Tvindy

Incredible Breakthroughs and Discoveries That No One Knows About (part 1)

After my post entitled New Ape Found, I realized that there are many such groundbreaking newsstories in the area of science that are so woefully underreported that most people never even hear about them. Here are a handful that I think are very significant:

Forcefield Created:
Machinery at a 3M polypropylene plant suddenly generates an invisible and impenetrable wall of force strong enough to prevent a man from passing through. This occurred in front of witnesses and was reproducible. Then employees at 3M "fixed" the machine, so the problem would not recur. There are lots of complex theories as to what exactly caused the phenomenon, but the bottom line is that forcefields are no longer just science fiction; they have been observed firsthand, and we know how to produce them.

Artificial Hippocampus:
Scientists at the University of Southern California have designed a chip which can, in theory, replace the hippocampus in the brain. (That's the part that encodes new memories.) The fact that we have now moved into the realm where we can realistically speak of replacing even a tiny part of the brain with a manmade device is astonishing. We've taken our first significant step toward the eventual reverse-engineering of the human brain!

Ion Propulsion:
NASA has designed and tested a new propulsion method which would enable "an interstellar probe launched in 2010 ...[to]... pass the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the most distant spacecraft bound for interstellar space, in 2018 going as far in eight years as Voyager will have journeyed in 41 years." Read about the history of the development of the technology here.

SETI's Wow! Signal:
Most people are under the impression that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has found absolutely nothing in all the years that researchers have been sweeping the sky for that one faint signal. The truth of the matter is that once in a great while, they do find something interesting. However, since it is generally recognized that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, anything that is found must satisfy a strict set of criteria before it can be declared to be a legitimate extraterrestrial signal. There have been a handful of signals which satisfied most of the criteria, such as verifiably coming from outside earth and being picked up in a narrow band frequency, but they have all lasted for very short periods of time and never repeated. Hence they do not satisfy the criterion of repeatability. In other words, they may very well be signals from otherworldly beings; we can't prove that they are, but we also can't explain the creation of these signals through any known natural phenomenon. The most spectacular is the so-called Wow! Signal of 1977.

Mars

Last Tuesday, August 27th, Mars was closer to earth than it had been for 60,000 years. Therefore this week's Pic of the Week (actually five pictures joined together) represents my attempts to capture at least a semi-decent image of the planet on this historic occasion. The top three reddish splotches represent photos of Mars taken through an upstairs window of my home on August 23. The bottom two were taken at the local university observatory at BSU on August 28. Basically, I just stuck my camera lens, fully zoomed, up to the viewfinder of the telescope and clicked. I have no idea why the two images are so different from each other in terms of size, color and brightness. If you'd like to get a slightly better look at Mars, you can check out the Hubble images, taken with moderately better equipment than I have.

It's rather unfortunate when one considers just how much impetus NASA has lost since the early 70s. We've lost a golden opportunity. With the close approach of Mars, now would have been the ideal time for a manned mission. Travel time there and back would be minimized, and that would have cut down on costs and increased safety. We can still do it at a later date, of course, but the planets don't line up this way for our convenience very often, and it's not as if didn't know decades in advance that this would occur. The last time it did, neanderthals walked the earth. Perhaps if Nixon had not made that fateful decision to cut funding to Apollo in favor of developing the space shuttle, inertia alone might have carried us forward so that today the first astronauts to Mars would be there right now, completing their mission and preparing for the trip home, perhaps even leaving behind a small band of colonists. Another opportunity was missed in the 1980s when Russia, through Gorbachev, expressed a desire to set up a joint US/USSR Mars mission, and Reagan refused to commit. (Sorry, I couldn't find a good reference for this.) I truly cannot fathom the lack of vision by our leaders. Even a simple trip to moon is no longer within out grasp; the old Apollo crafts were not even mothballed -- they were scrapped! It would take us years to design and build the equipment again.

Perhaps our only hope now lies with such private organizations as the Mars Society and the X PRIZE Foundation. The may lack the funding and resources of the US government, but at least they've got vision.

More on Apes

This is just a quick followup to my previous ape postings (New Ape Found and Are Humans Apes?).

I found a much easier-to-read source explaining the classification of humans and (other) apes. It also underscores the fact that gibbons are, by far, the most genetically distant (and diverse, with 11 separate species) of all the apes -- much more so than humans. So if humans are placed outside of the ape family, then gibbons would have to go as well, leaving only chimps, gorillas, orangutans, and perhaps that recently discovered mystery ape.

Reading back over my previous ape postings, I don't think I made it very clear that my main interest with regard to the word ape was that I had become puzzled over whether or not it included humans, and I wanted to make sure that I was using it correctly, especially in light of the fact that I often find myself correcting people's usage of it. I probably put way to much emphasis on religion, and I fear that it might have appeared that I was attacking the core beliefs of Creationism, which was not my intent. I was merely being critical the notion that humans are not apes.

By the way, Geoff and Bill, I really appreciate your taking the time to leave comments, especially since my blog is so new. It helps to reassure me that at least a few of the visitors to this site are actually reading some of the entries and not just clicking through. (I will eventually put up a blogroll of the first ten people to leave comments here.)

Also, I should probably state that I've decided to follow the policy of never making responses to comments directly in the comments section. That makes it a bit harder for people to credibly post there posing as me. (It wouldn't be much of a problem now, but if I ever get a large number of comments, it could be.)

I sense a couple more ape entries coming in the near future, but for now I'll try to move on to more varied fare. Tomorrow will be my second Pic of the Week, and I promise it won't be of an ape.

Are Humans Apes?

It never fails. Whenever I hear people debating the veracity of religion, someone always brings up the apes, as in But how could something as intelligent and spiritual have come from apes? or even less intelligently, If humans are supposed to have come from apes, then how come there's still apes? Normally at this point, I'm trying not to get involved in the conversation and saving my groans for later when I can utter them in private, but frequently such remarks are followed by the evolutionary proponent's reply, in which (s)he explains, sometimes in great detail, how it is a proven fact that humans come from apes. At this point I always lose my self-restraint and interject with my oft-repeated spiel about humans, apes, and evolution:

Humans did not come from apes. No qualified person in the scientific community has ever made that claim, including Darwin. All apes and humans are desceneded from a single proto-ape species that lived millions of years ago and no longer exists. Thus humans can be said to be closely related to the other apes, but we are certainly not descended from them. Actually, we are apes, no less so than chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons. Whether or not you choose to subscribe to evolutionary theory, there is no doubt that all human beings, including Jesus Christ himself, are classified, both genetically and morphologically as an ape species.

Despite many arguments by people to the contrary, I'd never seriously questioned the fact that humans are apes. After all, I acquired that particular tidbit of knowledge from my father, who is an anthropologist and therefore should know. However, it was disquieting that the CNN article I referenced in my previous post seemed to imply otherwise, as have several other sources I've encountered over the years, so I decided to do some checking. The best explanation I found (under response #6) states in a nutshell that the term ape is sometimes employed to include all species in the superfamily Hominoidea (chimps, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons and humans) and sometimes to only include the nonhuman species, although traditionally, usage of the word has often not included humans. Therefore, I am completely correct when I state that humans are apes. Unfortunately, those who argue against me and say that humans are not apes are just as correct. Don't you just love the English language?; it's so free of ambiguity. Anyway, perhaps I should try to be a little less self-righteous in the future.

New Ape Found

According to CNN scientists have identified a previously undocumented type of ape in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Genetic tests are currently being conducted on fecal samples to determine the animal's classification. The researchers are entertaining three possibilities: it is a chimpanzee subspecies; it is a hybrid form of gorilla and chimpanzee; or it is a completely unknown ape species. Any one of these possibilities would be remarkable.

Consider:

A Chimp Subspecies: Chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives. If this new ape turns out to be a form of chimpanzee, it is radically different, both in form and behavior. There has long been a debate over whether or not bonobo chimps more accurately reflect the behavior patterns of early humans than mainstream chimps. Now we may have found a new chimp that lives on the ground and has been observed to walk bipedally, so it would almost certainly be the closest living model we have to the behavior of early humans.

A Gorilla/Chimp Hybrid: If this is the case, it would be extraordinary. I'm willing to accept that in theory gorilla and chimp DNA could combine to produce viable offspring, but it's hard to imagine the two species actually mating with each other in the wild. They are behaviorally so different from one another. Furthermore, the new hybrid ape would have to survive to adulthood, find a mate, and be able to reproduce, which is an ability that most interspecies hybrids , such as mules, do not have. Furthermore, one would expect that most of the new DNA would gradually become diluted with each passing generation, rather than that a new genetically distinct population would arise. It certainly sounds farfetched, but that would make it all the more intriguing if true.

A New Species of Ape: Wow! Finding a whole new species of great ape would be mindblowing. Chimps, gorillas, and orangutans are so fascinating because of their high level of intelligence combined with their similarity to humans. Yet each species is so different from the other two. Chimps are the most aggressive, both to other chimps and to smaller animals which they occasionally hunt as food. Gorillas are strict vegetarians and normally very docile. They sometimes fight for dominance, but not with the ferocity of chimps. Orangutans are loners. They don't live in communities, and it is not unusual for them to be out on their own for as long as a month without even running into another of their kind, although they do have complex social interactions when not alone. A New ape species would likely be as different from the other great apes as they are from each other. The best case scenario would be for us to discover not only that this is a new species, but one that is genetically even closer to humans than chimpanzees, perhaps even more intelligent. Wouldn't that be something?

We'll know more in about a month when the genetic tests have been completed. And this autumn, primatologist Shelly Williams says she hopes to return to Africa to further study the apes. Hopefully she'll take better pictures this time around.