Your DNA, the little rule book inside every cell that tells your body what to do and how to look, has led to the solving of a small mystery involving just how it is that a piano won’t fall when being lifted upstairs to a second-story apartment. Unless, of course, it’s starring in a silent [...]]]> by Richard

Your DNA, the little rule book inside every cell that tells your body what to do and how to look, has led to the solving of a small mystery involving just how it is that a piano won’t fall when being lifted upstairs to a second-story apartment. Unless, of course, it’s starring in a silent slapstick of black and white comedy and is destined to fall at just the last second and narrowly miss some people walking by. But that’s comedy. This is real life.

Seriously. A couple of physicist dudes were looking at DNA and wondering why it doesn’t unwind from its double-helix shape when it’s stretched. In fact, if you stretch a bit of DNA, it actually winds itself tighter in the direction of its helical twist. And that, oddly enough, got these scientists thinking about rope.

In a traditional rope, each individual strand is twisted as much as possible in one direction. The twisted strands are then wound together in a spiral shape called a helix, which itself rotates in the opposite direction. The interlocking of these twists and countertwists gives the rope strength so that when yanked, it does not unwind.

By plotting a rope’s length against the number of twistings in each strand, (Jakob Bohr and Kasper Olsen, physicists at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby) discovered that there is a maximum number of times each strand can be twisted — resulting in what they call the “zero-twist point” for the overall rope. A good rope is always in the zero-twist configuration.

Not only that, they also found that a rope, when it’s in the zero-twist point, will always be 68 percent shorter than its individual components. So, stronger, but shorter. Makes sense to me. What about to you aliens from the planet Flurm? Yeah, back there in the last row. What about you?

Physicist Henrik Flyvbjerg of the Technical University of Denmark, who was not on the research team but is familiar with the work, agrees: The rule of the zero-twist point is universal.

“If there is life on other planets in the solar systems, their rope makers must follow the same rules,” Flyvbjerg says.

I don’t know about you, but I think I feel a heavy-handed metaphor coming on. You know, something about family members being the individual strands and getting twisted up by the others in the family, joining together and becoming stronger by relying on the other strands. That sort of thing. I’m pretty sure you can figure this one out by yourselves.

If you can come up with a better, or at least not so clichéd, metaphor, I’d love to hear it in comments.

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‘Tis the season to start gulping down chocolates like they had been out of style for 63 years and you were trying to spark a revival, but no one was interested so you were downing chocolates by the handfull every second you were out of the house. Well, either that or it’s Valentine’s Day and [...]]]> by Richard

‘Tis the season to start gulping down chocolates like they had been out of style for 63 years and you were trying to spark a revival, but no one was interested so you were downing chocolates by the handfull every second you were out of the house. Well, either that or it’s Valentine’s Day and chocolate is the traditional gift of the holiday.

I bring good news to those who don’t keep up with the science. Turns out that chocolate might actually be good for you.

Great news. Well, for the wives at least. I mean, sure, I like chocolate, but it’s not something I’ll go out of my way to buy or even ask for. If I really wanted something sweet to celebrate a holiday, I’d just as soon order a cookie bouquet. Still, let’s hear it for flavonoids. Yeah, I know. It sounds like the invading aliens from some horrible 1950′s SF epic. But, no. They’re actually naturally-occurring compounds found in plant-based foods recognized as exuding certain health benefits. And they’re what makes chocolate good-ish for you.

Flavonoids provide important protective benefits to plants, such as in repairing damage and shielding from environmental toxins. When we consume plant-based foods rich in flavonoids, it appears that we also benefit from this “antioxidant” power.Antioxidants are believed to help the body’s cells resist damage caused by free radicals, formed by normal bodily processes such as breathing or environmental contaminants like cigarette smoke. When the body lacks adequate levels of antioxidants, free radical damage ensues, leading to increases in LDL-cholesterol oxidation and plaque formation on arterial walls.

Well, in dark chocolate at least. That’s the — you should pardon the expression — skinny so far as we know it. Dark chocolate, having more flavonoids, is better at promoting good health. Not only is it good for reducing damage caused by free radicals, it also has other supposed benefits:

All in all, not bad.

But what about all the fat? you ask. Well, it’s actually not that bad. See, the fat in dark chocolate is made up of three different kinds of fat and, it turns out, only 1/3 of the fat is the bad, saturated, kind of fat that hurts your arteries and heart.

So, let’s hear it for chocolate. In moderation of course. Like that ever works.

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I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that humans, homo sapiens, were not alone on this planet and, oddly enough, it’s true. Over the past million years, we’ve shared the planet with any number of near humans, called hominids. You probably know about some, such as Neanderthals. They’re pretty popular and we see them as [...]]]> by Richard

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that humans, homo sapiens, were not alone on this planet and, oddly enough, it’s true. Over the past million years, we’ve shared the planet with any number of near humans, called hominids. You probably know about some, such as Neanderthals. They’re pretty popular and we see them as pretty dumb.

What you might now know about, though, is a hominid species called the Boskop, for the town in South Africa where the first bones were found in 1912. See, the thing about this hominid is that it was smarter than humans. Much, much smarter.

The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

In addition to the huge melon, it turns out the Boskop people had another distinguishing feature: They had faces significantly smaller than humans. Basically, it would be like if you took a little dude’s face and plastered it on a big dude’s head.

Hmmm. Why does that sound so very familiar? Small bodies, large heads, small faces. Hmmm.

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:

“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

Yes, the Grays, little space aliens blamed for every surprise hemorrhoid in the rural south. Probing and all that, don’tcha know? Looks like we were visited by those little alien dudes, only they were natives of Earth and they went extinct thousands of years ago.

It’s a common misconception that evolution says we descended from apes. That’s not true. What it says is that both apes and men had, some time in the distant past, a common ancestor. Yet we humans keep seeing evolution as a process that consistently builds species better and better as they move forward toward the present, resulting in the pinacle of evolution: us. Humans.

Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.

There we go. Our alien overlords weren’t so very much alien, yeah? And, yet, they were. This kind of thing is why I love science.

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