Vandal Science

Today’s lead story in the New York Science Times details one oceanographer’s decades-long search for the world’s oldest fossil on the floors of the ocean more than 2 miles beneath the surface.

Peter Rona began his career working for Standard Oil searching for promising new sites in the American Southwest. But he fell in love with the deepest depths of the ocean while visiting family in Manhattan and stumbling upon groups of oceanographers and research ships.

A decade later, Rona had a Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics from Yale and was investigating the ocean floors.

In 1976 he found a small, hexagonal imprint with hundreds of tiny holes. Perplexed, he asked oceanographers around the world what the imprint might be. His inquiries turned up empty until a scientist in Germany suggested it fit perfectly with the fossil P. nodosum, one of the oldest fossils on record.

After several more trips, the evidence piled up, and Rona is now convinced that the imprints belong to the organism believed to have become extinct 50 million years ago.

But the argument is not over. Rona has yet to capture a living specimen, but he’s certainly trying.

Also in this week’s edition:

• A profile of a scientist and industry seeking to build complex computer models of how thousands of genes and proteins interact in today’s deadliest diseases.
• A new study shows that children who have a high sense of guilt grow up to be better at controlling their destructive impulses, though a lack of guilt can be overcome.
• An interesting recount of the 10-year anniversary of the West Nile outbreak in New York phases into a recollection of the very first cases, intentionally given as an experimental cancer treatment, which spawned the debate creating today’s ethical standards on clinical research.
• It seems many doctors have no clue when they are using off-label prescriptions – using drugs for reasons other than what they are intended.
• And finally, there is some evidence that certain diets may help ease arthritis.

I came across this interesting story in Science NOW, an online collection of short but interesting articles regularly published by Science magazine.

You know how movies always depict people who are lost in the wilderness as walking around in circles? Well, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany decided to find out if this myth is fact or fiction.

To find out, the team blindfolded a group of volunteers, attached a GPS device to them, and asked them to attempt to walk a straight line across a large field. And, believe it or not, most people could not do it. Some seem to eventually make their way in the correct general direction but with many wobbles and wavers. However, some walked in circles as tight as 20 meters in diameter.

It seems that the human navigation system denied access to visual cues contain very minute errors. If these errors all begin to pile up into the same direction, we walk in circles.

But the study didn’t stop there.

The group also asked volunteers to attempt to walk  a straight line through a section of the Sahara Desert and a forest in Germany. They found the sun helps people navigate a straight line, or at least shadows and other visual cues caused by the sun’s light do.

On sunny days, people could easily walk a line for several hours. But on cloudy days, in both environments, participants ended up walking in circles.

Pretty neat, eh?