Jun 23 2008
The Baggage of Words & The Role of Proteins in Biological Patterns
Over the weekend I printed out three science news releases from ScienceDaily. (For serious reading I prefer paper. For one, you can’t scribble notes on a computer screen.) Two articles got the word-nerd parts of my brain going, the third was just great science coupled with ramifications on how I may henceforth view things such as the seemingly perfectly positioned petals of the small, paisley-blue plumbago blossoms.
1) Newly Born Twin Stars Are Far From Identical
Very young eclipsing binaries like this are the Rosetta stones that tell us about the life history of newly formed stars,” says Keivan Stassun, associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University. . . . Eclipsing binaries are pairs of stars that revolve around an axis at a right angle to the direction to Earth. This orientation allows astronomers to determine the rate that the two stars orbit around each other – even when they cannot resolve the individual stars.
My question: why was the article title not worded this way: “Newly Formed Binary Stars Are Far From Identical”?
Is word choice much ado about nothing? A poor excuse to get your intellect in a bunch? Maybe in this case. But I believe that the use of words can shape a worldview, intentionally or not.
So no, the newly born stars were not spanked on their bottoms by Gawd after he delivered them into this universe.
As for the word “twin,” this is no doubt shorthand for “binary counterpart.” I guess you save quite a few letters and syllables by choosing “twin.” Used alone – no big deal. But coupled with “born” and “identical” and it begins to paint a picture.
2) Wavelets Crunch Through Doctors’ Day Long Struggle To Diagnose Brain Tumors
You may wonder, as I did, “what’s a wavelet?” It is certainly okay to use new words. Sure they force people to read further to discern the meaning, but this is fine. We need new words, for our knowledge of the universe is expanding. Encountering unfamiliar words is a growing pain we must undergo to gain a more precise understanding.
At first glance I assumed that a wavelet is technological term for a snippet of an electromagnetic pulse. But buried in the article I found this:
A wavelet filter is a computing tool that could be thought of as acting like a virtual microscope to analyse signals at various frequencies and positions in space. Each different kind of wavelet can be used to analyse a different aspect of a signal.
Okay, it’s a computing tool. Hardware or soft?
Wikipedia defines wavelet this way: “A wavelet is a kind of mathematical function used to divide a given function or continuous-time signal into different frequency components and study each component with a resolution that matches its scale.”
So here’s the problem, how can “a kind of mathematical function” “Crunch Through Doctors’ Day Long Struggle To Diagnose Brain Tumors”? The wavelets aren’t really doing the crunching. What about “Doctors Use Wavelets to Crunch Through . . . .”
3) Zebra’s Stripes, Butterfly’s Wings: How Do Biological Patterns Emerge?
In an organism’s early formation, genes encode proteins that orchestrate where types of cells migrate to. Future brain cells over here, kidney cells over there. While this pattern is not the same as a visually repeating pattern in a striped butterfly or spotted blossom, the two may be related by the underlying mechanism. The issue seems to be cell migration and the protein “signal” that determines whether a cell stays with neighboring cells or detaches and continues to migrate to a distinct location – which is relative to other cells.
Fascinating. It seems that the ribs in my ribcage may have something in common with the stripes of the zebra longwing butterfly that keeps fluttering around my desk, enjoyably distracting me.
[You should probably know that I have an outdoor desk -- glass table, really -- beneath a patio umbrella I like to work at when weather permits. During the summer, it's the first two or three hours of the day. So no, I'm not hallucinating in a cubicle!]
