Online Cortex Thoughts on Science and Technology

Summer has arrived early this year.  We have had a full week of clear sunny skies and 70 degree weather.  Perfect, absolutely perfect. 

This weekend I was in New York City.  On Easter Sunday, Emily and I walked from 34th Street (Macy’s) up to Central Park.  The Central Park Zoo was horribly crowded on this beautiful day as everyone in the city showed up to enjoy the warm sunny weather and the blossoming crab apple trees among others unidentified.  We walked past the zoo and eyed the animal sculptures are the Delacorte Musical Clock.  We didn’t wait for it to chime, but I did enjoy my favorite sculture of the hippo playing a violin.  Emily says that she imagines it to be a fiddle.  We then walked up to the Conservatory Water where they sail model sailboats.  Sneaking past the Red-Tailed Hawk obervation telescopes we made our way past the Alice in Wonderland sculpture up past Cleopatra’s Needle (or the Obelisk) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It ended up being something like 70 blocks of walking when we finished, but it was such a great day.

I wanted to put up a picture of the blossoms from the New York Times, but I stumbled on this brilliant Easter photo instead…

(Photo Credit: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

from a New York Times article on Peeps.  They are pink like Crab Apple Blossoms, and besides, who doesn’t love Peeps?  OK, I know a lot of people don’t love them.  But I love them, especially when left out to sit until they become stale.  Forget soft and chewy; I just want chewy.  They are made by a company called Just Born, Inc. and if you are interested in Peep Research, click here.  They apparently suffer from an uncontrollable stress response when left alone in microwaves. This response is often fatal.  There is clearly much we don’t know about Peeps.

This entry definitely goes into the Blather Category.

But the weather has become truly remarkable.  So much so, that David Guggenheim’s new movie called ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, is perhaps arriving just in time…or maybe 6-26 years too late.  This movie, which will be released this summer, follows former Vice President Al Gore as he tirelessly works to expose the truth about Global Warming.  If you haven’t seen heard about this, you should watch the trailer.  If it is as well-written as any one of Al Gore’s speeches (he writes his own…just like they used to in the good old days that many people in this country long for), this movie should be a treat.  In fact, check out his latest article in Vanity Fair…
“The Moment of Truth” – by Al Gore, Vanity Fair, April 9, 2006

Why can’t we elect someone like that for president?

Meanwhile, I calculated my Carbon Footprint at:
http://www.climatecrisis.net/

I am way above average at 21,900 pounds of carbon a year.  Its mostly all the flying I do.  I guess I will need to start a corn field and sequester 20,000 pounds of carbon a year to make up for it.  Or maybe I can just bury a California Redwood…YEOWCH!!!

Sorry Earth,
Kevin

Kevin Knuth
Albany, NY

PS No Goose this time.

Posted under Blather, Climate

Our birdwatching trip to the Boreal Forests of northern Wisconsin was very exciting.  We did not see any Boreal Chickadees, nor did we see any Black-Backed Woodpeckers, which we also looked for.  However, we did see several Gray Jays, which in my opinion are beautiful. 

They have no crest, but are covered in soft fluffy feathers that range in color over all shades of gray.  It is a bird that knows how to work with what its got.  Other highlights of the trip included three Porcupines, a Snowshoe Hare, Bobcat tracks, and two tagged Trumpeter Swans, which have recently been reintroduced into Wisconsin.

I had never appreciated how suddenly the Boreal Forests start as one heads north once you are north of Antigo WI.  There are also a great number of bogs in northern Wisconsin as well.

A bog is a circular-shaped depression often surrounded by Black Spruce trees (thanks to my dad Rocky for the phone pic above).  Mats of sphagnum moss grow at the water’s edge and slowly grow inward forming a tangled mat that one can walk on.  We didn’t go out walking on the bog this time, but I have done it before, and it is fun how the mat moves up and down as you walk and as waves travel across the water under the mat.  As you step near a small tree growing through the mat, the tree bends toward you as your weight deforms the mat.

On the evening of Saturday April 8th, we were thrilled to see the Northern Lights.  There were sheets of light green veils hanging from the sky flickering in the silent sky.  They were so beautiful.

After our boreal adventure, we drove back to my home town of Fond du Lac WI.  On Tuesday night (April 11, 2006) my brother Joshua took us out into the country east of Fond du Lac to look for frogs and salamanders.  It was unseasonably warm and humid…you could say froggy.  We found several Blue-Spotted Salamanders by driving very slowly down the highway and watching for them crossing the road.  [Insert your favorite 'Cross the Road' joke here].  We also stopped for a while to listen to the chorus of frogs.  What amazed me was that once I stopped to listen—really listen—I could hear all the different kinds of frogs.  I heard the peeping of the Spring Peepers, the clucking sounds of the Wood Frogs, and the comb-tooth-playing sounds of the Chorus Frogs.  (Click on the links for frog calls)  I didn’t hear the Gray Tree Frog that my father and brother picked out.  In addition, we heard a Woodcock, a Common Snipe, a Barred Owl, and a Coyote.  The moon was almost full and the sparse clouds were racing away on the sky above us while we were surrounded, not by silence, but by the active excited clamour of the nocturnal wildlife.

Kevin Knuth
Bronx NY

Posted under Birds, Travel, Wildlife

Its early morning in the Bronx and the car alarms are singing below in a chorus accompanied by sirens from the nearby hospital and percussion from the construction work.  Its 8:30 am, which is early for me.

I am getting ready to leave for Wisconsin.  Its my dad’s birthday this month, and we are going birdwatching in northern Wisconsin in the hopes of finding the ever-elusive Boreal Chickadee.  The range of the Boreal Chickadee is restricted to the boreal (northern) coniferous forests.  I have just realized that both northern Wisconsin and the Adirondacks in New York constitute the southern-most parts of its range.  So if I don’t see them on this trip, I can look for them when i get home!

Posted under Birds

Just last week in the March 25th issue of Science, an article by Mary H. Schweitzer, Jennifer L. Wittmeyer, John R. Horner, and Jan K. Toporski announced the unimaginable.  They had found soft tissue remnants inside the fossilized femur of a Tyrannosaurus Rex!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_trexsofttissue.html

The Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton had been found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana a good distance from the road.  The bones had to be airlifted out by helicopter.  The femur bone was too big and the paleontologists were forced to break it in half.  When they did, they realized that the interior did not look like fossilized bone. 

Once safely in the laboratory, they demineralized the specimen and were stunned to find flexible vascular tissue that remained elastic.  This vascular tissue exhibited branching patterns, and the researchers worked to show that it was not fungus or plant material.  Comparison with the vasculature of demineralized ostrich bone is breathtaking with the Tyrannosaurus vessels showing nearly identical morphology to that of the ostrich.

Under a scanning electron microscope, I cannot tell the features in the dinosaur vasculature apart from those in the ostrich.  Smaller structures are visble, such as osteocytes (mechanosensing cells that help modify the bone matrix) and what appear to be nuclei of endothelial cells, which line blood vessels.

I know what you are thinking…DNA.
I am sure that they are thinking it too, but even if you could find DNA, there would probably be a good number of mutations in the molecule, or you might just find pieces.  Whether someday someone will be able to reconstruct a Tyrannosaurus’ DNA is anyone’s guess.

But there is another surprise.  They now believe that this bone is medullary bone, which is created in female birds when their estrogen levels rise during ovulation.  This was a female Tyrannosaurus Rex and she was getting ready to lay eggs!

Three other things amaze me about this find: 

First, I find it very hard to believe that organic structures can last for 70 million years.  Surely they are not exactly as they were, and it will be very interesting to find what types of degradation have occurred over that time period.  But 70 million years is a mighty long time.

Second, it opens up entire new areas of study.  Soon researchers will be cracking open fossils and looking inside.  The more recent mammalian fossils have a better chance of yielding DNA and will allow us to better map out evolutionary changes.  This will open avenues of research once only imagined.  The more ancient Jurrasic and Triassic dinosaurs (going back some 200+ million years) have less chance of there being soft tissue and organic remains.  But who knows?  If this quantity of T. Rex tissue lasted this long, its half-life must be quite a bit longer.

Third, I marvel at how much has changed in science since I was young.  When I was six years old, I wanted to be a paleontologist.  Back then, dinosaurs were cold blooded reptiles that lumbered about slowly.  Since then, we have learned that they were warm blooded.  Also, we have learned that birds evolved from dinosaurs.  In fact, many dinosaurs had feathers and the precursors to feathers, which are now well documented.  The Tyrannosaurus Rex itself is a species that is thought to have had feathers.  Now there is a sight unimagined by the dinosaur artists of my youth!

Posted under Birds, Dinosaurs, Evolution, Paleontology