agnieszka biskup — writer & editor

NASA reported last week that it has finally lost contact with its Pioneer 10 spacecraft. Launched in 1972, the craft had been in service for more than 30 years. Pioneer was the first probe to pass through the asteroid belt, make direct observations of Jupiter, and pass Pluto’s orbit. As Earth’s first emissary into deep space, it carried a gold plaque describing what humans look like, a map showing Earth’s location, and the date its mission began. On Jan. 22, Pioneer sent its last, weak signal to Earth. Since then, further attempts to contact the craft have been unsuccessful. It is believed that Pioneer’s radioisotope power source has decayed, and that it doesn’t have enough power to send additional transmissions. At last contact, Pioneer was 7.6 billion miles from Earth, coasting in the general direction of Aldebaran, a star some 68 light years away. It will take the craft some two million years to reach it.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 3/04/2003.

Perhaps you’ve heard of astroporn, those gorgeous, glowing images of planets and galaxies and pillars of gas found on Web sites like Astronomy Picture of the Day (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html). But what if you’re looking for something, say, a bit more intimate? What if your tastes run a wee bit smaller than the universe? Rejoice, because microporn exists. too. The Protein Data Bank has its own Molecule of the Month collection, illustrated by David S. Goodsell, an assistant professor of molecular biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, at http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/molecules/molecule_list.html. At last, you’ll be able to see insulin and serum albumin in all their naked glory. Or perhaps you’d prefer to gaze at bacteriophage phiX174 or the p53 Tumor Suppressor? Each illustration includes an understandable and clear introduction to the molecule’s structure and function, as well as a discussion of its importance to human health and welfare. Even if you’re not into molecular biology, you’ll find that small can be beautiful, too.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 2/25/2003.

Mungo Man, Australia’s oldest known human remains, is 20,000 years younger than previously thought, according to James Bowler of the University of Melbourne and colleagues in the Feb. 20 Nature. Mungo Man was discovered at Lake Mungo in New South Wales in 1974, and though his age has been debated for some time, the most recent estimate put it at 60,000 years. Bowler amassed a team of experts from all over Australia to achieve a final consensus on Mungo Man’s age. Using multiple methods, including an analysis of the sand and soil from the burial site, and four separate dating laboratories, the team came up with a new age of 40,000 years. The previous date was often given out as a serious challenge to the “Out of Africa” theory of human migration, which states that early humans from Africa colonized other parts of the globe around 50,000 years ago. Mungo Man’s revised age is now seen to support that theory.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 2/25/2003.

It was long thought that healthy lions posed relatively little threat to people: Only sick or injured animals, unable to catch and kill their usual fast-moving prey, would attack slower humans. For example, the famous man-eating lions of Tsavo that killed nearly 30 people in 1898 were found to have broken teeth and jaws. But, as reported by New Scientist last week, zoologist Bruce Patterson of the Field Museum in Chicago has found evidence contradicting that theory. After examining the teeth and jaws of 23 “problem lions” killed by rangers in Kenya, he found that less than a quarter had damaged teeth — and most were healthy males under 5 years old. Patterson said young lions are leaving park boundaries searching for territory, and the growing (doubtless delicious) human population may be too much for them to resist.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 2/25/2003.

Plants such as kudzu and animals such as zebra mussels, which can be harmless in their country of origin, can be a pest elsewhere, playing havoc with local wildlife and having huge economic costs. Two studies in the Feb. 6 Nature report that one reason invasive species are so successful is because the enemies that kept them in check at home are usually left behind. Ecologists from Cornell University examined invasive plants, and researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara studied invasive animals. It was found that, in general, invasive species had only half as many parasites and pathogens as native species. How do they manage to ditch their enemies? One hypothesis is that for parasites that live on more than one host species, a migration of two or more species might be required for them to survive. According to both studies, one way to control invaders would be to import their original enemies, but if the introduced pest turns out to like native species, too, that opens a whole new can of parasites.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 2/18/2003.

Both of Mars’s polar ice caps consist mostly of frozen water, report Shane Byrne and Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology in last week’s Science. It was long thought that the southern ice cap was made almost entirely of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice, unlike its northern cap, which was made almost entirely of frozen water and had only a thin crust of dry ice. But recent thermal and high-resolution images made by NASA’s Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor spacecrafts show that the southern polar cap is too warm to be made entirely of dry ice, which evaporates at a higher temperature than the freezing point of water. According to the new study, both ice caps are fairly similar except that the south pole’s dry ice crust is slightly thicker than the north’s. The new mystery is, where is all the carbon dioxide? If Mars was ever warm and wet — and its landscape of flood and riverlike channels make it seem probable — it would require large amounts of carbon dioxide to provide a greenhouse effect so that liquid water could have existed.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 2/18/2003.

Imagine kissing someone – not a peck on the cheek, but full lip-to-lip contact. How do you tilt your head? Chances are, it’ll be to the right. Researchers have known for a long time that embryos and infants show a distinct preference for turning their heads to the right, but, until now, no one knew whether the preference lasted into adulthood. Continue reading →

A computer program has decided that women are better than men at baby talk. Designed by Gerald McRoberts of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Malcolm Slaney of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, the program listens to speech and analyzes how voice pitch, rhythm and stress — the emotional content of speech — communicate meaning. Six sets of parents were evaluated. First, they were told to encourage their babies, and then to warn them away from a dangerous object. The program was able to correctly judge which were the encouraging and discouraging comments 80 percent of the time. But, as New Scientist reported last week, the surprising result was that the program was able to correctly identify 12 percent more of the comments made by mothers, suggesting that women use less ambiguous sounds than men when talking to babies. The researchers admit that the program may not pick up all speech characteristics, but the study does show that men and women talk to babies differently.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 2/11/2003.