Category Archives: General Science

General Science

How Would A Biologist Fix A Radio?

An interesting, and amusing, disquisition on different scientific approaches:

I started to contemplate how biologists would determine why my radio does not work and how they would attempt to repair it. Because a majority
of biologists pay little attention to physics, I had to assume that all we would know about the radio is that it is a box that is supposed to play music.

How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Fig. 2, see color insert). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio’s performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

General Science

Reviving The Past

This is pretty cool. Researchers have sequenced the DNA of an extinct cave bear. They seem to be overly pessimistic about the implications of this, though, at least in my opinion:

“In hundreds or thousands of years from now, we may have advanced our technology so we can create creatures from DNA sequence information,” Dr Eddy Rubin, director of the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, told the BBC News website.

I think that “decades” is the appropriate timeframe here. And this is the most interesting part, to me:

the scientists hope to be able to sequence the DNA of ancient humans, which lived at the same time as cave bears, raising the prospect of perhaps one day being able to “build” a Neanderthal from their genetic blueprint.

This would raise some interesting ethical issues. Would a Neanderthal be considered fully human, with standard-issue human rights? Or would he or she be kept in a glorified zoo? It might be dangerous to let them run loose, because we would have no idea what the temperament would be, and the fossil evidence of their musculature indicates that they could probably wrestle cave bears for recreation.

Just making one wouldn’t necessarily give us insight into the subspecies as a whole, in terms of its mental capacity, temperament, etc. But it would be fascinating to find out just how smart a modern Neanderthal, raised in a modern technological environment, would be.