Monday Science Links

This week's science (a tad late, sorry):

• Lee at Cocktail Party Physics asks measles, mumps, rubella - or autism?: Yes, that's a deliberately provocative headline. I chose it because that's what the media would like you to think your choices are. You can vaccinate your kids and risk giving them autism, or protect them against a number of dangerous, miserable, and potentially crippling communicable diseases. Does that protection cause autism? Is that really the choice? Or is it a false hypothesis hyped by the media and unsupported by real research? Is the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine a commercial conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies to make money, or are vaccines an actual health benefit?


• Jenifer at Mind the Gap comes late to talking about Darwin and DNA: Isolation is satisfying: you wash off the medium, pluck up a sterile glass cloning cylinder with a forceps, dip one end in high vacuum grease and press it down around one of the colonies to form a water-tight seal. A tiny amount of the enzyme trypsin will loosen the colony (consisting of anywhere from twenty to a thousand cells) and the cells can be replated into a small-welled vessel to begin the laborious process of nurturing, expansion and validation. I usually take about twelve colonies to ensure that I get at least one cell line that is healthy and that expresses both markers to sufficient levels, but for the next week or so I’ll have my hands full transferring my new babies to increasingly larger vessels, freezing down samples as back-ups and running tests to decide which will be ultimately be chosen — and which will be flushed.


• JR Haas at The Planetologist reminds us that A Habitable Zone by any other name…: … Is still not guaranteed to support life That’s one thing that people need to keep in mind, as NASA’s Kepler Mission begins its long vigil. Kepler will examine around 100,000 stars in one region of the sky continuously for at least three and a half years, and using that accumulated data astronomers will get a much better sense of what solar systems are really like in this part of our Galaxy. Kepler data help settle a major question in astronomy and geology… how common are Earth-like planets? Right now we’d simply don’t know, because most extrasolar systems found so far are not like ours. Not even remotely. Many have hot gas giants the mass of Jupiter or greater orbiting very close to their sun. Many have gas giants that spiral in long, elliptical orbits that would have long since thrown any inner Earth-like planets into their sun or into deep space. A few systems have smallish, probably rocky planets orbiting dim, feeble suns where the Habitable Zone - the region around the star that receives enough light for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface - almost grazes the tiny sun’s surface.


• And Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East gives us too fascinating looks at Egyptian tombs, leading with the god's wife of Amun: But, before we talk about her mummy, let's first go back to roughly the time she was born -- perhaps 30 years before her lamentably early death (and she died somewhere around the year 800 BCE). That was a tough time to have entered the world, as she did, in the city of Thebes in Egypt. For, give or take a few years, around 840-835, the crown prince of Egypt -- whose name was Osorkon -- consulted the ram-headed god Herishaf (right) on a potentially catastrophic matter of state.


• Next, she looks at the tomb beneath the tomb: Back in 2002, a Spanish-Egyptian archaeological team working in Thebes reopened the tomb of Djehuty, overseer of the treasury -- and holder of a slew of other major titles -- during the extraordinary years when Queen Hatshepsut became pharaoh and ruled Egypt as its king. Now they have discovered an Unknown Tomb beneath that tomb, and it is filled with surprises.

Enjoy!