Well, I came back to delete this post 19 hours after writing it, realizing I had fallen into exactly the sort of oppositional mire between Creation and evolution that I think should not exist (see Day 5). Thanks for stopping by, though. I hope you check out some of the other science posts while you’re here!
Doctors are sounding the alarm about a shortage of radioactive materials used to guide surgery and examine medical conditions like heart disease and cancer.
The shortage is fallout from worldwide efforts to restrict the production of nuclear bombs. As more reactors are abandoned around the globe in anti-proliferation efforts, supplies for medical radionuclides are also drying up. But one Canadian doctor says he knows how to keep imaging people’s ailments without making new material for nuclear war.
Adult solitary phase locust; photo by Tom Fayle.
The same chemical that helps turn people and lab mice into crack addicts may also cause locusts to swarm.
A team of researchers from the UK and Australia has discovered that serotonin seems to trigger the swarms of desert locusts, devastating crop pests that span a fifth of the globe.
Serotonin has been found in every multi-cellular organism on the planet. The neurotransmitter is associated with euphoria, agitation and — when it’s lacking — depression in people, which is why many anti-depression drugs act to boost the chemical in the human brain. A serotonin reward leads laboratory mice to hammer cocaine levers like little fiends. And, according to the new research, when serotonin levels triple in the brains of locusts, the insects change from harmless loners into pillaging swarms with billions of individual members.
“It’s really interesting,” study co-author Malcolm Burrows, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, said in a press release. “Here we have a solitary and lonely creature, the desert locust. But just give them a little serotonin, and they go and join a gang!”
The comment arrived on Day 2 of my 100-day effort, and I now regret getting so angry that I deleted it. My friend, posing as an anonymous reader, quoted my own line: “The scientific process is robust; its only weakness is human error,” and wrote:
“Yikes, what if we humans erred right at the beginning, in our conception and formation of the scientific method itself? An important question that I raise here only rhetorically.”
Preposterous, I thought. Ridiculous!
Delete.
You might say I treasure the scientific method. Apparently I stand ready to defend it tooth and nail — or at least with the “delete” key. But why?
People living in arid climates have taken great pains to adapt, by re-using their wash water and collecting rainfall for secondary purposes, like gardening. The practice, tuned to a fine art in places like Arizona, is widely accepted as a conservation strategy — alleviating the need to irrigate with drinking water — and a way to deal with drought.
But what if another drought-afflicted creature also benefits, and then contributes to outbreaks of disease?
