The Man in the Lab Coat

It’s official – the Mars Rover, Spirit, is stuck in the mud. Well…sand, but that’s not an amusing cliché. Trapped in the sands of the Martian desert, Spirit has been unable to move for ten months, and has now been declared a “stationary research platform”. The news doesn’t seem to have reached the official NASA Mars Exploration Rover site, but you can find the announcement on their news page.

It seems unlikely we’ll hear much more about Spirit now until it’s covered with enough dust that it cannot recharge via solar power and goes silent forever – or at least until there’s a stiff breeze (as my beloved pointed out, this is not unlike what happens to Wall-E). But it’s striking how the language NASA uses is very…well, very Yes Minister. Spirit isn’t “dead” or “stuck”, it’s “no longer a fully mobile robot”; it’s not “retired”, it’s “entered a new phase”. I kept expecting to hear that it was “very happy with its brave decision” and that we can expect more reports from Spirit “in the fullness of time”. Or even: “Spirit’s close colleague, Opportunity, has not been available for comment.”

But for the definitive last word on the end of Spirit’s active life, I must pass you on to that ever excellent web comic XKCD; their piece on the subject is simply titled “Spirit“.

I’ve seen a bunch of different dinosaur pictures over the years, all of them highly speculative when it comes to colour; the colouration and look of dinosaurs has generally been in the hands of artists, not scientists, because you can’t figure those things out from bones or even skin and feather impressions. But not any more, or at least not for Sinosauropteryx.

Clever, clever  scientists at Bristol University, led by Mike Benton and working with Chinese palaeontologists, have used electron microscopes to find imprints of the melanosomes that carry pigment in hair and feather cells, and by doing so have deduced that Sinosauropteryx – a small theropod in the Compsognathis family, and the earliest dinosaur known to have feathers -  had a “russet” mohawk. (I’m reminded of our old friend Amargasaurus at Melbourne Museum, though its “mohawk” was made of bony spines, not feathers.) Just as importantly, the presence of melanosomes also puts to bed the debate over whether the structures are really feathers: they are.

I wonder now if modern punks will dye their hair in authentic shades from the Cretaceous, or if cosmetics manufacturers will see fit to release “theropod vermillion” rouge or lip gloss? The possibilities are without number…

What do these names have in common? Well, they all like big bottoms, and today, according to the ABC, so do scientists.

The rather sensational headline “Scientists back big bottoms” isn’t quite the reality; rather they have discovered the reason why it is healthier to carry extra wait on the thighs, hips and buttocks than around the abdomen. That this is the case is old news – it’s why those diabetes ads talk about the measurement of your waistline, not your weight – but now Oxford scientists have determined that not all fat is equal.

There are big differences in the fat cells in different part of the body; for one thing, lower body fat is less metabolically active: it doesn’t quickly absorb fats from your diet or release them when needed for exercise. That’s the purpose of abdominal fat. But lower body fat instead produces the hormones leptin and adiponectin, which assist in the processing of fats and sugars – thus helping guard against diseases like diabetes. In sharper contrast, abdominal fat produces evil hormones that fight the leptin and adiponectin, causing an opposite effect, so having fat everywhere has a net negative effect (well, we already knew that, but now we know it chemically as well). If ever there was a time to misuse the phrase “the battle of the bulge”, this is it.

It’s an interesting reminder that so many of the terms we use are generalisations: fat isn’t just a homogeneous type of tissue which is bad in excess and good in the right amount, it has different types each with different roles to play. And the basic upshot of this news is that if you exercise you’ll be healthier than if you don’t, even if you’re still carrying some weight on your hips. And of course you should carry some weight there, because as the Man in the Lab Coat always says: they’re called pleasures of the flesh because flesh is required.

Now: I’m off to listen to Jonathan Coulton’s cover of Baby Got Back.

It’s true: the Russian government is going to save us all from Apophis. No, not the Egyptian demon more properly known as Apep – or the alien Goa’uld of the same name, which seems more likely given the space-based context – but the asteroid, which made headlines five years ago when it was thought likely to kill us all. Since then the probability of that has been greatly reduced by subsequent observations, though wise minds are keeping an eye on it. The Russian collegium, though, doesn’t agree with the lower probability, and are hatching a “secret plan” to save us all from the fate of the dinosaurs.

My favourite thing about the article, though, is that Dr Permiov, spokesperson for the Russian collegium (or “science-council” as he describes it, which seems delightfully steampunk) assured citizens that “there won’t be any nuclear explosions,” and then that “everything will be done according to the laws of physics.” Does he have the option of not doing things according to physics? What does the collegium know that we don’t?

Because pterosaurs aren’t dinosaurs. What they have been, though, is a puzzle, at least in terms of how the later, classic pterodactyl form evolved from earlier long-tailed pterosaurs. There are so many differences between them – from the pterodactyl’s characteristic skull (and the number of openings in it) and much shorter tail, to differences in ribs and a second flight membrane between the legs – that it’s hard to tell what path that evolution took.

But once again, it’s Chinese fossils to the rescue, as a new species – another transitional form, Creationists! – has been discovered. As published this week by the Royal Society, Darwinopterus modularis (“Darwin-wing”…er…”modular”) is the kind of transition that makes things obvious – it has all the skull and neck characteristics of a pterodactyloid, but the rest of its body is old-school, long-tailed pterosaur. It’s as though a mid-Jurassic pterosaur had a new haircut and the new ‘do was such a big hit that it eventually changed it’s whole wardrobe to match…

The exciting thing is that this doesn’t just help explain how one form changed into another, but is also evidence of modular evolution. Normally we think of evolution in terms of an individual trait changing over generations – a tail getting longer, teeth getting sharper, colouration getting brighter. In modular evolution, though, sets of complementary features evolve together at the same time – in this case, D. modularis doesn’t just have a head closer to that of a pterodactyl; it’s evolved all the numerous head and neck features of pterodactyls, while the rest of its body retains the characteristics of an earlier pterosaur. It hasn’t just had a haircut, it’s gone in for some piercings and facial tatts as well, but it’s still wearing the stodgy old business suit.

This story is also interesting in the way that some news outlets have done better with it than others. The Independent did quite well, but fell into a common misconception: “Carbon dating has shown that the fossils fall in the middle of the age range from 220 million to 65 million years ago”. The erroneous word here is “Carbon”; Carbon dating is useless for anything more than around 60,000 years old, and palaeontologists – certainly those working with dinosaurs – use other methods to determine the age of their finds. To the author and paper’s credit, this little error and several others have now been cleaned up; to even greater credit, they added a comment in the story to let readers know! (Probably because bloggers with quicker trigger fingers than mine had already been pointing to it…)

On the other hand, The Australian were much worse; they ran with a headline about “Flying Dinosaurs” – pterosaurs are flying reptiles, not dinosaurs – but then go one better by reporting that the fossil was “baptised” with its scientific name. Baptised? Really? I mean, christened, sure; that has currency as a synonym for “named”. But “baptised”? I expected the article to conclude with a social item inviting the reader to Darwinopterus‘ confirmation… The article lists Agence France-Presse as the source, but somehow I’m not sure this translation is entirely their fault…