Back in the late 1940s, the US Navy financed the building of an electromechanical computer at Harvard University, called the Harvard Mark II. It was basically a super-fast (for the time) calculating machine, made unique because several calculations such as the reciprocal, square root, logarithm and exponential, were built into the hardware, making execution much faster than on other similar machines of the time. Unlike modern computers, the Mark II was not a stored-program computer. Instead, program instructions were read sequentially from a tape, and then executed.
Anyway, back to the legend… On this day, back in 1947, while the Harvard Mark II was doing its thing, humming away (as I presume they did), a technician noted an unusual object trapped in one of the computer’s relays. On closer inspection, he found it was a moth. The moth was removed and taped into the computer’s log book. Grace Hopper, computer scientist and US Navy Rear Admiral, saw the moth entry in the logbook, and added the caption, “First actual case of bug being found”. This reference to a computer problem or glitch as a ‘bug’, caught on with other computer scientists, and has been used ever since, together with terms like debugging, etc.
Much of the above story is true – there was a moth found in the Harvard Mark II, on 9 September 1947 at 15:45. And it was indeed taped into the log book, with the above-noted caption. However, this was far from the first use of the word ‘bug’ to refer to a technical error – small machine glitches have been called ‘bugs’ for many years, with the first known reference coming from a letter written by Thomas Edison in 1878: “Bugs – as such little faults and difficulties are called – show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labour are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.”
So, while it would have been cool if this was the real origin of the term computer bug, it sadly wasn’t. What is probably true about the story of Grace Hopper and the Harvard Mark II, is that this may indeed be the first known case of an actual computer bug, or computer moth, to be more exact. Which is still kind of amusing. 🙂
Happy Sunday, everyone – hope you’re not being bugged by bugs of any kind todayyy.y..yy…yyyyy.yy. Bugger…
Today, 8 September, is International Literacy Day – the day the world’s attention is focused on literacy as one of the fundamental human rights, and the foundation of all learning. In the words of UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova, “Education brings sustainability to all the development goals, and literacy is the foundation of all learning. It provides individuals with the skills to understand the world and shape it, to participate in democratic processes and have a voice, and also to strengthen their cultural identity.”
In the information age, literacy is a more critical basic requirement than ever. The literacy landscape is also rapidly changing – children’s reading and writing experience is changing from a paper-based to a digital context. Many kids’ primary exposure to the written word is through texting – SMS, instant messaging and Twitter – thanks to the global proliferation of mobile phones and internet connectivity.
Texting has long been blamed for being one of the main causes of decreasing linguistic savvy among children and teenagers, with parents and teachers fearing that texting shorthand (incorporating linguistic shortcuts, weak grammar and little or no punctuation) was destroying their ability to write ‘properly’.
While it’s true that these teenage ‘textisms’ drive most people over thirty up the proverbial wall, it may in fact not be quite the scourge it was thought to be at the turn of the century. New research is showing that, while it may not promote perfect grammar, text messaging may in fact have a positive impact on basic literacy. For one thing, there is no arguing that it is increasing young people’s level of interaction with the written word. Instead of speaking, kids are very likely to communicate via text messages, even when they are in the same physical location.
As reported in an article in the Telegraph, researchers are suggesting that using a mobile phone can boost children’s spelling abilities. In a research project at Coventry University in the UK, 114 children aged 9-10, who were not already mobile phone users, were split into two groups. Half were given handsets and encouraged to text often, while the control group remained without mobile phones. After 10 weeks, both groups were subjected to a series of reading, spelling and phonological awareness tests, and the researchers claimed they found that texting made a significant positive contribution to to children’s spelling development during the study. According to Professor Clare Wood of the university’s Psychology Department, they also found “no evidence that children’s language play when using mobile phones is damaging literacy development.”
Similar sentiments have been expressed by Professor David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, who says it’s an urban myth that text speech are taking over childrens’ regular writing. He considers it “merely another way to use language”, and suggests that the use of textisms and shortcuts is exaggerated: “If you collected a huge pile of messages and counted all the whole words and the abbreviations, the fact of the matter is that less than 10% would be shortened.”
So, while language may be changing in the age of texting, the undeniably positive part is that it is exposing children to the written word, in both the traditional and the abbreviated sense.
And that, as they say in the classics, is gr8 4 literacy.
Today is a celebration of that greatest of cured meats – it’s Salami Day.
Salami is a cured, fermented and air-dried sausage-style meat, usually made from pork and/or beef, but also sometimes from a range of other meats including venison and turkey (and even, apparently, shark and swordfish in Japan). The meat is minced together with a range of spices, garlic, minced fat, herbs and wine or vinegar, and left to ferment for a day or so before being stuffed into a (usually edible) casing and hung out to cure. The casing is sometimes treated with an edible mold culture which adds flavour and helps protect the salami from spoilage.
It first became popular with South European peasants, thanks to the fact that it doesn’t require refrigeration, and can last at room temperature for a month or longer. (It is this feature that also makes it one of my personal favourite foods to take on multi-day hikes – few things beat a couple of slices of salami on some cracker-bread over lunch, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.)
Of course, in science, salami has a very different connotation. The phrase ‘salami science’ refers to a scientific publishing tactic where the same body of research is published in more than one journal, or, more commonly, the results from a single research project is sliced up into multiple smaller research results (spread over time, for example) and published separately. This second option is also referred to as ‘salami slicing’ because you are effectively slicing your single research salami into a whole bunch of smaller slices, spread across different publications.
This is an unfortunate practice because it can skew research data, and it makes it more difficult to get the ‘big picture’ with regards to a specific body of research. It is, however, the result of the way the value or worth of a scientist is measured in the scientific community – the more you publish, the better you are rated, and the more funding you can attract. This ‘publish or perish’ phenomenon is well-known in science, where the size of an individual or group’s scientific output is overemphasized, rewarding quantity over quality.
Nature magazine has gone so far as to say that salami science “threatens the sustainability of scientific publishing as we know it”. Fighting this practice means more time and effort have to be spent by journals and publications to ensure that the same results have not been published elsewhere, thus increasing the workload on already stretched staff and peer reviewers.
Of course quantity is not the only criterion used to judge or measure a scientist’s research output – references and citations also play an important role. However, formulae for quantifying research output is often oversimplified and skewed towards quantity. To again quote Nature magazine, “The challenge then is not only to establish more sophisticated means to assess the worth of a researcher’s scientific contribution, but for bodies making such assessments to make it plain that it is scientific rigour and not merely numerical output that will lead to success”.
It definitely seems slicing your salami thin is better when you’re talking meat than when you’re talking science. In fact, referring to the meaty version, it’s probably a very good idea to slice it thin – when it comes to processed meat (including salami), moderation is definitely a good thing. In a report in the Guardian, the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) has warned that excessive intake of processed meat can increase your risk of developing cancer.
According to the WCRF, “If everyone ate no more than 70g of processed meat – the equivalent of three rashers of bacon – a week, about 3,700 fewer people a year in Britain would be diagnosed with bowel cancer”.
So, in celebration of Salami Day, get yourself a good quality salami (paying a bit more really is worth it when it comes to enjoying a good salami) and enjoy a taste of meat-heaven.
It’s 5 September, the day back in 1698 when the good Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, in all his wisdom, decided the macho, fully bearded look sported by most of his fellow countrymen, was simply too out of touch with the times, and that Russian men really ought to follow the example of their European counterparts and cut their beards.
Rumour has it that, after returning from a trip to Europe where he was most impressed by the forward-thinking, clean-shaven Europeans, he personally cut off the beards of the men in his court. He obviously couldn’t take it upon himself to clear all the bearded Russians of their facial hair, so to make them take his request a little more seriously, he imposed a ‘beard tax’, announced on 5 September 1698, which meant that any man who opted to keep his beard would incur a hefty tax penalty. Luckily for the more rustic farmer-types, the tax was only imposed in the cities, so they could keep their beards while on the farm. If and when they needed to go to the city, however, they also had to shave, or pay a fine to keep their beards.
Bearded blokes actually had to carry with them a token showing that they had paid their beard tax. To further remind them of the silliness of their facial hair, the token was inscripted with the message “A beard is a useless burden”, or something to that effect.
Turning to modern times, I recently came across the results of a study conducted by a team from Canada and New Zealand, investigating the reactions of men and women to bearded and beardless men. Nineteen men from New Zealand and Samoa were first photographed with 6-week old beards, in two sets of photographs – one where they looked serious, and another where they were asked to make an angry face. Their beards were then shaved off, and they were again photographed in the same poses. According to the feedback from respondents, women were more drawn to the beardless men, while men considered the bearded men to appear more important and imposing. So, it seems you have a choice – do you want to impress the guys, or charm the ladies?
Further in the same article, however, there’s mention of a study where the reactions of women to bearded men was extended to also include chaps with 5 o’clock stubble. It appears that this may be the magic option from the attraction point of view – as the article notes, it seems women like men who can grow beards, but don’t quite do. Perhaps these men are seen as suitably masculine, yet not quite out of touch with their feminine sides.
I have also found a report on a recent survey of more than 2,000 men and women conducted by Lynx, which gives some rather conclusive anti-beard statistics – while 63% of the men surveyed believed their facial hair improved their manliness and attractiveness, no less than 92% of the women preferred a clean-shaven man. In fact, 86% went so far as to say they found beards unattractive.
Perhaps that can be taken as some modern form of Peter the Great’s beard tax. In Tsar Peter’s case, men were allowed to keep their beards as long as they were willing to part with their money; nowadays you can keep your money, but you may well have to say goodbye to any romantic possibilities!
We all love chocolate, don’t we? So much so, that there’s a whole host of chocolate-y celebrations out there – National Chocolate Day, International Chocolate Day, days for different flavours chocolate… Forced to pick one date, I’ve decided to dedicate a post to this particular chocolate day – today, 4 September, we celebrate World Chocolate Day.
Looking at some of the latest chocolate-related science news that I’ve come across, however, the chocoholics among us may in future have less and less reason for celebration, as the future of chocolate looks ominously bleak.
Firstly, it appears that worldwide chocolate consumption is exceeding production, which means that chocolate will increasingly become a luxury commodity, fetching higher and higher prices. Apparently cacao trees can only be grown naturally in a narrow band within 10 degrees around the equator, and more and more farmers in this band are turning to more lucrative alternative crops such as genetically modified maize, soybeans and palm oil. Geneticists are trying to develop better yielding cacao crops, but there are no guarantees yet that this will remedy the situation.
If that is not enough, there is a fear that diseases may devastate what is left of the global cocoa supply. Fungal diseases such as witch’s broom and frosty pod have already destroyed most cacao crops in Central America, and the concern is that if these diseases spread to Africa, the majority of the global cocoa production may be at risk. Again, the best defense lies in bioscience – if scientists can succeed in sequencing the cacao tree genome, it will help them developing genetically modified plants that are resistant to infection.
If you think the above challenges make the future of chocolate look a bit suspect, here’s the cherry on top – apparently, climate change may result in West Africa (the source of most of the world’s chocolate supply) becoming too hot to sustain cacao growing in the region.
According to a report in Scientific American, it is estimated that by 2060, more than 50% of the West Afican cocoa-producing countries may be too hot to continue growing the crop, which will also contribute to chocolate prices spiraling out of control. The slack in the market may be picked up by regions that were previously too cool for growing cacao, but that would require these regions to switch from other crops that may be considered more lucrative. Thus there’s yet another challenge to the genetic scientists – developing a drought-resistant cacao tree capable of handling the effects of global warming.
So, in a nutshell, to save chocolate from becoming an unaffordable luxury commodity, scientists are in a mad race to develop new, genetically modified strains of cacao tree that are higher yielding, infection resistant and able to withstand heat and drought.
Sorry to leave you with such a depressing message on World Chocolate Day – I guess we can only hope that science will step up to the plate and save the day, enabling us to continue enjoying the wonderful product of the cacao tree for many years to come!
The 1st of September is generally considered the first day of Spring in the Southern Hemisphere. However, dedicating the day to celebrating the coming of spring and the end of winter seems a little cruel to all the Northernites out there who are just entering their long cold winter (especially considering that I’ve already pretty much done exactly that a couple of days ago).
So, rather than discussing the seasons again, lets consider another special reason to celebrate this day – today is International Redhead Day!
People born with red-hair are, in a way, similar to those born left-handed – a genetic minority group with a fierce pride in that unique feature that makes them special and part of an exclusive ‘club’. In fact, the ‘natural redhead club’ is even more exclusive than the lefthanders club, with less than 1% of the world population having naturally red hair. Except for Scotland and Ireland, where more than 1 in 10 people have red hair. Former colonies of the UK are also blessed with a significantly higher than average sprinkling of redheads.
Quite a few redheads may count themselves as part of the super-exclusive intersection of the redhead club and the lefthanders club – apparently, since red hair is a recessive trait, and recessive traits often come in pairs, redheads are more likely than others to be lefthanded!
Redhead Day started in the Netherlands, as a festival called Roodharigendag, that takes place every first weekend in September in the city of Breda. Taking its cue from this event, the celebration of red hair has spread around the world with the 1st Saturday of September becoming an international celebration of the fiery top.
The Dutch Roodharigendag festival is itself a pretty global affair, attracting attendance from over 50 countries. In addition to being a gathering of thousands of people with natural red hair, the festival also celebrates art featuring the colour red, and includes lectures, workshops and demonstrations aimed at red-haired people. And of course many, many photo shoots.
It’s quite interesting that the festival is held in the Netherlands, where less than 2% of the population have red hair. However, it is exactly this fact that resulted in the festival happening in the first place. It was started in 2005 when the Dutch painter Bart Rouwenhorst decided to do 15 paintings of redheads. Knowing how hard it is to find redheads in the Netherlands, he placed an advert in the newspaper, and to his surprise 150 people volunteered. Rather than turning most away, he chose 14 and then organised a group photo of the others and used a chance lottery to select the 15th and final model. This get-together of 150 redhead would-be-models became the first redhead festival. It made headline news in the Dutch national press, and the rest, as they say, is history, with the numbers of attendees increasing exponentially each year.
It is known that red hair is caused by gene mutation – it is a variant of MC1R, or the melacortin-1 receptor. This mutative gene is what’s known as a recessive gene, which means that, for a child to have red hair (s)he has to inherit a copy of the mutated MC1R from each parent. While a reasonable number of people carry a copy of the mutated gene, the chances of two people who carry the same gene, having kids, is quite rare. However, the claim that redheads may become extinct due to this is unfounded. While recessive genes can become rare, they are unlikely to disappear completely, unless some natural disaster causes everyone carrying the gene to die. So even if they may become rarer, there should always be people around who carry the gene, and so redheads should continue to pop up from time to time. As stated in the National Geographic, “while redheads may decline, the potential for red isn’t going away”.
Which I think is a good thing – the world would definitely be a worse place without redheads around to spice things up.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to Mark Twain (himself a redhead), who famously quipped that “while the rest of the human race are descended from monkeys, redheads derive from cats”.
It’s Daffodil Day today, August 31st. Well, it’s Daffodil Day in New Zealand, to be exact – Australian Daffodil Day happened on the 24th of this month already. The US, bless them, seem to have a whole bunch of different Daffodil Days across different states. (With Daffodils being a spring flower, it obviously makes sense that most US Daffodil Days happen earlier in the year, around February, and not August/September, as it does down here in the South.)
Daffodil Day is all about cancer – raising awareness of the disease, raising funds for cancer related research, and creating a support network for individuals suffering from the disease.
Cancer is an incredibly pervasive, prevalent disease – here in New Zealand it is the leading cause of death in the country – and I’m sure there are very few people who are not in some way fairly directly affected by it. My dad died of cancer in his liver and colon; my mother in law is a breast-cancer survivor; just about everyone I know has someone close to them who has either died from, or is living with, the disease.
In a nutshell, cancer occurs when cells in the body accumulate genetic changes (due to various factors), resulting in a loss of growth control. Normal cells grow, divide and die in an orderly manner, in response to signals from the body and the environment. When cells become cancerous, however, they fail to respond to the normal signals, and start growing and dividing in an uncontrolled manner. These out-of-control cells can spread through the body via the bloodstream or lymph vessels (a process called metastasis) and continue to grow and replace normal tissue. It is the fact that it’s the body’s own cells that go crazy and effectively turn against their host, that makes it such a complex disease to treat.
As mentioned, one of the critical focus areas of Daffodil Day is raising money to support research into finding cures for the disease.
Over the years, literally billions of dollars have been spent on cancer research, and it’s quite a sobering thought when you realise that, in spite of all this, the death rate from the disease has changed little over the past 50 or so years. As new therapies are developed, cancer also adapts and evolves, finding new ways to kill.
Now this does not mean all is in vain – millions of people have been saved from the therapies that have been developed. All it means is that there is no room for complacency, and new and more effective cancer therapies are continually needed to stay ahead of, or at least keep up with, the disease.
In my job as a science photographer, I interact with a wide range of research and technology organisations, and one of the most inspiring of these is the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research – New Zealand’s leading medical research institute, and a registered charity based in Wellington, NZ. The reason I mention this fact is that one of their main fields of research is cancer (they also research cures for asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis and infectious diseases) and they are one of the organisations supported through the proceeds of fundraising events like Daffodil Day.
One of the main fields of cancer research that the Malaghan Institute focuses on is Immunotherapy, which basically involves using the immune system and it’s unique properties to complement existing cancer treatments. As they explain, “Immune cells are specific and have the capacity to discriminate between normal and cancer cells, they have powerful effector capacity and can recruit inflammatory cells to destroy neoplastic tissue, and they can migrate to different tissues and eliminate residual metastatic disease.” So, similar techniques to those used in helping the immune system recognise and fight contagious diseases (such as vaccination, etc), can also be used to help the immune system recognise cancer cells and to strengthen their ability to destroy them.
Another more recent research subject at the Institute is cancer stem cell research. Cancer stem cells are cancer’s evil root – these tumor initiating cells are highly resistant to drug and radiation treatment – and the focus of the research is on finding safe and effective ways to eradicate them.
Organisations like the Malaghan Institute, and many others like them across the world, are doing incredible work to address the continually evolving threat of cancer, and really need all the support they can get. It’s a scary, scary topic, and it’s good to know there are talented, committed scientists and researchers out there facing the challenge head on.
Today, according to those in the know, is ‘More Herbs, Less Salt’ Day. Another of those days that has been thought up to try and nudge us towards a slightly healthier lifestyle (much like ‘Independence from Meat’ Day, that I blogged about earlier).
Indeed, leaning towards herbs, rather than heaps of salt, to season your food is not a bad idea at all. I’m sure anyone who has opened a general lifestyle magazine in the last 10 years will know that salt isn’t all that great for our overly stressed 21st century bodies – our poor hearts already have enough to deal with. Giving the heart a further knock by subjecting it to a high salt diet really isn’t a winning idea.
There’s a significant body of research linking high sodium diets to high blood pressure, which in turn is linked to heart attacks, strokes, kidney disease and other nasties. Proving that a decrease in salt actually reduces the risk of heart disease has been more difficult, but a long-term research project conducted a few years ago, aimed to do exactly that. In an article entitled “Long term effects of dietary sodium reduction on cardiovascular disease outcomes: observational follow-up of the trials of hypertension prevention (TOHP)”, the research team from Harvard Medical School presents their results from a long-term follow-up assessment related to a sodium-reduction, hypertension prevention study done 15 years earlier. In the original intervention, a group of adults followed a sodium reduced diet for between 18 and 48 months. From the long-term follow-up research it was found that, compared to the general population, “Risk of a cardiovascular event was 25% lower among those in the intervention group (relative risk 0.75, 95% confidence interval 0.57 to 0.99, P=0.04), adjusted for trial, clinic, age, race, and sex, and 30% lower after further adjustment for baseline sodium excretion and weight (0.70, 0.53 to 0.94), with similar results in each trial.”
This led them to the conclusion that “Sodium reduction, previously shown to lower blood pressure, may also reduce long term risk of cardiovascular events.”
To really put you off a high salt diet, a visit to World Action on Salt and Health, a website dedicated to “improve the health of populations throughout the world by achieving a gradual reduction in salt intake”, should do the trick. Just note, however, that this day (and most scientific research) calls for ‘less salt’, not ‘no salt’. As one of the primary electrolytes in the body, salt is essential for the body to function – just not at the levels that we’re consuming it.
Herbs on the other hand don’t just taste good – they’re like a veritable medicine cabinet in your garden (or pantry, if you don’t grow your own). Besides often being rich in vitamins and trace elements the body needs, specific herbs have long been known for their medicinal effects.
Herbs like chamomile and lavender is known to have a calming effect, parsley, oregano and echinacea can boost the immune system, garlic contains selenium, which can help reduce blood pressure (now there’s a good one to fight the effects of a high sodium diet!), mint and feverfew have been reported to reduce headaches, basil and bergemot fights colds and flu, lemon balm and rosemary is good for concentration and memory… The list goes on.
Of course, as with everything in life, the key is moderation – ‘more herbs’ should not be seen as a license to go overboard on every herb you can lay your hands on. Reckless and injudicious use of herbal supplements can be very detrimental to your health, to say the least. Colodaro State University hosts a nice site, Herbals for Health?, which is worth a read – it gives a balanced overview of the pro’s and cons of a few popular herbal supplements.
Despite the cautionary notes above, culinary herbs, especially freshly home-grown, generally speaking should not cause health risks when used in moderation as an alternative to salt in daily cooking, and that, after all, is what this day is all about. Using herbs in cooking can be a very exciting way to improve your health and well-being, so have fun experimenting with all those new tastes and flavours!
When I think ‘urban’, I think ‘people’. Which leads my thoughts to what those people do in their urban environment, which immediately screams ‘shopping!’ And then of course, one starts thinking about ‘the people who serve the people – the shopkeepers’.
So here, in response to the ‘urban’ theme, some local shopkeepers. 🙂
Today we celebrate a veritable institution in the international popular science communication landscape – the magazine Scientific American today celebrates its incredible 167th birthday, making it the oldest continuously published monthly in the US.
The first issue of the magazine, then a four page weekly newspaper, appeared on this day back in 1845. It was published by Rufus Porter, a very interesting character who, besides being a magazine publisher, was also a painter, inventor, schoolmaster and editor. In line with Porter’s personal interests, the magazine reported on happenings in the US Patent Office, as well as having popular articles on inventions of the time.
Porter’s interest in the magazine didn’t last long – after 10 months he sold it to Alfred Beach and Orson Munn I (for a whopping $800). It remained under ownership of Munn & Company, who, in the century between 1846 and 1948, grew it from its humble beginnings to a large and influencial periodical. In the late 40’s it was put up for sale again, and this time the magazine was sold to three partners, Gerard Piel, Dennis Flanagan, and Donald Miller Jr. They reportedly planned on starting their own new science magazine, but finding that Scientific American was for sale, they opted to rather buy that and work their ideas into the existing title. They made significant changes to the magazine, updating and broadening its appeal. Ownership remained stable from 1948 to 1986, when it was sold to the German Holtzbrinck group, who has owned it since. The current Editor in Chief is Mariette DiChristina – an experienced science journalist and the first woman in the magazine’s history to hold the position.
What has kept the magazine alive and relevant for so many years, is the fact that it has consistently focused on an educated, but not necessarily scientific public, clearly explaining the scientific concepts it reported on and maintaining strong editorial quality control. It has also, since its inception, focused on clear, explanatory visual illustrations to accompany its articles. In its long lifetime, the magazine has published contributions from many famous scientists, including more than 140 Nobel laureates. Albert Einstein contributed an article called “On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation” in 1950.
In 1996, the Scientific American website was launched. A mobile site, as well as the Scientific American Blog Network, followed in 2011. For the past 10 years since 2002, the magazine has been hosting its own annual awards, the Scientific American 50, recognising important science and technology contributions of the previous year, across a wide range of categories from agriculture to defence to medicine.
Here’s looking forward to many more years of quality science communication, and a big double-century celebration in 2045!
Sciencelens 