One of the things I loooooooooove about science writing is all the free stuff. Scientists aren’t like those crummy jerks at the Associated Press, scientists want you to talk about what they’re doing. They want us bloggers to quote them, link to them, post their photos. Scientists give away tons and tons of intellectual property every single day, which gives people like me tons and tons of stuff to cover. I never hurt for content or media to fill this blog all because I cover science.

If I covered movies, music, television, or radio, I would be wasting more time than its worth trying to rationalize fair use, translating the word-count of my cited quotes to the pennies in my budget, and shelling out the moolah for photos and video clips to illustrate my content–and even then I’d probably get sued.

You know what? #$%@ it. It’s not worth it covering those media fantasy lands anyways. Science is reality, 99% of modern media is crap.

The following quote from G.M. Trevelyan, although speaking to history, applies to science as well as any other academic pursuit. Just replace the word “historians” with “scientists”:

And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

If a scientist makes a discovery, and fails to share it with anyone, then is it science? Absolutely not. They are irrelevant. Lucky for Science Bloggers, scientists are all about the pursuit of knowledge for everyone’s benefit, and not about hoarding it to make a little money.

 

My latest article is up at the Science Creative Quarterly:

Explaining Our World: Science VS Creationism.

My previous articles are still available there as well:

Tragedy of the Commons Explained With Smurfs

Science Fiction VS Fantasy: An Opinionated Guide

How To Fly

Enjoy!

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The Coccyx, or Tail Bone 

Science: Our predecessors had tails, and we retain these bones because our gluteus maximus and other muscles need something to anchor them. The coccyx also serves as a shock absorber when we fall on our rump.

Creationism: Ironic that science would use such a tall tale to explain a short one. Ha! Ha! But seriously folks. There’s no such thing. Science just likes to slip dirty words, like that c-word it just used, into our everyday language as part of their War on Traditional Family Values.

 

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Male Nipples 

Science: They serve no purpose and exist because of a lack of sexual dimorphism in the early embryo. Male mammals have nipples because females have mammary glands.

Creationism: Wrong again Science. Nipples feel good and arouse people to procreate, as the Designer wants us to. Everybody knows breasts are for sex. That’s why our kids were all bottle fed at birth, to prevent them from growing up into unnatural perverts who use c-words.

 

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Goose Bumps 

Science: This is a vestigial characteristic of our skin that goes back to when our predecessors still had fur. In cold weather, the goose bumps would make the fur stand up, increasing it’s ability to hold in heat.

Creationism: Oh! Did you hear that? Did you hear? Science just admitted its relatives were furry! My kids are soooo gonna tease your kids on the playground on that embarrassing admission! Next topic.

 

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The Vermiform Appendix 

Science: In our ancestors, this organ was much larger and served as a reservoir of bacteria and fermentation chamber for digesting cellulose. Many herbivores today have large appendixes that help them digest plants, while ours serves little purpose and will often get infected, needing surgical removal.

Creationism: I think Alfred Sherwood Romer and Thomas S. Parsons said it best, “Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession.” Even scientists admit the Intelligent Designer gives them purpose!

 

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Menopause 

Science: Menopause prevents a female from baring offspring at a time in her life when she would most likely not live to raise them to maturity. Instead, the older female may now devote her energies to raising her existing offsprings’ offspring, her grandchildren.

Creationism: Why don’t you just come out and say it? Women go through menopause to become Grandmothers! See? Family values! God-I mean, the Designer obviously supports Family Values!

 

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The Plica Semilunaris 

Science: This fleshy part of our inner eye is what’s left of our predecessors’ third eyelid, or Nictitating membrane, which is found in many mammals and some fish. It serves no purpose in humans.

Creationism: Au contraire mon frere! It does so serve a purpose! It produces eye-boogers, and eye-boogers are great social-equalizers. Even the Pope gets eye-boogers!¹

¹ With apologies to Berke Breathed.

 

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Hemorrhoids, Hernias, and Hiccups 

Science: The result of our blood vessels being selected for an active lifestyle rather than sitting in a chair all day, the result of a hole in the muscle wall in the groin to provide a pathway for the testicles to move from our ancestor’s internal placement to our present external placement, and a vestigial signal from our brainstem from when our ancestors had gills.

Creationism: Inconveniences of the flesh meant to test our faith while we wait to die and go to the afterlife.

 

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Why Be Good? 

Science: Because natural selection occasionally favors species that show altruism to one another.

Creationism: Because the Intelligent Designer said so.

“civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.”
– H.G. Welles

It took life on Earth millions years to figure out how to digest cellulose, the hard wall that makes up the cells of plants, efficiently to get at the energy inside it. In fact, complex lifeforms, such as Cows and Termites, have to take the indirect route of enlisting bacteria in their guts to digest the cellulose for them.

In one of the many many many asides he takes in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson talks about plastics being made of hydrocarbons found in oil and natural gas. Although plastics are non-biodegradable, there is a great deal of energy still stored in those hydrocarbons, just waiting for the right lifeform to evolve along and start consuming them.

There is now a continent-sized vortex of the Pacific Ocean swimming with plastic junk. Sea turtles and birds are mistaking plastic bags for jellyfish, ingesting them and dieing. Plastic particles are accumulating in the food chain, appearing, undigested, in the feces of seals and other animals.

Plastic Bag Tree Credit: spike55151

In his book, The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton fictionalizes a microbe that mutates to eat rubber. Today, numerous scientists and companies are engineering microbes to eat plastic, or more precisely, microbes with the ability to break down plastics to get at the bounty of hydrocarbons locked up within them.

Companies, like Verde Environmental and WonderChem, produce solutions of microbial cultures that eat oil, slowly. Recently, 16-year-old Daniel Burd, of Waterloo, recently isolated the microbes that eat plastic bags as a Science Fair project, earning him a $10,000 prize and $20,000 scholarship. His discovery may reduce the time it take to degrade plastic bags to just three months. A shovel-full of soil from anywhere on Earth contains millions of the oil-eating Pseudomonas bacteria. It’s just a matter of encouraging these microbes to be fruitful and multiply

The Law of Unintended Consequences comes into play at this point. Algae-like bacteria live in both diesel and biodiesel fuel, clogging up the engines they contaminate. Organisms like these have all ready ruined a large amount of Earth’s underground petroleum, leaving sulfer and methane as byproducts. A quick look at all the modern conveniences requiring plastics that we rely on give us a hint as to the pandora’s box we might be dabbling with here, meaning we might end up needing microbes to clean up the microbes.

“There was an old lady who swallowed a fly…”