Is there evidence or reason to believe that any animals, other than humans, realise that sex makes babies? Does anyone know roughly when humans are thought to have worked this out?

07:15 / 16.02.05

The only theory that I've heard suggested that humans—at least, male humans—probably figured it out around the time that we took to domesticating animals. I'm afraid I don't know how credible this theory is, beyond sounding fairly reasonable.

10:39 / 16.02.05

I'm remembering something from my 1st year anthroplogy course about the Trobrianders and their ideas of conception. Having just googled them I found this from Malinowski's "The Sexual Life of Savages":
"The idea that it is solely and exclusively the mother who builds up the child's body, the man in no way contributing to this formation, is the most important factor in the legal system of the Trobrianders. Their views on the process of procreation, coupled with the certain mythological and animistic beliefs, affirm, without doubt or reserve, that the child is of the same substance as its mother, and that between the father and the child there is no bond of physical union whatsoever."
Though this doesn't answer Smoothly's question abbout animals it shows that some human cultures didn't necessarily make the connection between sex and birth.

13:51 / 16.02.05

That's really interesting, Phyrephox. And I gather that the Trobianders farm, but have no real involvement with animal husbandry (I love that word), so that gels with what Tommy says.
Making the connection between sex and pregnancy really isn't at all obvious, is it, unless you control the access of males to females in large enough groups of enough species over a long enough period to notice a trend emerging. But once you do make that link, it must be quite the Eureka! moment. And although it might not be the easiest causal connection to make it, once it's made it's simple to communicate.
Which makes me wonder... Humans have achieved pretty impressive standards of communication with other animals. I'm thinking of Koko the signing gorilla, for example. Could we relate this simple but deeply profound fact to other animals? Would they then be able to share this new, scientific knowledge around within their own culture? I wonder what the impact would be.
Not really a question, I know, I just wonder to what extent the hard-won discoveries made by our over-sized brains could be shared with those without the wherewithal to do the intellectual legwork... what the consequences, ethics might be, etc...

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

18:13 / 16.02.05

King Charles I gave William Harvey access to his deer, to do experiments into animal husbandry.

Harvey set up a series of simple experiments, keeping male and female deer far apart, keeping them close together but separated, keeping them in the same space... etc. in order to see if there was a direct causal link between sex and pregnancy.

As an aside, the experiments confused matters even further, as Roe Deer are one of the few species with highly variable periods of gestation.

Anyway, wouldn't this imply that there was some uncertainty even into the 17th Century in Europe?

Obviously people understood that there could be no pregnancy without sex at all - the Bible goes on about Virgin Births and the like. But the fact that Harvey was conducting this sort of experiment implies that the idea of one pregnancy being caused by on round of sexual intercourse wasn't concrete even then.

22:57 / 16.02.05

Among Bonobonos the mother is the males first sexual partner, but as soon as he's sexually mature he's not allowed intercourse with her anymore. This might be an indication that they "know" that incest is "bad" as they're our nearest relatives, but it might just as well be pure instinct.

10:10 / 17.02.05

Bit more on the Trobrianders thing -there is a connection between sex and babies, just not between sex and conception. As I remember it, the woman goes out to sea to recieve the spirit of her ancestors (ie, concieve) and from then on the husband has sex with her in order to impress his image on the child. So whilst the child is all the woman's, the man is involved in the child insofar as he has had sex with the mother.

Thought I'd throw that into the mix -I actually read some of Argonauts quite recently with reference to a Head Shop topic (but after starting to post decided that it wasn't really relevant)

11:42 / 17.02.05

Google Answers has dealt with this in the past. Some interesting stuff in the links leading off that page, but the basic conclusion is that the connection was after the adoption of animal husbandry 10,000-odd years ago - and some interesting but vague speculation that it might have led to the decline of mother-goddess worship.

As for the confusion over deer: I think it might have taken a lot longer to realize that animals reproduce exactly the same way - Aristotle seems pretty well informed about the human reproductive process, rather less so about animals , where he seems to have realised that sex is one way of making babies, but not that it's the only way. I wouldn't be surprised if it had taken until the Enlightenment for anyone to carefully re-examine his theories.

Smoothly: Interesting question on the effect it would have on animal "societies". The comparison that leaps to my mind is the invention of the Pill (which is obviously the other way round, but it's of similar magnitude). Mechanistic behavioural models hold that animals want nothing more than to reproduce, and are driven to copulate whenever possible. If those models are accurate (and assuming animals could grasp the notion of causality at all), I wonder if they'd be relieved to learn that one actually does lead to the other, or frustrated that they're programmed to behave that way?

As for the Trobrianders, does anyone have a read on whether their supposed attitudes might be a convenient social fiction aimed at avoiding potentially disastrous paternity disputes?

20:31 / 17.02.05

Thanks for these responses.
It's almost hard to believe that higher animals haven't made this connection, isn't it? We certainly talk about them as if they had. But like Robot says, it demands quite a sophisticated appreciation of causality. To connect a birth - or even pregnancy - with an act that took place months earlier is quite a leap.
There's stuff here about instinct that's relevant to the Children thread in the Head Shop, and I've now got an itch to start a thread on incest too. Lots of food for thought. Cheers.

Phex: Dorset Doom

18:46 / 19.02.05

New SSQ: What's the deal with women's periods syncing up? This is something I've heard of a few times: apparently if women live together for a long time, eventually their periods will begin to synchronise. How does this work exactly? How is the 'order' to sync up a monthly cycle transmitted from one woman to another?

20:12 / 21.02.05

Sorry to jump back but:
Now, when we measure the wavefunction (say poking the particle with detector) we will get either Wa or Wb, or Wc etc... We never get any 'average' W for any one measurement. We always get exactly Wa or Wb or Wc.

Can we get a measure of every possible answer?
I mean, if you point a whole bunch of different detectors at the same wavelength, each one calibrated to look for a different value, could you get a complete picture of the wavelength?
Is that a spectacularly stupid question?
(Do I get a prize?)

10:41 / 22.02.05

Phex, it's all to do with the hormones apparently.

03:19 / 23.02.05

thermal inertia

someone once explained that this is why the hottest day and the coldest days are not going to be the longest and shortest days (solstices [solstii?!!]) - s'why late summer is hottest and late winter likewise...

anyone shed any light on this? (i love the phrase, though!)

10:40 / 23.02.05

Hi Astro,

I assume it means that the atmosphere takes time to heat up.

The inertia bit means that it takes time to heat and then carries on heating even after the hottest part of the year.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

13:10 / 23.02.05

hmm... this thread is becoming a little fiddly to read, so I'll mess it up some more.

Warewulf: No, not really.

When you measure this quantum superposition, you only ever get ONE result. So if you indeed had a detector or a set of detectors that could potentially measure every possible result, at each measurement, you would only ever have one result per measurement.

The result of measurement doesn't depend on the detector. I'll try and do an example:

I have a photon detector, that only detects red photons.

My quantum system in a superposition can emit red photons, green photons or pink photons. For instance, this superposition emits a photon when it is hit with a hammer. So let's say I point my photon detector at it - it will detect red photons when I hit it. But sometimes when I hit the superposition system the detector will register nothing - this is beacuse sometimes the system emits a pink photon or a green one when it is hit, and this detector cannot see them.

So lets say I now get a set of photon detectors, a red one, pink one and a green one. If I then point them all at the superposition system, I will detect EITHER a red photon, OR a green one OR a pink one each time I hit the system with my hammer.

Because the system I am hitting with the hammer is a superposition, there is no way of me knowing which colour photon it will emit. I can only ever work out the probability that a photon of a certain colour is emitted.

So there is no way of knowing which state the superposition is in until you have measured it.

So, pointing a detector or set of detectors which can measure every single possible outcome does not remove the problem that we can only yield one outcome per measurement.

22:32 / 23.02.05

I don't know if this can really be considered a science question or not, I guess it's sort of a medical question.

Let's say you have a herion addict who goes clean and stays that way for a couple of years. Then he gets into this horrible accident and they give him morphine (or some other opiate) for the pain. Would this situation inevitably cause him to revert to fall off the wagon, as it were?

odd jest on horn

22:46 / 23.02.05

I've heard, and confirmed by googling, that morphine is only addictive when the amount one is given, supercedes the amount needed to make the pain go away or to be lessened at least.

I'm not sure about clean heroin addicts though.

I don't really have time to expand upon this subject right now, though, and there are peoble here probably more qualified to do so than me, anyway.

20:06 / 24.02.05

My utterly unqualified guess is that yes, they'll be off the wagon -- although for a good reason.

My understanding is that (according to AA) there's no such thing as "recovered alcoholics," only alcoholics who haven't had a drink in a long time. And that this (according to more recent neurochemical studies) is how addiction works -- an addict is someone with a dopamine receptor system that works a little differently than the rest of us. They're hardwired to seek out chemical rewards, in a way.

I'm not really sure how the opiates work into this model of addiction, because my understanding is that they're basically direct substitutes for neurotransmitters, so the sensitivity/activity of one set of receptors might not matter so much. The opiates might create addicts who aren't "real" addicts, if you follow. I don't know if this is so, and it seems to get really close to chicken/egg territory.

Anyway, if opiates work like liquor does, and your definition of "addict" matches up with AA's, then you're off the wagon as soon as you get that (therapeutic) shot of morphine.

09:14 / 25.02.05

Topical snow question!

Okay, how about this one. I remember people saying that there were no two snowflakes alike. Like fingerprints.

Hmmm. How can anyone be so sure? I mean, there is millions of tons of it in the world. No-one's checked them all - especially when you factor in the time scale of the history of the world.

So, what's it all about then?

11:09 / 25.02.05

I think it might be that there are so many factors involved in the development of a snowflake (where it is in the cloud, where the cloud is, how quickly it freezes, where it falls, etc) that it's very improbable that any two would be the same, to the extent that it can be theorised that each one is unique. I'm not sure though...

odd jest on horn

13:28 / 25.02.05

snow

Lets make a *lot* of assumptions. A snow flake is 3 mm in radius. It has a perfect reflected sixfold symmetry. It has a mandlebrot dimension of approximately 1.5 (This takes care of the fact that we need it to be connected). A snowflake lives in a plane. To be called different from another snowflake, there has to be a patch of 0.05 * 0.05 mm that is different from the same patch in another snowflake.

So we've got 2^(3^1.5*PI/(6*2*0.05*0.05)) different configurations. That's 6*10^163. A googol and then some :-P
This would have to count as the lowest limit.

How many snowflakes have there been since the earth was formed? Let's assume that snow has been falling for 4000 million years, and the precipitation is 3 m per year over the whole globe. I think this can be safely said to be the upper limit.

So we've got 4 * 10^9 * (4/3*PI*(R+3)^3 - 4/3*PI*R^3)) cubic meters of snow, where R is the radius of the Earth. If we now assume that the volume of a snowflake is approximately 3^1.5*PI*0.1*10^-(3*3) cubic meters (I.e. we still use the mandelbrot dimension for the area and then assume a 0.1 mm thickness) and divide, than we've got 1.0 * 10^34 snowflakes that have fallen on the earth since the beginning of snow.

So 6*10^163 / 10^34 = 6*10^129

So that's still less than a 1 in googol chance for a snowflake to have been the same as another snowflake since beginning.

Even if we take the number of visible stars in the universe, assume they've got 10 snowy planets which have approximately 100 times as much area as the earth and have been snowing on since the big bang, and have ten times as much precipitation we've got.

Ok that's 7*10^22 * 10 * 100 * 3 (3 is for the age of the universe, ompared to the age of earth) or 2 * 10^26 which we can multiply with.

That still doesn't get it below 1 in googol chance that there have ever been two snowflakes alike.

So there we have it..

odd jest on horn

13:46 / 25.02.05

On the other hand, the fact that they are more less symmetric, might suggest that they don't grow all that randomly, and that the changable factors are much less than the number of possible different configurations. hmmmm.... I'll have to think about that..

Just to divert your attention, did you know that there are thousands of people with the exact same number of hairs on their heads as you?

14:40 / 25.02.05

You might be interested in this column from the Straight Dope tackling the snowflake question.

It goes through all the googol stuff, but then the final footnote has this to say:

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to read in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that matching snow crystals were recently discovered by Nancy Knight of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The crystals in question admittedly aren't flakes in the usual sense but rather hollow hexagonal prisms. They are also not absolutely identical, but come on, if you insist on getting down to the molecular level, nothing's identical. They're close enough for me.

So, there's that.

23:34 / 15.03.05

I've got an electromagnet running on AC power. If I understand all this physics business, the polarity of my magnet is changing as the current reverses, correct? Now, how do I go about setting the speed at which the current reverses (thereby setting the frequency of polarity changes)? Is this even possible? Would it be far easier to switch over to DC?

I'm assuming this answer will involve fancy electronics terms, so please keep it simple and dumb (I wish I knew everything about electronics, but sadly I know next to nothing, except how to start small fires).

Thanks in advance.

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

07:01 / 16.03.05

Yes, the AC means that the polarity of the magnet will change.

If it's plugged into the mains, you will have it switching over at 50Hz (60Hz in the US I believe), i.e the frequency of AC mains.

If you want a different switching rate, you'll need a different power source, so a high current frequency generator. I have no idea where you'd buy one of those, but you can get them in labs.

17:21 / 18.03.05

This is a question that passed my mind when studying the topic of nerve cells during Biology lately. Considering the fact that my teacher doesn't know very much Biology outside of the scope of the syllabus and isn't very willing to answer question that aren't about his precious biology course, I've decided to pose the question to the denizens of Barbelith:

All nerve cells except for those in the spinal column and brain can repair themselves. In these areas, scar tissue forms, preventing reparation to occur. My question is, why does this happen? Wouldn't it be far more beneficial to the species if scar tissue didn't form on the nerve cells of the spinal column and brain?

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

20:37 / 18.03.05

I guess it would. The current human form isn't perfect, it can still evolve.

My best guess is that injuries to the brain or the spinal column were so often fatal in the past that any ability to repair these systems is unlikely to be passed down the generations.

Whereas injuries to limbs and other parts with nerves in them are common and non-lethal - so the ability to repair normal nerve tissue is going to help the chances of reproduction; natural selection kicks in.

04:14 / 31.03.05

what makes my urine smell so wonderful after eating asparagus?

and what percentage of people have this experience?

17:25 / 02.04.05

Apparently, the body converts a compound in the Asparagus to a metabolite (methyl mercaptan) which is what makes it smell bad and statistically it's apparently about 40% of people who experience this. I can't abide Asparagus so I don't know if I'm in that 40%. If you ask me it's just another reason to avoid the thing.

From studentbmj.com: 'Allison and McWhirter first showed that the ability to produce methyl mercaptan after eating asparagus is not universal. Some people would produce detectable amounts in the urine after eating only three or four spears of asparagus, while others would produce none even after eating as much as one pound (0.45 kg) of asparagus. In their random sample of 115 human subjects, they demonstrated that this ability occurred in about 40% of the population.'

11:26 / 06.04.05

Sugapuffs do the same thing.

13:09 / 11.04.05

Where does everything that gets sucked into a black hole go?

14:29 / 11.04.05

[quote]Where does everything that gets sucked into a black hole go?[/quote]

I could be wrong but I think from what I have read (not a lot)that once matter is pulled in the black hole it is ripped apart into atomic levels or sub-atomic levels. Then according to one theory it comes out of white holes.

23:18 / 11.04.05

here is a bit of info on white holes... seems they are real but don't exist - or don't exist but are real, or something... unrool!

so where does all the sucked stuff go? well, pen lids go through to another universe and are replaced in ours by wire coat hangers.

01:53 / 12.04.05

ok, so what I gathered (probably erroneously) is that once matter passes through a blackhole space/time event it is pushed out the otherside of a white hole... but moving backwards in space/time. Therefore the Whitehole can be said to exist and not exist... ??? Can I be reading that right?

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