Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Weird Science gets its kicks huffing glue from old books

Computer pop-ups help with real pharmaceuticals, self-mating hermaphrodites …

Sniffing the glue of old books: Lots of people speak fondly of the distinct aroma of libraries, both personal and private. It turns out they might not be imagining it. Researchers have done a wholesale identification of the volatile chemicals released by books and performed multivariate analysis on the results. It turns out that it's possible to identify a series of chemicals associated with the degradation of paper, which could provide archivists a noninvasive way of determining which works need immediate attention.

Cheaper pharmaceuticals through computer pop-ups—for real: This one's a randomized clinical trial that targeted the doctors, rather than the patients. Like everyone else, doctors are susceptible to advertising, and will often prescribe an expensive drug when there's an equivalent but cheaper generic available. It turns out that simply adding an alert to the computerized prescription system was enough to counteract the impact of heavy marketing, and keep the use of less-well-marketed alternatives at a steady level.

They're still working on the urine samples, though: This one isn't science so much as engineering, both of equipment and behavior. As you might imagine, taking the blood pressure of a mature male gorilla isn't a straightforward process. Sedate them, and the readings may not identify issues that are apparent during normal behavior. Try to do it while the gorilla is awake and, well, you might be facing a large and rather annoyed animal. But a combination of a properly engineered cuff and a well trained gorilla can apparently do the trick.

Plants don't see family as competition: Well, perhaps not all of them, but at least one species of Impatiens grows differently in the presence of genetically related plants than it does when unrelated plants are around. The recognition of kin appears to require roots, but the competition can play out above ground, where the plants respond to the presence of strangers by devoting more resources to leaves, presumably in an attempt to grab more sunlight than their neighbors.

Making a hermaphrodite is easier than you might think: One of the reasons that people started doing genetics with the worm C. elegans is that one of its two sexes is the hermaphrodite (the other's male); animals that can mate with themselves make a variety of genetic crosses much easier. But most of the worm's relatives have the standard male/female arrangement, leading scientists to consider what it might take to switch between the two. The answer, as it turns out, is not much. In a related species, lowering the dose of one protein involved in sex determination had females producing ineffective sperm; tweaking the dose of a protein that activated the sperm rescued this defect. Combining the two tweaks produced a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite.

Back in the day, Minoan knockoffs were all the rage: Anyone who hasn't visited Crete might be forgiven for not realizing that the Minoans had one of the most impressive civilizations of their time, their time being over 5,000 years ago. Apparently, they made quite an impression, because excavations of a Canaanite site in Israel has turned up Minoan knockoffs that date from over 1,000 after the peak of that civilization. No word on whether counterfeit Minoan handbags and DVDs turned up in the market.

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