When Systems Fail It's No Accident

Once in a while some beautiful technological achievement fails catastrophically. How does that happen? Usually it is due to a sequence of independent errors, accidents, and misjudgments. When these faults line up, disaster happens.

The explosion aboard the Apollo 13 Service Module that almost cost the lives of three U.S. astronauts in 1970 has been studied extensively, and its many causes are known.

The problem was with oxygen tank 2. The following is mostly verbatim from NASA's web page on the accident and the Apollo 13 Review Board Report. (Skip to the bottom if you're in a hurry.)

1. The oxygen tanks had originally been designed to run off the 28 volt DC power of the command and service modules. However, the tanks were redesigned to also run off the 65 volt DC ground power at Kennedy Space Center. All components were upgraded to accept 65 volts except the heater thermostatic switches, which were overlooked. These switches were supposed to open and turn off the heater when the tank temperature reached 80 degrees F. (Normal temperatures in the tank were -300 to -100 F.)

2. The thermostatic switch discrepancy was not detected by NASA, NR, or Beech in their review of documentation, nor did tests identify the incompatibility of the switches with the ground support equipment at KSC, since neither qualification nor acceptance testing required switch cycling under load as should have been done.

3. The no. 2 oxygen tank used in Apollo 13 had originally been installed in Apollo 10. It was removed from Apollo 10 for modification and during the extraction was dropped 2 inches, slightly jarring an internal fill line. In itself, the displaced fill tube assembly was not particularly serious, but it led to the use of improvised detanking procedures at KSC which almost certainly set the stage for the accident.

4. During pre-flight testing, tank no. 2 would not empty correctly, possibly due to the damaged fill line. (On the ground, the tanks were emptied by forcing oxygen gas into the tank and forcing the liquid oxygen out; in space there was no need to empty the tanks.) The heaters in the tanks were normally to be used only for very short periods to heat the interior slightly, increasing the pressure to keep the oxygen flowing. When the tank would not empty normally, It was decided to use the heater to "boil off" the excess oxygen, requiring 8 hours of 65 volt DC power.

It is believed that in trying to open as the temperature rose the thermostat switches arced, being designed for lower voltage, and welded shut, allowing the temperature within the tank to rise to over 1000 degrees F in spots.

5. The gauges measuring the temperature inside the tank were designed to measure only to 80 F, so the extreme heating was not noticed. The high temperature emptied the tank, but also resulted in serious damage to the Teflon insulation on the electrical wires to the power fans within the tank.

6. The Teflon insulation was flammable in pure oxygen, given an ignition source.

56 hours into the mission the power fans were turned on within the tank for the third "cryo-stir" of the mission, a procedure to stir the oxygen slush inside the tank so it wouldn't stratify. The exposed fan wires shorted and the Teflon insulation caught fire. This fire rapidly heated and increased the pressure of the oxygen inside the tank, and may have spread along the wires to the electrical conduit in the side of the tank, which weakened and ruptured under the pressure, causing the no. 2 oxygen tank to explode. This damaged the no. 1 tank and parts of the interior of the service module and blew off the bay no. 4 cover.

Astronaut Swigert said, "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."

So there you have it:

• Overlooked upgrading thermostat switched during design modification
  

• Poorly designed test procedures failed to reveal the switch problem
  

• Jarred tank displacing fill tube
  

• Used untested emptying procedure; thermostat switches failed; tank overheated; insulation was damaged. The tank was now a bomb.
  

• Tank temperature gauges only read to 80 F, so overheating was not obvious. Nobody noticed that although the tank temperature had reached the top of the scale, the switches had not opened, as shown by current readings on the control panel.
  

• Teflon insulation was flammable in its pure oxygen environment.
  

If any one of those six things hadn't happened, the accident would not have occurred.

But after that sequence of errors it was only a matter of time before the fan wires shorted, the fire started and the tank exploded. (It was only on the third stir that they shorted, perhaps jostled by the stirring itself. If it had happened earlier the crew would probably have been lost.)

Most big engineering failures (bridge and building collapses, plane crashes, ship sinkings) follow this pattern. A number of little failures add up to one big disaster. More examples at this site. Wikipedia has some further links.

World AIDS Day -- Focus on Women

Women are catching up in HIV/AIDS infections. About half of all the infected adults world wide are women. In the hardest-hit region, Sub-Saharan Africa, 60% of those infected are women.

More than 1% of all the adults in the world are living with HIV/AIDS. Infection rates range from 0.1% in East Asia, through 0.3% in Western Europe, 0.6% in North America, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia, 2.3% in the Caribbean, to 7.4% in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Here is a table.)

The global AIDS epidemics killed about 3.1 million people last year, about 6% of all deaths from all causes world wide.

The World Health Organization and UNAIDS have issued a new report, AIDS Epidemic Update 2004, with the latest statistics on the spread and impact of AIDS around the world.

The increasing impact on women is due to both physical and social factors.

• "Women are more physically susceptible to HIV infection than men. Male-to-female HIV transmission during sex is about twice as likely to occur as female-to-male transmission," according to WHO.

• The imbalance of power in the family makes it hard for women to insist on safe strategies even when they are aware them. "Strategies to address gender inequalities are urgently needed if we want a realistic chance at turning back the epidemic," said Dr Peter Piot, UNAIDS Executive Director. "Concrete action is necessary to prevent violence against women, and ensure access to property and inheritance rights, basic education and employment opportunities for women and girls."

• "In North America and Europe, an increasing number of people are becoming infected through unprotected heterosexual sex. In the United States, AIDS disproportionately affects African American and Hispanic women, with AIDS ranked among the top three causes of death for African American women aged 35-44 years. . . . There are strong indications that the main risk factor for many women acquiring HIV is the often undisclosed risk behaviour of their male partners."

• "In Western Europe, HIV infection through heterosexual sex more than doubled between 1997 and 2002. It is feared that large numbers of HIV-infected people are still unaware of their HIV status. In the United Kingdom, HIV has become the fastest-growing serious health condition."

The Physics of Shopping

Physicists love to analyze complex systems. Face it, in order to try to figure out a world where everything affects everything else, they have to. And to analyze complex systems you have to Do The Math. Then you can apply the same mathematical tools to other complex systems, such as book sales.

A report in today's issue of Physical Review Letters shows that the sales of popular books on Amazon.com can be partly explained by complex-systems models. Or, as they so quaintly put it,

"These results are rationalized quantitatively by a simple model of epidemic propagation of interactions with long memory within a network of acquaintances. The observed relaxation of sales implies that the sales dynamics is dominated by cascades rather than by the direct effects of news or advertisements, indicating that the social network is close to critical."

Here is a "Physics News Update" from the American Institute of Physics that tries to use more English. (However, most English speakers will note the egregious usage error in the first paragraph. Physicists don't seem to feel they need editors.)

Apparently physicists speak three languages:

• Mathematics, when analyzing things,
• Physics Jargon, when formally communicating with other physicists, and
• Natural human language when interfacing with non-physicists or on non-physics subjects. (I have no direct evidence for successful physicist-nonphysicist communication by this third modality.)

"What physicists bring to economics is not new concepts but rather the determination to put these concepts to quantitative tests." Professor H. Eugene Stanley, Boston University.

The underlying concept is the idea of models. Models are mathematical constructions (equations, algorithms, calculations) that try to mimic and predict the behavior of real-world systems. For example, models using Newton's Laws of Motion and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion do a pretty good job of predicting the behavior of the real-world solar system. We could hardly expect space probes like Cassini/Huygens to get to Saturn without accurate predictions of orbital motions and trajectories.


If we can model the motions of planets, moons and probes, maybe we can model the behavior of groups of book-buyers, if we can find the patterns that predict their actions.

Dining on Dinosaurs?

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Many families will be feasting together, and most of them will have turkey for their holiday dinner.

Why is this bird called a "turkey", at least in the U.S., since it originally came from Mexico? Well, it made a round trip (return journey). Brought to Spain and the Mediterranean shortly after Columbus's voyage to the Western Hemisphere, it was carried to various parts of Europe by traders, including Levantine traders who handled goods from the East. In Britain it came to be known as Turkey fowl. In other European languages it is connected with India. British colonists brought it to America again. They also encountered similar wild fowl in Eastern North America. Here is the story of the name.

Turkeys are the only mainstream agricultural animal that was domesticated in the Americas . There are many domesticated plants from the Americas which have spread around the world (maize, potato, sweet "potato", rubber, lima bean, tomato, chili pepper, peanut, bottle gourd, sunflower, quinoa, cranberry, cotton, pineapple, papaya, avocado, tobacco, cassava (manioc), cacao, vanilla, cashew, pecan, Brazilnut, coca and others—about one-third of world crops were domesticated by native Americans).

But few widespread domestic animals come from the New World. The turkey is probably the only one you are intimately familiar with, and the only one that makes a significant contribution to modern agriculture. Llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, American bison (buffalo), the muscovy duck and some others (e.g. capybaras—not really domesticated) are used for food or work, but are not much raised outside their original homes. Dogs were raised in the Americas before Columbus, but they probably accompanied human settlement of the Americas from Asia.

Current scientific thinking is that birds descended from dinosaurs. They are placed in the group of maniraptoran dinosaurs, those with "seizing hands."

Although new fossil finds continue to add to our understanding of evolution of birds, and may change our ideas substantially if something really revolutionary turns up, the basic thesis is well supported by a growing number of fossil feathered dinosaurs.

There are some, of course, who see evidence that birds are not related to dinosaurs. This is definitely a minority view, and hinges on disputed technical details.

There is always ambiguity in science, but even with uncertainty there can be consensus. The consensus is that when you carve that Thanksgiving turkey you will be dining on a dinosaur! Bon appetit!

The Virgin Mary on a Grilled Cheese Sandwich?

How can an image of the Virgin Mary appear on a grilled cheese sandwich? There are two reactions involved:

• First, the Maillard reaction, when sugars and amino acids react non-enzymatically. This commonly causes browning during cooking.

• Second, pattern-recognition reactions in someone's brain, which enables the subject to see the image interpreted as Mary's face in the toast.

If divine intervention occurred in the browning process, the appearance of this image could be considered miraculous. If there was no supernatural role in the pattern of browning, then the image is not miraculous, but it is still interesting.

Many foods brown when they are cooked, and flavors and aromas develop. This has been known for ages. But the mechanism by which a grilled cheese sandwich browns was first explained by the French biochemist Louis-Camille Maillard (1878-1936) at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Maillard reaction is a chemical reaction between an amino acid and a reducing sugar, usually requiring the addition of heat. Like caramelization, it is a form of non-enzymatic browning. The reactive carbonyl group of the sugar interacts with the nucleophilic amino group of the amino acid, and interesting but poorly characterized odor and flavor molecules result. (Thefreedictionary.com)

Examples of the Maillard reaction include:

• the browning of bread and toast
• the color of beer, chocolate, coffee, and maple syrup
• the flavor of roast meat

Here is some more explanation of the chemistry involved, from Professor Christine H. Scaman's food chemistry course at the University of British Columbia.

Maillard reactions are associated with application of dry heat, since water is one of the reaction products. In high-water-activity systems (e.g. boiling) equilibria do not favor Maillard reactions. The bread of a grilled cheese sandwich, typically fried in butter or other fat, presents the ideal environment for Maillard browning. (Grilled cheese sandwich recipe—this is how we always made it in our house.)

Anyone having a roasted turkey for the U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving this week will notice the skin of the bird turns from white to golden brown during cooking, due to the Maillard reaction.

Why "Science In Action"?

"Science in Action" was a San Francisco TV program that I watched as a kid in the 50s. It was produced at the California Academy of Sciences and hosted by Dr. Earl S. Herald. It was cheaply produced, black and white of course, but it was fascinating. I'm sure it contributed to my interest in science.

Neither Mr. Wizard, Beakman, nor Bill Nye the Science Guy (not even Dr. Science--he's not a real doctor!) could beat Dr. Earl S. Herald talking to Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz about submarines, to Dr. John Lawrence about high-altitude medicine, or to an FBI agent about forensic science (with a demonstration of how fast he could draw and fire his revolver). And then there was always the "animal of the week"!

Some of the old programs are supposed to be available at the Internet Archive, which gives access to the Prelinger Archives. There are also some clips here.

Dr. Herald was superintendent of the Steinhart Acquarium at the California Academy of Sciences, an expert on fish.

Centropyge heraldi

Centropyge heraldi, type specimen collected at Bikini Atoll, where Dr. Herald did marine surveys after the atomic bomb tests there. (Picture from FishBase.)

Undergrad Field-Trip Find Makes Student Famous

Here's what can happen on a geology class field trip when

• you keep your eyes open,
• you aren't afraid to ask the instructor about what you see, and
  
• you are incredibly lucky.

University of Pittsburgh student Adam Striegel went on a routine field trip with Lecturer Charles E. Jones's geology lab class. He noticed an interesting rock and showed it to the instructor. It turned out to have a beautiful fossil of a novel genus of 300-million-year-old amphibian in it. It will probably be named after its discoverer, Mr. Striegel!

The local press picked it up.
It got on the national news.
Yahoo news .de featured the story.
There is a nice picture at this Ukranian site.
And naturally he got an A in the course!

That's science in action!

Eid Mubarak 1425

Today (or tomorrow, in some parts of the world) is Eid-ul-Fitr, the Muslim holiday after the end of the fast of Ramadan. The reason it is celebrated on different days in different regions is that the Muslim liturgical calendar is based on lunar months, each beginning with the sighting of the new moon. Astronomical positions and atmospheric conditions determine when that new moon can first be seen, and where.

The importance of predicting astronomical events is one reason astronomy flourished in Muslim lands while Europe was falling into the Dark Ages. One legacy of mediaeval Islamic science is that we still use Arabic names for most of the prominent stars. If you go out this evening and the sky is clear you will probably be able to see the big square made up of stars in the constellations of Pegasus and Andromeda. The four corners are:

Modern Name	Arabic Name	Meaning	Modern Designation
Markab	Mankib al-Faras	The shoulder of the horse	Alpha Pegasi
Scheat	As-Saq	The leg	Beta Pegasi
Algenib	Al-Janb	The flank	Gamma Pegasi
Alpheratz (or Sirrah	Surrat al-Faras	Navel of the horse	Alpha Andromedae

Create a sky map for your location. Here is a list of Arabic star names. What does "Betelgeuse" mean?

If it is really clear, and you are away from the lights of the city, you will be able to see the spiral galaxy in Andromeda, the most distant object visible to the naked eye. The photons hitting your eye when you see this nearest-neighbor galaxy have been traveling for 2.2 million years. (They were emitted before human beings like us evolved -- though our extinct relative Homo erectus was already making tools.)

The Andromeda galaxy was known to Islamic astronomers at the beginning of the 10th century. It was illustrated and called "a little cloud" by Abd-al-Rahman Al Sufi, of the court of the Emire Adud ad-Daula in Isfahan, Persia, in his famous "Book of Fixed Stars" in 964.

More on mediaeval Islamic astronomy:

Islamic Gateway
University of Nevada at Reno
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals
science

Medical Errors -- The leading cause of preventable death in America

Imagine opening your newspaper to read "Two airliners crash——all aboard lost". Now imagine reading that same headline nearly every day of the year! That’s how many Americans die every year from preventable accidents and mistakes in U.S. hospitals.

And that only accounts for the deaths due to avoidable mishaps in hospitals. Many tens of thousands more are injured or maimed. And beyond that, many thousands are hurt or killed in non-hospital settings such as clinics and nursing homes. In addition to suffering and death, these errors cost us tens of billions of dollars in excess health care expense each year.

We have all heard heartbreaking news stories of patients who have had the wrong leg or kidney removed. These were avoidable medical errors. (Medicine even has a name for this problem: "wrong-side surgery".) But each day there are thousands of medical errors that cause injury or death to patients nation wide——patients who put their trust in health workers who tolerate a rate of errors that would be unacceptable in any other industry.

More people probably die each year from these medical errors than from any other cause except heart disease, stroke, all cancers taken together, and maybe chronic lower respiratory diseases like emphysema. Breast cancer and prostate cancer together don't kill as many. AIDs, car crashes or suicide? Way fewer.

Extensive studies have shown that several percent of patients admitted to hospitals suffer preventable injuries due to errors in medical management (2% of admissions in a New York study using 1984 data, and the same in another in Utah and Colorado using 1992 data). Of course in hospitals a lot of people die anyway, so these avoidable incidents are easily covered up or ignored. Imagine if 2% of the customers of all restaurants became sick or died because of errors by the restaurant employees.

Other industries go to great lengths to prevent defects and errors, and they succeed. (They use statistics to identify potential problems and fix them—they do the math!) We need to demand the same from medicine.

(The Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academies published a detailed report in 2000.)

(Department of Health and Human Services medical errors site.)

Drugs Targeted by Race

Results of a recent drug trial have sparked discussion of the pros and cons of targeting therapies by race. Americans of African descent have worse problems with heart disease than the U.S. population as a whole. Many causes have been blamed, including lack of access to the health system, quality of care, environmental factors and lifestyle as well as possible genetic factors.

Since black Americans suffer disproportionately from heart disease, the Nitromed company decided to run a trial of its new drug BiDil® (a combination of the older generic drugs isosorbide dinitrate and hydralazine) including only blacks with severe heart disease. The results are due out in the next New England Journal of Medicine and are available in early release at their website.

The new combination pill, when added to standard therapy, had significant benefit, reducing the chance of hospitalization for and death from heart failure, and improving quality of life. Nitromed hopes to have the pill approved for this specific indication -- severe heart disease in blacks -- by next year.

Here are some of the headlines generated by the announcement of this research.

• Promise Seen in Drug for Heart Failure New York Times
• Heart drug seen aiding blacks Boston Globe
• The Dawn of Race-Based Drugs? BusinessWeek
• Controversy over heart drug for blacks only The Independent

The modern consensus is that "race" is at best only a very crude way of categorizing people. (Only about 5% of genetic variability in humans is between ethnic/racial groups. You differ just as much genetically from others of your "race" as you do from those of other races. However, there are obviously specific genetic differences between races -- in fact we use markers like skin pigmentation, eyelid folds, and hair characteristics to create racial categories.)

Some experts suggest that this therapy might work just as well in heart-disease patients of other races. (However, a large trial years ago with veterans of all races found no significant benefit from these specific drugs. Researchers were later able to discern some benefit among black subjects, which led to the current trial.) Experience with other heart-failure drugs indicates lower effectiveness in African Americans than in European Americans, so any way to help this population is welcome.

An editorial accompanying the publication of these results in the New England Journal of Medicine asks, "are we moving into a new era of race-based therapeutics?" This is an awkward question, given that race is such a crude category, but at the same time, says the editorial, the medical establishment shouldn't shy away from the potential benefits of race-conscious therapeutics.

There is widespread interest in tailoring therapies to patients' specific genetic backgrounds. Perhaps categorizing patients by race can be useful until we develop more specific markers for heart-failure risk and drug response.

(The Association of Black Cardiologists was cosponsor of the Nitromed trial.)

What do you think?

Science in the Movies

Here's a quick list of some movies that feature scientists, engineers, mathematicians, etc., actually doing some science. There must be science in the movie (usually embedded in a love story, war movie, thriller, western, etc.). They must do the math. Scientist at work.

There are basically two ways that movies look at scientists:

• Scientist/mathematician/engineer/inventor as a tormented, or at least slightly odd, solitary genius

• A Beautiful Mind
• The Fly
• Frankenstein
• Good Will Hunting
• Back to the Future
• The Island of Dr. Moreau
• Sherlock Holmes
• The Man in the White Suit
  

• Scientist/mathematician/engineer as part of an imperfect team

• Fat Man and Little Boy
• Contact
• The Dam Busters
• The Andromeda Strain
• Ghostbusters
• Flight of the Phoenix

Here are my remarks on some films that present a range of images of science and scientists, arranged chronologically. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

The Story of Louis Pasteur--1935, William Dieterle. Paul Muni won the Oscar(r) for best actor in the title role. Too much of a western, with Good (the saintly Pasteur) vs. Evil (the skeptical, conservative establishment), but still more science than most films about scientists. Gets 7.4 of 10 on IMDB.

The Dam Busters--1954, Michael Anderson. True story of Dr. Barnes N. Wallis, CBE, FRS, (played by Michael Redgrave) and his role in the war-time effort to develop and deliver bombs against the Rhur dams. Even uses some real footage of the bomb trials. IMDB voters give it 7.5 out of 10.

The Flight of the Phoenix--1965, Robert Aldrich. (I haven't seen the remake by John Moore yet.) Perfect casting of Jimmy Stewart as over-the-hill, seat-of-the-pants pilot (remember he was top-of-the-hill flyboy Charles Lindbergh in 1957). He has to hold his marooned cast together while asocial engineer Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Krüger) struggles to convince them he has a way to safety. 7.6 of 10 by IMDB voters.

The Andromeda Strain--1971, Robert Wise. The first film from a novel by Michael Crichton, (M.D.), before Westworld, Coma, or Jurassic Park. As the review at And You Call Yourself a Scientist! notes, the film portrays more accurately than most how "We [scientists] spend very little time doing brain transplants, resurrecting the dead, or even plotting to take over the world with our secret armies of remote-controlled flesh-eating zombies. What we do spend a great deal of time doing, however, is the same thing over and over and over again." Seven out of ten on IMDB.

The Serpent and the Rainbow--1988, Wes Craven. Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis wrote several books about his plant-hunting adventures. This is the movie of one of them. Emphasis on drugs and zombies. But Wade really did do some freaky things in the field. Movie gets 6 of 10 on IMDB. Bill Pullman's third film.

Fat Man and Little Boy--1989, Roland Joffé. The Manhattan Project. Paul Newman as crusty Army administrator Gen. Leslie Groves tangles with prima donna Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz--you may not know his face, but you have probably heard his voice), while scientist Michael Merriman (John Cusack) actually does math in one crucial scene. Gets 6 out of 10 on IMDB .

Microcosmos--1996, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou. Incredible ultra-macro-closeup window into the world of insects and other creepy-crawlies. No science, no scientists. Just bugs being bugs. You will be awed--and isn't that one of the reasons science is fun? (8 of 10 on IMDB.)

Enigma--2001, Michael Apted. Bletchley Park codebreakers plus love story/whodunit. Boffette Kate Winslet. Tormented math genius Dougray Scott. First film from Mick Jagger's Jagged Films. IMDB rates it 7 out of 10, though reviews were mixed.

Here are some other films featuring scientists, engineers and the like:

• Stand and Deliver
• A Brief History of Time
• The China Syndrome
• Dr. Strangelove
• The Prize
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• any Sherlock Holmes--his reliance on deduction, reasoning, and facts makes him an archetypal scientist. The films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce are my favorites--crisp, sharp: case closed.
• Q in Bond movies--not really working at the bench any more--he's more of an administrator.
• Young Tom Edison
• Edison, the Man
• Real Science
• My Science Project
• Medicine Man
• Lorenzo's Oil
• The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
  
• The Invisible Ray
• the Invisible Man
• Re-Animator
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Demon Seed
  

Latest News From Titan and Mars

The Mars Exploration Rovers keep sending back data, and the Cassini-Huygens probes are just beginning their four-year mission to Saturn and its moons.

The best site I have found for interesting analysis of these projects is The Planetary Society. Their posts have lots of good science and analysis, plus the pretty pictures.

If you have found a better site, please add a comment.

Are Human Beings Weeds?

What is a "weed"? Generally it means a plant growing where it is not wanted. It is not the plant itself, but how it interferes with what we are trying to do with the environment that earns it the name of "weed". This definition is completely human-centered. The broader term "weedy species" applies to animals as well as plants.

But looked at another way, don't we humans ourselves have many of the characteristics of weedy species?

Characteristics of weeds and weedy species (as we humans have defined them):

• They interfere with activities we value, such as the way we want our gardens to look, the production of crops and livestock at least cost, other economic activities, or our use of the environment.

• They crowd out other species we would prefer to have at that site.

• They crowd out native species already growing there.
  

• They are directly toxic or otherwise bothersome to us (think of poison ivy).
  

• They are costly or difficult to prevent or remove.
  

• They tend to reproduce prolifically and occupy vacant or disrupted environments.
  

• They are often versatile in terms of habitat, nutrition, and interaction with other species--flexible and adaptable.
  

• Examples are rats and mice, or other species when introduced in new environments without their natural predators (dogs, prickly pear cactus in Australia)

Something that is a weed in one situation may be desirable elsewhere. Milkweed is an agricultural weed, and is toxic if eaten. But it is also the sole food of the larvae of monarch butterflies, which are highly esteemed. No milkweed plants--no monarch butterflies.

Those Pesky Humans!

• They have invaded virtually every habitat on Earth except underwater zones (and will probably find a way to colonize Mars).

• They can out-compete any other species that occupies territory they want or that threatens them.

• They can reproduce rapidly when constraints of disease are removed by their technology.

• They have become one of the dominant species on the planet in just a few thousand generations.

We're the kings and queens of the weeds! (Yes, there is a They Might Be Giants song on this subject. Download the video here.)

Why don't we teach science?

Kids are born scientists. They want to know how the world works. They are curious about everything. They will need correct information and reasoning ability in the future to detect and avoid all the baloney that will be thrown at them (much of it pretending to be "science").

How can we best prepare them to deal with all the misinformation, confusion and error they will encounter?

• Try to give them a feeling of wonder and excitement about the marvels of the natural world

• Teach them that science is more than just facts—how it works

• Give them tools for critical thinking and baloney detection

• Give them the ability to "do the math"

• If time allows, provide them with some useful facts

I don't emphasize the facts, partly because the "facts" presented by many science teachers are so out-of-date as to be misleading. Remember, most teachers were trained in teaching, not in science. They foist an amazing amount of garbage on unsuspecting students. For example:

• Discouraging review of the situation from Forbes Magazine.

• Richard Feynman wasn't joking when he said science textbooks were UNIVERSALLY LOUSY! (his emphasis).

• Textbooks have been found riddled with errors in a 2001 study. Its authors note, "Many middle-school science teachers have little physical science training and may not recognize errors".

• Worst of all, most science teaching misleads students about what science is and how it works!

Nature is so cool! Here are some questions that can be approached "scientifically":

• Do plants feel pain? (Do animals feel pain?)

• What limits the height to which trees can grow? (The world'’s tallest tree is in California—112 meters tall)

• How much do human "clones" have in common with each other? (There are human clones, you know—they are called "twins".)

What questions would you ask? How would you find the answers? How good is your "baloney detector"?

Update

To see what can happen when science education is neglected or perverted, see this more recent post.

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