SERIOUSLY SILLY SCIENCE: a science reader for the year - and some of it is even true, is now available in paperback and kindle editions at Amazon. This is a collection of essays on scientific topics organized according to the months of the year, one chapter for each week.
Below are two sample chapters, and one of them is not even in the book. This is in keeping with my general policy to under promising and over delivering. I can promise you nothing from this book, but you will get sixty chapters instead of what would be a normal 52 chapters in an annual reader.
JANUARY
Below are two sample chapters, and one of them is not even in the book. This is in keeping with my general policy to under promising and over delivering. I can promise you nothing from this book, but you will get sixty chapters instead of what would be a normal 52 chapters in an annual reader.
JANUARY
Week 5
(If
needed, although I don’t really know
anyone
who needs an extra week of January.)
CAFFEINE
(Attention readers: To get the best effect from
reading this article you should read as quickly as possible and jiggle one knee
while reading.)
Quick! I’m in a hurry! What’s the most commonly-consumed,
mind-altering substance in the world?
Nope. Nope. Nope.
It’s caffeine. Perhaps you hadn’t
thought of caffeine as a mind-altering substance. But, of course, it is. Why else would someone consume a normally
very bitter-tasting compound, if there was not some desired result? But we’ll get to that.
Unlike
other drugs, which are scarce in the natural world and have to be laboriously
and delicately extracted or created, caffeine literally grows on trees and
bushes, some kinds of cacti, lily, holly and camellia. In fact, I found that there were more than
one hundred species of plants that produce caffeine molecules in their seeds,
leaves, or bark.
Hurry! Can you tell me how many species of plants
manufacture nicotine or morphine? Just
one each! Quite a contrast. I wonder what caffeine is for in the real
world. Maybe it’s just so bitter it
keeps consumers away. Either that, or it
makes consumers so hyper they become inefficient. I’m just saying.
Human
association with caffeine began a very long time ago. Different plants containing caffeine were
discovered in different geographic regions of the world, but the use of all of
them by humans was wide spread. Today,
tea and coffee are the most popular drinks in the world. More tea is consumed, but coffee is a close
second. However, in the US, soft drinks
may surpass coffee in consumption. The
“cola” in some soft drink names comes from the “kola” bean, found in Africa,
which is used for caffeine extraction.
Caffeine
is manufactured by plants from a precursor molecule called xanthine. This chemical is widely distributed throughout
nature. In animals it is used to
manufacture DNA, and any excess is converted into uric acid and is
excreted. But in plants, xanthine acts a
little like a convenient table on which to stack other things. One of the things plants stack on the
xanthine table is a molecule called a methyl group.
If
one methyl group is stacked on an xanthine table, it is called - drum-roll
please - methyl xanthine. But the table
will support more methyl groups than one.
So if the plant attaches a second group, the chemical is then called dimethyl
xanthine. (These are not as creative as
some baby names, but certainly descriptive.)
Quick! Can you guess what we call
a molecule with three methyl groups on the xanthine? Very good!
Certain kinds of trimethylxanthine are also known as caffeine. (There are actually several variations of
this molecule that have similar effects.
For simplicity, and because I am in a hurry, I will just leave it at three.)
These
additions make caffeine kind of a lumpy, funny-shaped molecule. This is important because the molecule must
attach itself to another molecule in the cell membrane in order to alter cell
function. The two have to fit together
like a lock and key. This peculiar
shape, then, makes caffeine highly selective and specific as to which cells in
the human body are affected. It has very
little effect on most cells of the body.
But to the cells that have the matching molecule, it binds very tightly.
Excessive,
but normal, neuronal stimulation while awake produces yet another molecule
called adenosine. This binds to other
neurons and slows neuronal firing to keep neuron activity within safe
limits. Caffeine mimics adenosine. When caffeine slips into adenosine’s place,
it acts like a piece of wood under your brake pedal in that you can’t slow down
the neuron activity. It doesn’t
stimulate at all. It just blocks the
brake. Your own natural
neurotransmitters do the stimulating, and driving without brakes does have its hazards.
The
group of cells that are most sensitive to the adenosine brake are found in a
small area of the brainstem. But those
cells fan out and connect to every other portion of the brain. That is why caffeine has a particularly
broad, if difficult to predict, effect.
It can cause the heart to beat more rapidly, constricts some blood
vessels, relaxes others, relaxes airways, and causes some types of muscle cells
to contract more rapidly.
Quick now! Who was the composer who passionately loved
coffee, and whose frenetic fugues most clearly capture the essence of the
caffeinated experience? Bach!
VALENTINES DAY
Valentine’s Day
is such an enigma. The emotions of the
entire tradition are absolutely based on scientific principles and events, yet
scientists, themselves, seem curiously inept at the practice. You would think it would be the other way
around.
For example,
someone in love might say something like, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Now this counting thing would seem to be
right up a scientist's alley. In fact,
any good scientist should be able to not only count the ways, but also calculate
the mean, standard deviation, and the probability coefficient. At the very least a scientist should be able
to do a chi square analysis comparing this love with the love they have for
some other person.
However, in
actuality, scientists seem generally incapable of counting the ways they love
someone. In fact, they frequently either
ignore Valentine’s Day or completely forget about it. It is difficult to tell
the two responses apart, since they appear identical. It also seems that either would be nearly
impossible to do considering the massive advertisement campaigns based on the economic
interests of the day. That, let alone
the elevated expectations accompanying the season.
Here is
another example. What is so hard about
telling a young lady, “O, my luve’s like a red, red rose”? Spelling is often not a scientist’s strong
suit, true. But where would Robert Burns
be today without the metaphor of an actual, scientific object like a rose? Well, in all fairness, I guess he’d still be
dead. But you know what I mean. Who could be better at making a rose metaphor
than a good botanist?
Even the
layman knows that roses are beautiful, smell good, and have nasty thorns. However, a good scientist could also explain
that the flowers of most rose varieties, have five petals, and that the number
five is the number for a marriage because it is comprised of the female number,
two, with the male number three.
Instead,
scientists tend to go off on the rose being a woody perennial with hundreds of
species and thousands of cultivars. They
explain that showy flowers are just a ruse to invite pollination and that roses
possess sharp thorns as defense mechanisms against being harmed. All of which emphasizes anything but the
romantic aspects of roses. It’s like scientists
are tone deaf or something.
Lord Byron
was not a scientist, but a profligate romantic, who coined the lines, “She
walked in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.” Now, explain to me why Copernicus, or at
least Kepler, didn’t come up with those lines.
For crying out loud, were there no fair damsels in those days? It seems such a waste.
Astronomers
have been studying cloudless skies and starry nights for a long time. I doubt Byron even knew the names of any
constellations. He fails to mention even
one by name in his entire poem. It seems
like there is some kind of flaw in scientists that inhibits their ability to
see the essential beauty of their subjects and make application, metaphorically,
to emotional matters.
My theory is
that this inability is not entirely a genetic defect. Admittedly, some people are seemingly born
lacking the metaphor gene. But I think
long years of indoctrination through the study of science may also play a
role. For example, back when I was an
English Literature major playing and singing old-English-folk songs in coffee
shops, I was far more romantic than I am today after twelve years of higher
education.
Otherwise, it
is simply unexplained why scientists, in the last century or so, haven’t come
up with something like:
My love exists at the border
Of the space-time continuum,
Forever growing yet infinite,
The original angio-spasm.
So I call on scientists everywhere to rise up to meet the needs and
demands of the modern world. Whatever
the question, the answer is "more love".