Science Fair

2003-04-25T23:45:00.000-04:00

After a year climbing the ivory tower (and getting really winded halfway through and having to turn back around), I have returned to the thing I used to call Life. Also, to Science Fair. This site will be revamped and relaunched in a month or so. Stay tuned.

Yes, I know there's not a damn soul reading this.

2002-06-25T11:45:00.000-04:00

Alright. Fine. I admit it. I am still overworked and have no time to post. There's no point in pretending I do. Hopefully things will lighten up as the year goes on, but for now, Science Fair -- like my sanity -- is on indefinite hiatus.

2002-06-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

A friend writes me e-mail with the subject: "Science Fair R.I.P. Mary, we hardly knew ye."

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

As you've (hopefully) noticed, I haven't been around much. As you've (hopefully) noticed, I've been posting to Gene Expression instead. I have to admit, my posting there hasn't been terribly prolific either. There is a good reason for my almost-absence, a reason involving a romance-novel hunk, a long stretch of sand, and a bottle of Absolut Mandrin.

Actually, I've just been really, really overworked. (So stop worrying, honey.)

But I'm happy to report that as of Tuesday, things should lighten up a bit, and I'll not only be increasing my presence on Gene Expression, but also returning to Science Fair. That should please all of you who can't get enough of me. All one of you. (Thanks, honey.)

2002-06-03T15:16:00.000-04:00

Okay, here it is: the development that will solve the problem of my laziness in posting. It's a new tag-team blog called Gene Expression featuring (as the site says) "a geneticist, a writer, a capitalist, a biochemist, an economist...and a blender." As the only participant without "ist" attached to my title, I'm looking forward to some heated and very well-informed debates. Right now, only one of us has posted, but this, I'm sure, will change soon.

I'll still be maintaining Science Fair, but on a less frequent basis. In other words, it's unlikely the Daily Darwin feature will be daily anymore.

2002-06-03T13:24:00.000-04:00

Terrorists in the Treasury? You can fold a new $20 bill a certain way to get an image of the burning Twin Towers. On the flip side is an image of the burning Pentagon. The second image isn't very convincing, but the "towers" do look like the towers. Bizarre...

2002-05-30T16:56:00.000-04:00

If you have access to The Scientist, you can read more about the Santorum Amendment here...

2002-05-30T16:51:00.000-04:00

I tried to warn people about the Santorum Amendment when it was on the table last summer. Nobody listened. Now look.

2002-05-30T16:46:00.000-04:00

Note to New York men: We women don't all want you for your money alone. Just most of us.

2002-05-30T16:44:00.000-04:00

Doesn't bode well for punctuated equilibrium: species evolve slowly.

2002-05-29T15:58:00.000-04:00

A fun plaything: links to Darwinism across the disciplines.

2002-05-29T12:35:00.000-04:00

Mitochondrial DNA gives up another secret: the origins of Eastern languages.

2002-05-29T12:07:00.000-04:00

They're even more haunting than the cave paintings at Lascaux: exquisitely detailed 15,000-year-old human portraits discovered in a cave in southern France 50 years ago. Are they the real thing? Scientists didn't think so when they found them. But the tide in anthropological research is for pushing back the origins of culture. Perhaps, then, it's not surprising that Dr. Michael Rappenglueck is clamoring for a reassessment -- and apparently also claiming that the Pleiades may have held some ritual, religious significance for the same early moderns that drew the faces.

2002-05-29T12:01:00.000-04:00

A schizophrenia treatment that makes sense -- the sort that might have kept Andrea Yates sane and her children alive...

2002-05-28T15:24:00.000-04:00

Swamped again! But coming soon... a development that will solve this problem. Stay tuned. (No, I'm not getting laid off.)

2002-05-28T13:12:00.000-04:00

Things you won't find at Victoria's Secret...

2002-05-24T16:23:00.000-04:00

I know. I know. Today has been busy. For the second day in a row I've been working so hard I've forgotten to eat (that can't be good for my ghrelin levels.) I haven't posted, either, and to make things worse, I'm traveling again this weekend and won't be back until Tuesday. I suck.

Please don't forsake me. Come back Tuesday and I'll talk your ear off.

2002-05-23T22:24:00.000-04:00

I am validated. Ha ha ha.

2002-05-23T17:25:00.000-04:00

C'mon, guys. We are so close to 1,000 hits. Just five more people, please, come here now and validate my bloviating.

2002-05-23T14:45:00.000-04:00

There aren't many things that make me think Steven Wise has a good case for animal rights. This is one of the few. We know, of course, that modern-day chimps use sticks and such as tools. But stone tools? I'm not aware of any that do today. If chimp ancestors were making stone tools, why did they stop making them on the way to becoming chimps? Were the tools just not useful anymore? Why? Was it an environmental factor? And why didn't said environmental factor affect humans in the same way? Oh, the questions we now have to answer. It gives me chills. It's also a reminder of how short 5 million years is, how close we are to chimpanzees, how much they might be capable of knowing. Wise must be overjoyed -- and infuriated.

2002-05-23T14:22:00.000-04:00

It's a shame Steven Hawking feels the need to restrict the flow of his ideas. I don't think the public would feel terribly defrauded by a new, possibly easier way to understand the concepts in "A Brief History of Time," which everybody bought and nobody read, except those few who already understood basic astrophysics and should have been reading less brief histories of time anyway. Allow me to bring out one of my favorite dead horses and beat it -- science should increase the trove of public knowledge. That, this ain't doing. Should Hawking be paid for this transcript? Yes. Should he complain if he isn't? Yes. Should he lobby the FTC to stop the presses because this is intellectual fraud? No. I, for one, expect better behavior from the great MC.

2002-05-23T13:39:00.000-04:00

This shocker from CNN: Star Wars Episode III will end darkly. Who'd a thunk it?

2002-05-23T13:34:00.000-04:00

Corporate, I know, but I also adore Cosmic Log, the new MSNBC science blog run by a fellow named Alan Boyle. I found out about it in yet another old-media take on blogs from USC Annenberg's school of journalism.

2002-05-23T13:24:00.000-04:00

I love IsntaPundit just for its name. (The content is often equally witty.)

2002-05-22T16:19:00.000-04:00

The new e-mail address for blog correspondence is science_fair@hotmail.com.

2002-05-22T15:24:00.000-04:00

The blogosphere weighs in on Gould. Steve Sailer writes a quasi-tribute for NRO; meanwhile, Godless Capitalist writes me a rant about Stephen Jay Gould being a "serial liar." Gould's opposition to evolutionary psychology and the highly debatable nature of his work are well known; they're clearly laid out in Sailer's piece as well as Robert Wright's piece for the New Yorker several years ago. As a disciple of Dawkins and Wilson, I acknowledge all this. That doesn't make me any less sad that Gould is gone. I think Sailer sums it up well in his final two paragraphs. Even if Gould was wrong, he made everyone else make damn sure they were right. Anyone who understands the self-correcting nature of science can appreciate that.

2002-05-22T14:24:00.000-04:00

More Gould from the AP. I also just noticed that his final collection of essays for Natural History, due next month, is titled "I Have Landed." I wonder how much he knew when he chose that name.

2002-05-22T13:58:00.000-04:00

SciTech Daily has a similar list of Gould obits, with a few not included on Arts & Letters Daily. Also weighing in are the Harvard Gazette, Newsweek, Nature, and Science (registration required).

2002-05-22T13:36:00.000-04:00

Reader Gregory Tetrault helpfully points out that the few Earth bacteria that would stand a chance of surviving on Mars are also the ones least likely to be carried there -- and that "a few hardy strains of common bacteria could survive as inert spores on Mars, but conditions would never be right for them to emerge from the spore form (not enough heat, water, or nutrients)." True that.

He also writes regarding the ACLU's dueling positions on facial recognition: "Because current systems work so poorly, innocent persons are mistaken for criminals or suspects." This, he says, is one way to resolve the incongruity between the two views -- the ACLU is just worried about Joe Blow, who looks like a terrorist but isn't. Maybe, but I still think the ACLU is being too reactionary. The technology isn't inherently ineffective. It will take a while to install it in airports; given how fast technology develops, during that time this problem can probably be eliminated. Tetrault does note that the ACLU would oppose FRT even if it worked perfectly now.

2002-05-22T13:24:00.000-04:00

I'm finally back in the office, and hopefully the technical difficulties are behind us now.

From the department of things inevitable: Someone named Rebecca Blood has written a pair of books about blogging, "We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture" and "The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog." Naturally, she has a blog. Books come out in July...

Reader RZ German writes: "Lots of folks will remember Steve Gould for the various scientific controversies he engendered, but there's another facet worth reporting in the blogosphere. He was a stalwart defender of making science accessible to everyone, not just the Harvard students he loved teaching. He opposed, over and over, letting the creationist take science education in America backwards into the past. The best tribute to a self-professed non-believer? Go read one of his books." I couldn't agree more. List of obits/tributes is on the way; for now Arts & Letters Daily has a nice one.

2002-05-21T16:13:00.000-04:00

Am having technical difficulties. I apologize if you're having trouble viewing the site. Will try to fix, but for now I'm in an e-mail kiosk at the airport and have a plane to catch.

2002-05-20T19:03:00.000-04:00

I came home tonight ready to post happy news of a new life. Now I find myself reeling from the loss of one far too young to go. Weeks after publishing his defining work, Stephen Jay Gould has died. I am too stunned to write anything more for now, but I will be collecting the obits and posting them here in the following days.

I often wondered what it felt like to hear that Lennon or Kennedy had died. Now I know. I feel like I've been kicked in the gut.

2002-05-19T23:10:00.000-04:00

Surprise! I can't stay away from the computer. A quick vent, and then off to the maternity ward (labor starts at 6 a.m. sharp): While here in the old hometown, I hung out with a friend from high school. She knows I majored in biological anthropology. She herself majored in biology at the University of Georgia. We were talking about science and I mentioned my interest in evolution. She looked at me blankly. Then, haltingly, cautiously, she said: "So... you believe we came from monkeys?"

I hate the deep South.

2002-05-18T22:27:00.000-04:00

One last thing before I go -- I love Tom Wolfe, but can anyone figure out what the point of this commencement address is?

2002-05-18T20:14:00.000-04:00

My sister's having a baby, so off to Georgia I go to help her breathe. I'll be back on Wednesday. In honor of my new nephew/niece, watch Life's Greatest Miracle -- the NOVA sequel to the Miracle of Life -- on your monitor.

Needless to say, the Daily Darwin feature won't be changing while I'm gone. So here's a stockpile. Pace yourself:
Darwin, live and in concert May 19 in Los Angeles
Decent reading list (ignore the creationist stuff)
A Darwinian blog!

2002-05-18T16:32:00.000-04:00

Oh, how I love Principia Cybernetica -- evolution, cybernetics, complexity, game theory, and lots of other big-ticket items, all in an easy-to-follow Glass Bead Game.

2002-05-18T15:50:00.000-04:00

Striking a blow for gender equity -- and its number of posts -- OxBlog acquires its first female blogger, Arielle, a Wellesley student who writes about drugs and Quorn.

2002-05-18T15:07:00.000-04:00

Treaties, cease-fires, crackpot plans from Saudi Arabia -- nah. What we really need to stop terrorism is 40,000 people in India simultaneously meditating. And for the low, low price of $1 billion!

2002-05-18T14:11:00.000-04:00

What you see is generally what you get -- but only because of context clues. Without them, the eye can't tell the difference between a large, faraway object and a smaller, closer one. So how do you know what you're seeing at any given time? You recall similar things you've seen and calculate which it's most likely to be, all in an unconscious instant.

2002-05-18T13:57:00.000-04:00

If the universe were a computer, it would have performed 10-to-power-of-120 calculations since the Big Bang and could store exactly that many bits of information at any given time. Humans have performed 10-to-the-power-of-31 calculations with 10-to-the-power-of-21 bits. The scientist who came up with these numbers says: "If the universe is doing a computation, then that might explain its complexity, because computers can do really interesting things with little prompting." Has he been taking coffee with Stephen Wolfram?

2002-05-18T13:27:00.000-04:00

The ACLU is terrified of facial recognition technology. It invades our privacy. It will let the government track petty criminals. It will give us our first real Big Brother. It also doesn't work -- or so says the ACLU, which begs the question: So which is it? A dangerous surveillance system that will track us all? Or a "clunker" that won't even track the people it's intended for? You can't argue both positions.

2002-05-18T13:03:00.000-04:00

The Times reports that drug companies have been paying off doctors in exchange for access to patients' rooms, where they make sales pitches and "recommend" the use of their product for conditions it's not approved to treat. This is morally repugnant, but it's not at all surprising. Consider: Drug companies are already allowed to directly market to the public via ads in magazines and TV. They already influence doctors' orders, whether docs want to admit it or not, by providing free lunches and paraphernalia -- and that's on the low end of the perk scale. (My favorite pharmaceutical party favor is a highlighter shaped like a Prozac pill.)

And for years, doctors have prescribed drugs for conditions they haven't been specifically approved for -- preventative Cipro and Botox, until recently, were both off-label prescriptions. As the Times notes, this is perfectly legal, although it's illegal for drug companies to promote their products for off-label use. I found it interesting that the drug in question, Neurontin, was being used off-label to treat some psychiatric disorders (its primary use is controlling epileptic seizures). The article quotes a doctor complaining that Neurontin is "being used like water" though the evidence of its off-label effectiveness is scarce, and in some cases it may actually make schizophrenic and bipolar patients worse. What the Times doesn't say is that the same is true for many psychiatric drugs that have been approved to treat those conditions. Psychiatric medicine is a trial-and-error guessing game -- some drugs make some people better, some make the same people worse, and for almost every drug the "evidence" of effectiveness is still up in the air. Scientists don't even know how most psychiatric drugs work on the molecular level. It's entirely possible that doctors who haven't been bribed are prescribing Neurontin off-label as well -- in some cases it might be just as effective as the FDA-approved drugs, which is to say not very.

The most disturbing detail is actually buried in the story: "Warner-Lambert also tried to influence doctors who wrote medical journal articles about Neurontin by paying them, sometimes secretly, and even hiring a marketing company to write first drafts." Influencing a few doctors by paying them off is one thing; no doctor, even one who's been bribed, is going to prescribe a drug that he knows will hurt a patient because no payment can offset the risk of a malpractice suit. Altering the scientific literature is quite another thing. Not only does it affect far more doctors, it gives them false or misleading information that they can't identify as such. At least the doctor who's being bribed knows he's likely being lied to as well and will hopefully prescribe accordingly. I had heard of drug companies stifling negative research and "suggesting" changes to the literature, but it stuns me nonetheless to hear about such a specific and egregious case.

2002-05-17T20:56:00.000-04:00

Looking for news of Neanderthals? The latest in physical anthropology research now comes in a handy search engine. So, for that matter, does last year's latest.

2002-05-17T19:24:00.000-04:00

You know the internet has gotten out of control when a site devoted entirely to pictures of airline food has 53,712 hits. (This isn't even vaguely scientific. But it's funny.)

2002-05-17T18:28:00.000-04:00

A big thank you to Virginia Postrel for the link. If you're one of the four people who didn't get here through her site in the first place, go there now.

2002-05-17T12:23:00.000-04:00

A field guide to New York City mating habits. (Remember, this is a science blog.)

2002-05-17T12:15:00.000-04:00

If you have kids, buy them this magazine. (Disclosure: I write for it.)

2002-05-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Virginia Postrel, a much funnier take on cloning/"Attack of the Clones." I'm also glad that she notes Newt Gingrich's "unconventional optimism, curiosity, and interest in the future," even if he does have a tendency toward technobabble. I met E. O. Wilson a few months ago and asked him what could be done about conservatives who deny environmental damage. His response: Apparently Newt -- a friend of his -- read every single word of "Consilience", and will hopefully be just as open to "The Future of Life." An open-minded, slightly visionary, pro-science conservative (from my home state of Georgia)? I can live with that.

2002-05-17T11:43:00.000-04:00

The sun rises, the earth turns, Stephen Jay Gould produces yet another book...

2002-05-17T11:38:00.000-04:00

Anthrax shmanthrax. Has the terror been taken out of bioterrorism?

2002-05-17T11:29:00.000-04:00

Get used to reading about Stephen Wolfram, because whether he's right or not he presents some intriguing ideas. Scary, stunning, intriguing ideas. I can't wait to see the first scientific reviews of this book. I'll write my own when I've plowed through the 800-some pages of main text...

2002-05-17T11:11:00.000-04:00

Glenn Reynolds responds to my question about bacteria on Mars:

"I think the answer is 'no.' Martian soil is full of germ-killing peroxides, and there are lots of UV and cosmic rays. Martian life is likely to be underground, in warmer, wetter layers."

Glad to know we won't be wiping out Martian space races anytime soon.

2002-05-16T15:44:00.000-04:00

More from the Prospect, this time arguing that the black community's skepticism of organ transplantation is reasonable. A few weeks ago I went on a black radio station's morning show to talk about organ donation. I had just written an article about live donor liver transplants and came prepared with all sorts of studies on how black patients fare worse than whites after liver transplants and why that might be. I barely got to slip that factoid in at the end of the interview. The rest of the conversation consisted of the DJ asking suspiciously -- several times -- if blacks were less likely to get transplants in the first place (or, as he put it, "Does... demography play into how quickly you get an organ?") This fear is real. But at least in the case of liver transplants, it's not at all reasonable. The list for a liver transplant is made up according to four objective, biological factors -- things like bilirubin count -- that indicate the severity of one's need. Race is not one of these factors, nor does it affect said factors. The list changes as the factors do so that the minute an organ becomes available, it goes to the person who needs it most at that time. This is a new system that was just instituted in February. It's too bad the Prospect didn't mention it, because it could have done a lot to allay people's fears. Then again, I don't think that was the point of the Prospect's article. With organs scarce already, I fear this piece won't do much to help the patients who need them.

2002-05-16T15:19:00.000-04:00

Okay. Cooling down a little. The American Prospect writes the article I've been dying to write since last summer: how "Attack of the Clones" will affect the cloning debate. (The title was announced in August.) The idea of the anti-science camp using a Lucas movie as support for its position is right up there with creationists who intentionally misquote Stephen Jay Gould -- stupid, yes, but just stupid enough that it works. George Lucas may have some libertarian leanings (not a bad thing, of course), and for all I know he's as conservative about sex as his characters are. We don't know that much about his political philosophy. But there's one thing he certainly can't be -- anti-science. This doesn't, naturally, stop anyone on the anti-research right from borrowing his metaphors.

TAP weighed in briefly on the cloning/Star Wars link last year, too.

2002-05-16T14:02:00.000-04:00

Evolutionary psychology is a discipline that begs to be abused. I once saw it described as very fun to do badly and very hard to do well. How James Tooley has managed to make a career of doing it so badly I will never know. If this article is accurate, it is yet another example of science applied to society with an utter lack of nuance, analysis or forethought. I'm willing to grant him that perhaps -- and I do mean perhaps -- women are more likely to want children, as opposed to a career, than men. And admittedly, I haven't read the book in question. But I seriously doubt it applies the basic standards used to separate cultural preferences from biological ones, and I'll wager Tooley assumes there's no possible way to have both career and kids without letting said kids wallow in low-quality daycare (I'd love to introduce him to the hundreds of women friends of mine who slap that theory in the face just by existing). More appallingly, Tooley seems to conflate what may be evolutionary tendencies with prescriptions for social policy. This is the kind of thinking that gives evolutionary psychologists a bad, neo-ultra-conservative name, and it's been utterly disavowed by evolutionary scientists worldwide. As a student of evolutionary psychology and a socially left-leaning woman who plans to have both a career and kids -- and not, I might add, a career "of dubious value," as Tooley puts it -- I am disgusted. This is not the discipline I love.

2002-05-15T19:40:00.000-04:00

Giants of science: Beta-test versions of new multimedia autobiographies of Sydney Brenner and John Maynard Smith are now available -- free, for a limited time only! -- here. The Smith film consists of an interview with... Richard Dawkins. The man is everywhere. Then again, that's his job.

2002-05-15T19:35:00.000-04:00

The Franklin Society petition against banning therapeutic cloning research has been submitted with an all-star list of names, including Milton Friedman, Steven Pinker, James Wolcott, and many of the web's best bloggers. If you kept meaning to get to this but didn't manage to sign it, call your Congressman and rant. Or send me letters and I'll publish the best ones, a la Glenn Reynolds.

Speaking of Glenn Reynolds, his latest musings on space exploration suggest that exploring Mars will inevitably contaminate it (shall we name the chosen spacecrafts the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria?) A brilliant point. One question, though: As Reynolds points out while counting reasons Martian bacteria might not do likewise to us on the return voyage, "it's unlikely that bacteria that can survive in the Martian environment will flourish on Earth." Shouldn't the same be true in reverse? Could Earth bacteria actually stay alive on Mars for long enough to wreak any havoc? If they couldn't, then they wouldn't multiply, and the chance of scientists finding them and mistaking them for original Martian life seems pretty low. Granted, much like a former roommate of mine, Earth bacteria can survive in some pretty unspeakable conditions. But I'm not sure about Mars. Any microbiologists/space nuts want to answer this one for me?

2002-05-15T12:54:00.000-04:00

In honor of "Attack of the Clones" opening tomorrow (sorry, I warned you), take a break from Dawkins and indulge yourself in The Science of Star Wars.

2002-05-15T12:40:00.000-04:00

And we're off -- admittedly a day early, but that's better than late.

First, a quick guide to the site: The Daily Darwin feature really is daily, so don't forget to check and see if it's changed. And the Book of the Month feature really is monthly, so get used to seeing that little picture on the left. I'll be posting random thoughts on the book throughout the month as soon as I transfer them from scribblings to screen. Which will be any day now.

Next time someone calls you "all thumbs," say thank you -- overuse of the thumb to manipulate keyboards and joysticks has turned it into the hand's most dextrous digit in people under 25, according to British research. Anyone who's ever watched their grandparents jab at the keys with their index fingers will understand why the thumb remains wimpy in older folks -- and if you're like me and you have a space bar that sticks, you really are giving your thumbs a workout every day. But it's still amazing that millions of years of tool-making would have less effect than two decades of typing (coming soon: "secretary's thumb" syndrome.) Lends credence to that parade-of-hominids picture that ends with man, not bipedal but crouched at a keyboard.

One of my favorite phrases is "obfuscatory cant," and there's no better example of said cant than current academic journals. On that note, I'm happy to report the launch of Contexts, an intriguing hybrid of journal and magazine featuring real sociological scholarship described in words we all know. (Alright, stop laughing, there is such a thing as "real sociological scholarship.") If more journals adopted this style, they'd go a long way toward narrowing the old two-culture divide. Then again, they'd also narrow the market for science journalists. Perhaps I should keep my mouth shut.

Another brilliant new publication is the Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis. It won't be publishing groundbreaking research. That's the point -- it will publish only statistically insignificant results. There are all sorts of wordplays with "insignificant" one could use here, but in fact this is an incredible idea. As the article points out, if you've got an idea for a project, how do you know if someone's done it already if they've stuck their results in the bottom drawer of their file cabinet? Science, like every other system, has massive asymmetrical information problems, and as a result, there are a lot of people out there wasting their time on experiments that have already been done, and done well, several times. Given that the point of science is to increase the trove of public knowledge, this journal seems sorely needed. I'm delighted to see that Eliot Gelwan has picked this story up too.

Thanks to Paracelsus for linking to me, driving my hit count up to a massive... well... over 25. More posts to come later...

2002-05-10T16:48:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Science Fair -- perspectives on life, the universe, and everything. This site officially launches Thursday, May 16, 2002. By no coincidence, this is also the launch date of "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones." I may post some ramblings on the movie, but don't worry: there will be more science than science fiction.

Until then, here's some original content to keep you busy.

Last month, astronomers announced that they had discovered two stars possibly made of a new kind of matter formed by different elementary particles than everything else in the known universe. The report was naturally a little thick on astro-jargon. But if it's true, it's the sort of Big Story that doesn't come along so often -- the kind your grandkids will ask you about 30 years from now when you're trying to take a nap. Print this, save it, and give it to them before you roll over and wish for a time when life was easier to understand.

Mary: So there are six kinds of quarks, and two of them -- "up" and "down" quarks -- make up ordinary matter. The stars in the news, RXJ 1856 and 3C58, may be made of up, down, and "strange" quarks, right?
Jeremy Drake, Harvard astronomer behind the discovery: That's the postulate, yes, instead of just the up and down ones.

What are the other three kinds of quarks?
There's a charm quark, and two quarks called truth and beauty or top and bottom, depending on how boring you want to be. There are also all the anti-particles corresponding to these.

Anti-quarks?
Yes, they're antimatter particles. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other, liberating energy according to Einstein's E = mc squared equation. Like on Star Trek, where they use a matter/antimatter drive to power the Enterprise. Fictionally, of course.

You originally thought both of these stars were made only of neutrons, right?
Yes.

So why do you think they contain strange quarks instead?
For the star I observed, the best way we seem to be able to match the data [for its density and size] is to assume that we can build that star out of strange quark matter. Using "normal" matter [like neutrons], the standard neutron star model would give us a star that appears to be too big. So you start thinking, how can you make that star smaller? And one way to do it is replace the neutrons with other sorts of denser matter. That's where these more exotic forms come in.

How big is this star compared to a standard neutron star?
Neutron stars are already pretty small. The range of your plain vanilla neutron star would be 12 to 20 miles across. The best size we can calculate for RXJ 1856 is about 7 miles.

That's pretty small. What about the other star, 3C58 -- it's problem is that it's too cold, right? So does it contain strange quark matter too?
It possibly could be strange quark matter. It also could be pion or kaon condensates.

Um...
Pion condensates. They're also subatomic particles. [In both cases], what we're trying to do is take the same amount of matter and fit it into a smaller volume.

So let me get this straight. A star made of strange quark matter would be smaller because its quarks aren't bound up in neutron and proton form, so they're free to squeeze in closer to each other?
Yes. It's not exactly clear what leads to the formation of this kind of thing. One idea is that as the star is in its death throes, when it's run out of energy and can no longer hold itself up, it collapses in on itself and you get extreme density. Basically, you have this very dense plasma of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and then the protons combine with the electrons to make neutrons. Normally, this is where the process stops because you need more pressure to squash the neutrons into something else. So if you get that extra squash, some fraction of the star may get converted into strange quark matter. The other scenario is that you actually have some strange quark matter in the star during its lifetime -- a strange quark matter nugget -- that's stable in that form. When the star finally collapses, you could just get that seed of strange quark matter catalyzing a conversion of the rest of the neutrons to strange quark matter.

Were neutron stars the densest form of matter known before this?
Known to exist, yes, though strange quark matter was first proposed twenty or so years ago. But in a sense it depends on how one defines black holes. Those are the densest possible form of matter, but it's difficult to define the density in a black hole because the density can be infinite.

At a NASA panel discussion, quark expert Norman Glendenning said this discovery gives us an alternate view of what the universe could have been like. Why?
Well, if our star really is made of strange quark matter and strange quark matter really is the ultimate stable form, then normal matter is not the most naturally relaxed state of matter. Protons and neutrons are still in some form of high-energy state, and of course everything tends toward the lowest possible energy.

Does that mean the entire universe could someday revert to this form?
I'm not sure. If you look at the lifetimes of protons and neutrons, neutrons are known to be unstable. But protons are often thought to be stable infinitely. What I don't know is, if strange quark matter were the most stable form, what effect any new constraints from a true detection of a strange quark star might have on protons. Maybe they would have to be less stable. This is an idea that's occurred to me over the last several days and I don't know enough to answer it. But then, I'm sure it's been thought about hundreds of times before by experts in particle physics who would know the answer.