"Cosmos" reboot to premiere this weekend

Having gone to school in Ithaca for almost three years now, I've noticed there's a lot of feelings for the late great Carl Sagan, who taught over at Cornell. He was on the board at the science museum I worked at, and their planet walk is named after him. (The museum also has Bill Nye narrating the walk when you call the number at each station, but that's aside the point.) Even though I'm not really directly involved with anything else he's done, it's a bit of a point of pride whenever I hear him brought up because it's the same area.

Upon hearing about the Cosmos reboot, I was happy not only for that reason but because we really really need something like the revolutionary documentary series from the 1980s to get us back on track.  It'll be hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is awesome, and even though the executive producer is also the mastermind behind the completely unrelated Family Guy series, Seth MacFarlane seems to be pretty serious about this series. In an interview with NYT, he said the original series meant a lot to him as a kid, as “Cosmos addressed questions that every human being has, whether they think about them on a mathematical level or just as a layman. It presented them in a wonderfully candy-coated way for those of us who are not scientists, and yet it didn’t dumb anything down.”

I think this is where the power of the show is going to be, bringing science to the masses in a friendly way. I know I say that a lot, especially considering that's what I want to do in life, but there's something different about a TV show. I don't want to say it's mindless because this sort of thing certainly isn't, especially with how Sagan and now deGrasse Tyson emphasize the spirit of urgency in our human condition, but the people who desperately need to be exposed to this kind of information are the people who aren't going to be willing to pick up a science magazine or read a book about it. Television reaches people in a different way, and those people who need to see this might be more apt to check it out this way.

And as a Firefly flan, I have to say this: Please don't screw this up, FOX.

Desert whales killed by algal blooms

This sounds about as ridiculous as the idea of aquatic sloths, but I promise both are true and both lived in South America. Thanks to the wonders of plate tectonics, there's a section of the Atacama Desert filled with fossils of marine mammals, including some pretty cool whale specimens; this is where the site's name, Cerro Ballena, comes from (it literally means "whale hill"). The site was uncovered in 2010 when construction workers were trying to build a road in the area, and researchers were able to go in to look at and eventually 3D image the fossils, as the time lapse below shows.


Some of the researchers were able to take this information to come up with a reasonable explanation for the extinction of all these animals in one place. The arrangement of the bones at Cerro Ballena showed that the animals, including whales, seals, and the aforementioned aquatic sloth had all died at sea and washed up on shore. This mimicked another event from the late '80s in which 14 humpback whales died from an algal bloom.

Before you ask, no, it wasn't like the algae formed a giant, amoeba-like mass that strangled the whales. Rather, the mechanism at work here is that of bioaccumulation. A surplus of nutrients can create an algal bloom, and certain types of algae produce neurotoxins, which are obviously bad. Going up the food chain, the problem gets exponentially worse: in the case of a baleen whale, each krill it eats might only have a few units of toxin, but these animals eat a LOT of krill, so the toxin adds up pretty quickly. A slightly different process occurs in top predators: krill might have 1 unit of toxin, a small fish may eat 10 krill, a larger fish may eat 10 small fish, and you get the picture.

So far, this seems to be the most reasonable. A tsunami would've beached a lot more than just big animals, and disease wouldn't have beached so many different types of animals.

Dairy aficionado answers cheese FAQs

I love cheese. I like a lot of foods, but cheese is definitely up there on the list of things that the loss of which would make me very sad. We even have an entire drawer in our fridge dedicated to it: I have string cheese for snacking, sprinkle cheese (or as you adults call it, shredded cheese) for pasta and such, a big hunk of Parmesan for when I feel like being fancy and whipping out the microplane, and even the crappy cheese food slices that aren't technically cheese but are perfect for egg sandwiches.

My own adoration aside, there's now a book all about the science behind one of the best foods ever. USDA research chemist Michael Tunick wrote The Science of Cheese last year, and he wrote a small piece for Wired with a few cheese FAQs he's gotten throughout his career. Here are a few from his list:

• Why is cheese yellow? The plants that cows eat contain carotenoids, which are the pigment compounds that make carrots orange. During the transfer from diet to milk, carotenoids latch onto fat: cheese is yellow because the fat content is high enough. Milk isn't yellow because there isn't enough fat and therefore not enough carotenoids. Fun fact: this only works in cows; goats, sheep, and other dairy animals convert their carotenoids to vitamin A, so their milk and subsequent dairy products are white.
• Can lactose intolerant people eat cheese? Actually, yes. Most lactose is removed from cheese during the manufacturing and aging processes. The mutation leading to lactose digestion arose in Europe between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, likely as a way to allow people access to vitamin D considering the low sunlight levels, but the majority of the world's population (~65%) is lactose intolerant, especially outside Europe and northern Africa. 

  

  Picture from J.P. Lon on Wikimedia Commons

• Why are some cheeses made in specific places? For some places, there's actually a law preventing certain types of cheeses being made in other areas. I remember watching a special on the Travel Channel about a race in England where they throw a wheel of Double Gloucester down a really steep hill and have participants run down to catch it. It was a pretty big deal, not only because a lot of people get injured each year rolling down a hill that I want to say had a 90% grade on one part, but also because Gloucester cheese is only made in that area. Roquefort, Brie, Emmental, and other cheeses are also only made in their namesake area, and one of the banks in the Emilia-Romagna area uses their parmesan-reggiano cheese as collateral for loans.
• And finally, can you make cheese from breast milk? Apparently this was a very common question that Tunick received, and the answer is no because there's not enough protein in general, let alone casein, which is the protein involved in forming curds.