Doctor Geek and the Daleks

I've got several science-related things that have been sitting on my "post this" list for a while, so I thought I'd just toss them all together here.

Episode One: November 25, 2003
A study that compared humans with other species concluded there are 1,000 times too many humans to be sustainable. It used a statistical device known as "confidence limits" to measure what the sustainable norm should be for species populations. "Our study found that when we compare ourselves to otherwise similar species, usually other mammals of our same body size, for example, we are abnormal and the situation is unsustainable," said Charles Fowler, co-author of the paper and a lead researcher at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. William Rees, professor of community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia, disagrees that humans are abnormal and said, "I would use the term 'unusual' instead." Humanity has been inordinately successful: We can eat almost anything, adapt to any environment, and develop technologies based on shared knowledge. Rees, however, said that we may be "fatally successful" because industrial society as presently configured is unsustainable.

Episode Two: December 10, 2003
Scientists at Armagh Observatory and Cardiff University say bacteria could get into space on rocks blasted off the planet by an asteroid or comet impact. Their calculations then indicate the microbes would eventually leak out of our Solar System to seed other regions. The research advances the case for modern-day panspermia - the controversial idea that life started elsewhere in space and came to Earth when it was young. The researchers say the implications of their work are obvious and profound. Wherever it started, life could have spread across the Milky Way on timescales that are short compared with the 10-billion-year estimated age of our galaxy. This means, they claim, that life must be widespread throughout our star system and that it is unlikely to have originated on Earth.

Episode Three: December 11, 2003
Qafzeh Cave in Israel is a remarkable site that contains many skeletons of humans who lived there about 100,000 years ago. Archaeologists have recently discovered fragments of red ochre - a form of iron oxide that yields a pigment when heated - alongside bones in the cave. The ochre is only found alongside the bones. The association of red ochre with the skeletons suggests that symbolic burial rituals were being performed there almost 100,000 years ago. That is 50,000 years earlier than when symbolic reasoning, the ability to let one thing represent another which is the basis of sophisticated language and math, is generally thought to have emerged.

Episode Four: December 16, 2003
Human trials of a new type of malaria vaccine are planned for next year after encouraging results in mice. Research published on Tuesday revealed that their formula, carried into the body on a virus, produced a strong immune response in mice. No fully effective malaria vaccine has yet been produced by scientists. It remains an important cause of early death - and a significant risk to travellers, who currently face lengthy courses of antimalaria tablets prior to travel.

Episode Five: December 17, 2003
Scientists claim to have found the oldest evidence of photosynthesis - the most important chemical reaction on Earth - in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks. Danish researchers say rocks from Greenland show life-forms were using the process about one billion years earlier than has previously been shown. While the dating and the interpretation are open to question, still, "Life may be older and more robust than we thought," said Dr. Roger Buick, University of Washington, Seattle.

Episode Six: December 24, 2003
Two British men say they have seen a seabird thought to have become extinct more than a century and a half ago. The bird, the New Zealand storm petrel, was spotted a short distance off the country's North Island in November. The two Britons say they are in no doubt the bird they sighted really is the one last seen in 1850.

Episode Seven: January 12, 2004
The orang-utan, Asia's "wild man of the forests", could disappear in just 20 years, a campaign group believes. WWF, the global environment network, says in the last century the number of apes fell by 91% in Borneo and Sumatra. Globally, it says, there were thought to be somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 orang-utans as recently as 1987. But by 2001 that number had fallen by virtually half, to an estimated 25,000-30,000 of the animals, more than half of them living outside protected areas.

Episode Eight: January 15, 2004
New research may help scientists dissect just what it is about the human brain that endows us with language. Researchers have found that tamarin monkeys have some distinctly languagelike abilities but that they can’t master the more complex rules of human grammar. Tamarins have been evolving separately from humans for approximately 40 million years - suggesting that any shared machinery in human and tamarin brains is old enough to be relatively common among primates.

Episode Nine: January 22, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO - Some high-tech insect experiments soon may be flitting out of the laboratory: Mosquitoes genetically modified to eliminate malaria. Silkworms engineered to produce bulletproof vests. Bollworm moths designed to self-destruct before they can wipe out cotton crops. Genetically engineered insects hold the promise of benefiting millions, eradicating diseases and plagues that cause famine in the developing world. But despite such good intentions, many scientists are alarmed that few safeguards exist to keep unintended consequences from harming humans or the environment. Fast-producing insects anchor food chains around the globe. Yet the impact that genetically engineered bugs could have on ecosystems is only now being explored, even as researchers push to release biotech insect experiments into the wild.

Episode Ten: January 25, 2004
Scientists have decided that a fossil found near Stonehaven is the remains of the oldest creature known to have lived on land. It is thought that the one-centimetre millipede which was prised out of a siltstone bed is 428 million years old. The millipede had spiracles, or primitive breathing structures on the outside of its body, making it the oldest air-breathing creature to have been discovered.