Emergence

Termite mound: Example of an emergence system.
(borrowed from getintravel.com)

The book I read for book club this month touched on something called emergence. And because it's so interesting to me I thought instead of trying to incorporate it into my book review I'd write a separate blog about.
Emergence has come up briefly in a couple other books I've read recently, and I'm pretty fascinated by it at the moment.(Like I was with strange attractors a couple years ago;) But what is it? To borrow the definition from Wikipedia emergence is:
"...the way complex systems and patters arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple reactions."
What this means is that in many systems patterns will begin to emerge that could not be predicted beforehand by looking at any single component of the whole system. Saying it another way, emergence is the production of a pattern or a complex systems by many individual components that could never create anything on their own. Moreover, the system cannot work unless all of the components are in place. It's slightly more complicated than just that, since to create emergent properties a specific amount of energy must be added to the system, but I'll try to explain that below. This is a really cool thing, so I'm going to take a minute to give a couple examples.
Sand ripples: If you look at the components that form sand ripples in the bottom of a lake or ocean you have: Water, wave action (i.e. your energy source), and sand grains. If you  look closely at a sand grain, or a molecule of water, it is unlikely that you could predict how they could ever organize themselves into coherent rows of ripples. But they do. The thing is, they only do it when the right amount of energy (i.e. waves) are present. Too little energy and they will not form. Too much (think big crashing storm waves) and the ripples will be destroyed. But just the right amount, and suddenly sand grains can organize themselves into ripple patterns. Cool right?
Termite nests: This works for hives as well. The components to these systems are earth and millions of individual insects. The energy to the system is how much work each individual can do. Now if you took a single termite and inspected it closely you'd never guess that it could build a mound twenty feet tall. It doesn't even know how to "build"! And you'd be right, a single termite can't build a mound. Even several hundred couldn't, but a few million can, and do. A bunch of individually simple termites can build gigantic mounds taller than a giraffe!
The human brain: Same thing. Your components are individual neurons, and of course the energy comes from the food you eat. If you look at a single neuron you can see how it basically works, but it can't create complex thought...or even simple thought for that matter. All it can do is send and receive chemical signals. You can't make a "sort of brain" with a few hundred neurons. You need a whole skull full of them, all connected together, to be able to think, and learn and know. A brain is not a neuron, a brain is an intricately connected assemblage of many neurons that when acting together produce thoughts and regulate body functions.
So why is this important and interesting to me? This subject of emergence is critical for the transition from non-living to living. The primary reason being that it explains how the evolution of life was able to occur and not conflict with the second law of thermodynamics (i.e.entropy of a system never decreases). To be clear, technically nothing gets around the second law, so ultimately everything does increase in entropy. But small isolated systems like termite mounds, or shallow shore lines, or human brains, can under the right circumstances, for a time, produce amazing and complex things. Using only specific quantities of energy, and relatively simple parts amazing patterns and functions quite literally emerge! I think that is so cool.
Anyway, I'm probably not explaining this super well, but it's my hope that if you find this subject interesting, you will look it up and do some reading on your own! I am sure there are authors out there who have done a much better job than me. On is Dr. Robert Hazen who wrote the book Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin that I read for book club this month.

A Universe From Nothing

Last month's book for book club was called A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. It was an interesting book, one of those astrophysics type where half of what you read you can't quite wrap your brain around, and the other half seems like it should be physically impossible, but apparently it's not.
Our book club was undecided about whether they loved it, but we are a pretty critical bunch, and I think over all it was a pretty good book. And ,since it was fairly short, I'd recommend it to those of you that are interested in the history of the search for dark matter and energy, and the origin of the (our) universe as well.
One of the biggest questions in cosmology is what produced the Big Bang? Most of us generally think in terms of cause and effect, and it only makes sense to us that if there was a Big Bang it had to come from somewhere, and be made out of something that was there before...only it's turning out that may not be true.
(See, this is what I mean about seeming physically impossible!) It certainly isn't true on a quantum scale where in the empty space between quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) particles pop into and out of "thin air" all the time! (The photo below was borrowed from a website called omnispace.org and if you click on the link below the image you can see a gif file animation that's pretty amazing!) That was one of the most interesting things I learned from this book. That empty space isn't really empty at all. WTF? Right?!

Click here to see animation!

So the idea is, if it can happen at a small scale, then why not on a scale the size of the universe? The only thing that seems to matter is that the total energy of the universe must always remain at zero, which apparently does.That might seem counter-intuitive too, but it's not once you begin to think about it. Stephen Hawking likened it (loosely) to making a hill out of dirt. In order to do that you must dig a hole of equal mass. So even though the hill might be high, it is balanced out by a hole equally deep. You are not bringing anything into the system or taking anything out of it either, you are just sort of shuffling it around. Yet still you appear to "make" a hill where there once was none. And so it might be with the universe. There was nothing needed, no outside cause to make the Big Bang, as long as the total energy remained at zero.
Now you might be thinking "Well, where does..."dirt" come from? Where does the system that totals zero energy come from?" And that's where it gets a little tricky. Because maybe the answer is that it comes from nowhere. Just like the particles and antiparticles that appear between quarks, so might our universe be. How could that happen you wonder? No one is exactly sure yet, but many think they are close. And it's all based on solid science, and observation (which the book goes into detail on, things like the Cosmic Background Radiation, and gravitational lensing etc...)
Part of it though, depends on which theory you buy. And each involves ever more complex physics . There is M-Theory and multiverses, string theory and so on, all of which can only truly be understood through some pretty hair-raising mathematics (and so becomes quite difficult for a lay-person such as myself to understand). It also depends on how you think the universe will end: with a"Big Crunch" or a "Big Freeze"? Will the universe collapse in on itself and form a giant black hole encompassing everything? Or will all the galaxies keep moving farther and farther apart until space cools, and all the starts die out? Does it even matter? Well, certainly not for us, or our grandchildren, or the rest of the human race, or any other living thing on our planet, or our sun, or our own home-sweet Milky Way galaxy. But for some distant future galaxy and  civilization it might. Krauss says in a mere trillion years (if the universe keeps expanding as it is now) those aliens will look up at the night sky and only see the stars from their own galaxy. If they develop the technology to gaze father out into the universe they will see....absolutely nothing.

The Birds and the Bees...Literally.

Chapter 2 in The X in Sex

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a book called "The X in Sex". Well, I finished it. And I know I say this about almost every book I read (and it's true!) but this was so interesting! Plus it was well written, and even funny in parts....I mean who can't appreciate a chapter entitled "The Duke of Kent's Testicles?" It's even more amazing to me because the subject of the book (minus the portions about testicles of course) is actively, at this very moment, doing all the things that I am reading about...inside every cell in my body. It's weird feeling to learn about my insides, and understand myself in such a way. I mean, there are processes going on in my body right now that...even with the aid of a book, I'll probably never understand. But somehow it's still me. How could I not know myself?!? Ha ha...It's just so weird...and awesome. I love it.

I learned so many cool things from this book that I am afraid if I try to cram them all into one blog it will be...sort of long and unfocused. So instead I am going to try to break it down into a few segments.

But before we start talking about the familiar males and females, X and Y and all of that, I thought it might be worth while to go into a little more depth on the multiple ways a living thing can create progeny. Bear with me if it seems a little redundant to the last post about this book. I'm going to try to be a little more specific.

Sex happens to be the one us mammals and many reptiles and birds use, but it is by no means the only (or even most efficient) way to produce offspring. And some of them are pretty incredible, at least as strange as our own way. As most of you probably know reproduction is broadly divided into sexual and asexual.
Asexual can be broken down into parthenogenisis, binary fission, budding, fragmentation and many other, but more obscure methods.
Fission and budding are mostly accomplished by bacteria, some viruses, and plants, and while they are interesting in their own right (and have many advantages), I'd much rather focus on parthenogenic species, because they are just so neat. They are animals that can reproduce without a male (or an opposite sex). Primarily they are mother/daughter species (although some can produce males once in a while, or be all male species) where the genetic material from the mother is passed directly and completely to the daughters. The classic pathenogenic species are aphids. But science has now discovered that some bees, lizards, hammer head sharks, Komodo dragons, and boa constrictors also reproduce this way!
When we move onto sexual reproduction things might become more familiar because there are boys and girls, but the methods of producing the XX/XY or ZZ/ZW (in birds and reptiles) can be totally foreign still! Besides our "normal" way of reproducing there are hermaphrodite species, like snails and many amphibians that can have both male and female sex organs at the same time (and fertilize their own eggs) or have the ability to change from male to female during their life cycle. Some species of frogs, when the ratio of male to female gets disrupted, can convert many of it's population to the less dominant sex to balance things back out again!
Or there is what is called "external fertilization" in contrast to our internal method. Salmon do this. A female will lay her eggs in the water, and a male will come by later and fertilize the eggs, and all the mating happens outside the body of the female.
Even when we finally get to talking about sexual reproduction where there are distinct males and females and the females are internally inseminated by males, the process can be wildly unfamiliar.
Humans (and all mammals) use genes to determine sex. XX and you have a girl XY and it's a boy. But there are many sexual species (with males and females) who don't use genes to determine sex! What do I mean? Well, here are two examples.
Bonellia is a kind of worm that lives in the ocean. They have males and females, but it is not genes that determine the sex of the offspring, rather it is the environment. The female creates sexless larvae that float around in the ocean. Eventually they drop to the ocean floor, and it is here that they decide what sex they will become. If the larvae falls and there are no other Bonillia around then it will become a female and root. If the larvae falls and there are other Bonillia around then it becomes a male, burrows into the side of the larger female, and essentially becomes a symbiotic...testicle! (Angler fish, as I mentioned before, also have a symbiotic relationship with each other.)
A second example is that of the Nile Crocodiles.They don't use genes or environment to determine sex, they use temperature! The sex of the baby crocks is determined by the temperature of the eggs during the middle of the third incubation period. If the temperature is above 34.5 degrees C or below 31.7 degrees C then the offspring will be female. But if the temperature falls within that 4 degree window, the babies will be male!

Often times we view the natural world with the idea that it is somehow perfectly designed, that there is an methodical simplicity in it, but I disagree. Especially when it comes to reproduction.  It seems to me life will try anything and everything. Males/females, females/females, males/males, male-females, males-then-females, non-sexed to sexed, non-sexual, clones, spores...etc. It reminds me of the game Boggle, where you use a discrete number of  letters to make up as many words as you can. So life has done with reproduction. Using the building blocks available, life tried every combination it seems,without bias. And the ones we are left with are the ones that worked better than the other possible combinations that are no longer with us.
Our human sexual reproductive ways have many advantages (primarily genetic diversity) and it is truly amazing how our bodies reproduce, but our strategy is far from perfect, and far from being the only way to get things done. And there are many weird, dramatic, and often unfortunate concequences embedded in our chosen methods. I will begin to discuss those in the next post.
But the take away point here is that there are pros and cons to every method of reproduction. None is perfect, none is flawless, and most of them are not even ideal. But the one thing they have in common (and the only thing they need to be viable forms of reproduction) is that they do in fact create survivors. You and I are one of them, and so is every other living thing on earth. Groovy. Yay for reproduction!

Paedophryne amauensis

Paedophryne amauensis is the smallest (and I might add the cutest) frog in the world...at least that we know of. Don't you just love nature. Just when you think you've seen it all, something new and unexpected appears! Just look at this little guy! I mean he makes a dime look spacious!

Glowing Kittens

Glowing Kittens! (image from discovermagazine.com)

        Well, it was only a matter of time before scientists "made" kittens that glow as well as puppies. These adorable little guys are being used to study feline HIV (which apparently can also infect monkeys). The virus was inserted into the eggs of the mother to see whether the kittens would be immune to feline HIV afterward. In order to tell if the virus actually made the transfer it was tagged (i.e. inserted into the virus) with a bioluminescent gene from jellyfish that would glow under a black light. The 'glow' was used to confirm that the virus indeed made it into the kittens, which is obviously a necessary control on the experiment. Isn't that ingenious? Oh science, you've done it again!

Christmas List: Item 3

Borrowed from the Associate Press

A glow in the dark PUPPY!!!!!! Yes! This is real! Isn't it adorable? This one glows red, and there is another that glows green. The set of two would would be the PERFECT addition to the holidays! Watch the video here.

(Actually, they fluoresce under a black light because some scientists in Korea replaced a protein with one that glows. RAD!)

Crop Circles

Most of us have seen the movie Signs with Mel Gibson (for those of you who have not consider yourselves among the lucky few), and have heard about the mysterious crop circles that pop up every now and again across the globe. We've also heard many speculate that they may be the work of aliens, although a plausible motive has never been discovered. I always thought the idea of extraterrestrials making crop circles was silly. Like a bunch aliens would come all the way here, hide behind the moon, then after dark sprint down to the planet, graffiti some English dude's corn field, then race back to their home planet. What for? So they could definitively say that fields of wheat are a great medium for finger painting?
Anyway, I stumbled upon an article that explains crop circles without invoking ET. And while you'd think it would have to be a less interesting scenario, it isn't. So what could this new theory be? Why stoned wallabies of course! Yes, you read correctly. Apparently humans aren't the only animals that appreciate opium, (in addition to wallabies, reindeer were cited...I knew I loved reindeer!) and I guess their favorite thing to do when high is to walk in circles...I am not sure how much research has actually been done on this subject, or how many wild wallabies there are roaming around Great Brittan, but I find it both interesting and hilarious, and a nice alternative to aliens. For the full article click here.

Here Jelly, Jelly!

Lion Mane Jellyfish

Another under water behemoth I came across on my reading of The Universe Below is the Lion-Mane Jellyfish, the largest jelly in the world. And holy mackerel, is it ever! I think I'd die of shock if I ever came face to....er...um...blobby head with one of these guys. I wonder if they could eat a human? Oh my gosh! I just thought of an awesome idea! Wouldn't that be a cool alternative to being buried in a coffin, or cremated, to instead be fed to a giant jellyfish? I like it. What do you think?

Siphonophores

Photo borrowed fro the Monterey Bay Aquarium Website

I am reading a really interesting book called The Universe Below by William Broad. It was a random thrift store find, but totally worth the $1.50 I paid for it.
Anyway, one of the strange creatures that I discovered on my undersea travels are things called a siphonophores. I am fairly versed in at least the basic genera of the oceans, but when I came across these guys I had no idea anything like them even existed, and they are so weird and cool I just had to share!
The most well known siphonophores are Portugese Man-O-War (I thought they were a kind of jelly fish, and while they are related, they aren't the same thing), that float on the surface of the water and sting tourists as they wade in the ocean on vacation. But most siphonophores live in the middle of the water column, eating whatever happens to get in their path. They are gelatinous, and generally clear to opaque white. Most of them bioluminesce in dark water, some even flash red (in addition to the normal blue and green) to attract fish. Some are as long as 40 meters, and may have several stomachs and hundreds of thread-like tentacles trailing behind trolling for snacks.While they generally appear as one organism, usually they are a floating colony of many individuals, all of which were produced by the same fertilized egg.

Photo borrowed from siphonophores.com

Anyway check out this video on YouTube of a giant siphonophore. (You can find more links to videos if you do a search, but this was the best one.) Or you can read about them on Wikipedia.

What in the...?

I saw this thing driving to work yesterday. I have no idea what it is, but it goes as fast as a car. Anybody seen one of these before?

The L-Train. I wanna ride!

So I just watched this incredible video of a 5 course gourmet meal that was served on the L-train of the New York subway system! Each course was brought onto the train at different stops, and all the food was strategically prepared ahead of time. It's totally the coolest thing I've seen on the internet in a while. Check it out! Get the full story and video HERE.

Holy Cow!

I found this article (and this amazing photo) while cruising the internet the other day. I didn't realize cows could be so dexterous! LOL! Who needs horses? For the full article please visit the original site!

There's a Championship for Everything

Just randomly found the World Beard and Mustache Championship website and thought you should take a look. It's definitely worth a couple minutes to peruse their website, and see whats "hot" and what's not (to be honest, it's hard to tell). On the one hand so much creativity, on the other so much....hair.

Strange But True Illnesses...

I have been slacking on my postings over the holiday, but not on my reading! Hopefully I will get caught up this coming week. Anyway over the last month or so I have come across some interesting illnesses in the books I'm reading and I thought I'd share a few of the stranger ones with you:

Micropsia: A condition where a person sees everything much smaller than it actually is, making them feel (or believe) they are becoming larger. Macropsia is the opposite.
Lycanthropy: A mental illness where a person believes that they have been transformed into an animal (usually a wolf, but not always) and behave accordingly.
Prosopagnosia: Also called face blindness is the inability of a person to recognize people by looking at their face, including friends and relatives

Beer in Bad Taste?

If there ever was an appropriate use of "WTF" this is it: Limited edition bottled beer brewed by Brew Dog that sells for over 700 British pounds a bottle and comes in it's own authentic squirrel koozie. WTF!?! Their blog says that all of the furry animals were roadkill, and not pumped full of b-b's or anything before becoming a jacket for a beer bottle. I am sure the fact that it was shoveled off of a highway would make me feel better about drinking beer out of a squirrel, if I ever found myself in such a situation.
I must admit it does help me feel less bad about the fact that I find it hilarious. Can you imagine watching someone drinking out of it? It would look like they were squeezing the puke right out of the little guys, or about to bite their head off maybe...either way worthy of a serious double take. I almost feel bad for finding it so funny. What do you think? Is this beer in bad taste? For more pics and weird stuff check out the Brew Dog Blog.