Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

This entry is especially for Raj, since she truly appreciates the medical/science geek that places the invisible pocket protector in our breast pockets.

I fucking love Discover magazine. My Dad bought me my first issue way back when I still had a bowl haircut and people told my mother that her son looked just like her. I remember thinking "Oh no, they’re trying to educate me!", but I read and was hooked. Who cares if it’s like Scientific America Lite? That magazine rocks, excellent articles, and hard science explained in a layman’s language with some excellent writing, and the section called "Vital Signs" which details puzzling medical cases and eventual diagnosis and treatment gets me all excited (Raj, medical geek alert at 12 o’clock!).

So I was browsing through the latest issue the other day, and I was absolutely gobsmacked by three articles.

The first one detailed this amazing breakthrough. Scientists have managed to cultivate the neural cells of a rat on an electron plate, and placing them in a nutrient-rich solution, have managed to keep them alive so that the cells have actually achieved connectivity through the growth of additional cells (or whatever, the finer details are a bit lost on my hamster memory), and then through simulations and the use of electron pulses, have managed to teach these itty bitty ratty brain cells (I think they only cover the head of a pin) through a simple feedback loop how to keep the nose of the plane flying above the horizon! In simple language, a rat brain is flying a plane!! How terribly exciting is that? When I read about it, I kept babbling at the boy about it. It’s like something out of a B-grade movie, who could have thought that science has come so far?

The second is about the study of wood tree frogs, which actually get frozen during the hardest days of winter, and yet reanimate themselves during the spring thaw, and, in the words of one researcher, "start thinking little froggy thought again". The amazing thing of course is that if you tried that with a human we’d just die, since the water in our cells starts expanding after 4 degrees Celsius, so it would cause the rupture of cell walls. So the question is why the frogs are able to do this at all? Technically their cells should rupture, same as humans, since water would work the same in their system. It turns out that they have a sort of failsafe system whereby their body starts producing a glucose derivative which acts as a sort of antifreeze (apparently modern antifreezes is based on a glucose derivative as well, which is why antifreeze tastes sweet and dogs and cats sometimes drink it and die) and so instead of actually freezing rock hard like our bodies would when chucked in the freezer, the frogs just get sort of gooshy but which prevents cellular damage. No frogsicles. And they’ve isolated the genes which cause this antifreeze reaction to take place in the wood frogs. If you look at the state of the art of genetic engineering today, and the rate of scientific progress, it makes you wonder if the concept envisioned by Robert Heinlein’s "Door To Summer" is really that far off.

The last one was totally killer , it was a purely theoretical piece on what would happen to the world (or the Americas and Europe anyway) if every single human being just disappeared off the face of the earth overnight. I won’t go into all the details, but the most interesting facts were this: the first buildings to go is probably every single building in Raffles Place because they’re just flimsy steel-and-glass-concrete structures, and old stone buildings would be the last to fall (hence, churches - ironic? Deeper meaning?), dogs would probably die, because even if they went feral, they wouldn’t be able to compete with the true predators which existed. Rats would suffer a huge depletion in numbers because there wouldn’t be any more garbage which they can live off. And the single most exciting hypothesis - cockroaches would die out completely in the colder parts of world. Apparently the theory is that cockroaches have only become so widespread thanks to the fact that we support them. If we disappear and there are no longer heated houses and buildings, they’ll die.

We are apparently the reason why cockroaches continue to thrive.