World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Bobby McPherrin has always been a favorite of ours here at Shambollocks!. Here he treats some scientists to some kick-ass audience participation.

This Tuesday, President Obama reversed the intransigence of the Bush administration and signed legislation which allows federal funding for embryo-derived stem-cell research. Obama heralded the signing as step toward the removal of politics from science. Unless, of course, you want to score political points with those who wished to see this reversal and paint those opponents of this research as religious zealots. And that is the case with this reversal.

The advances which will come from this decision promise to be nothing less than revolutionary. In The Atlantic, William Haseltine writes about the medical advances to come.

Scientists and doctors at Wake Forest have already successfully implanted the first laboratory-made human organs–bladders and urethras. Coming soon: synthetic corneas, heart valves, skin, cartilage, tracheas, and vaginas. More ambitious plans are underway to replace lost digits, muscles, and nerves, and to build entirely new complex organs such as livers, kidneys, and human hearts.

Great, right? We can build replacement organs. Right now, there are a glut of unwanted embryos frozen at fertility clinics across the country. I have no problem with using those embryos to further research.But once we build replacement organs, what’s to stop us from building replacement embryos for our children? Embryos are humans. I don’t think most Americans are comfortable with embryo factories. In Slate, William Saletan defends the position of the other side.

To most of us, the dilemma is more compelling from this angle [from the side of pro-research]. It seems worse to let the girl die for the embryo’s sake than to kill the embryo for the girl’s sake, particularly since embryos left over from fertility treatments will be discarded or left to die, anyway. But it’s still a dilemma. And as technology advances, the dilemmas will become more difficult. Already, researchers are clamoring to extend Obama’s policy so they can use federal money to create and destroy customized embryos, not just use the ones left over from fertility treatments.

My fear in all this is that we’re giving conservative America a new front. Just like pro-choice proponents liberalized abortion laws throughout the country, instigating a raging cultural debate which has yet to subside, I fear the same could happen over embryonic research. Inevitably, some scientists will grow embryos for research with federal funds. The ensuing debate will have very little to do with science, but very much to do with politics and religion.

Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius wishfully think they have stuffed their opponents into a black hole of pure scientific reason. They will soon find out that just as science deigns to even nod toward religion, science bares the same ignorance toward politics, and therefore, the interests of any political party.

In our cool science news of the day, Time reports that the University of Cambridge published a study on the success rates of traders with high testosterone levels and those with lower testosterone levels. The researchers judged the testosterone levels traders received in the womb by measuring their ‘2D:4D’ ratio. The longer a man’s fourth finger is to his index finger, the more testosterone he was exposed to in the womb and the more responsive he is to the hormone as an adult. Not surprisingly, traders with higher testosterone levels were six times more profitable than those with lower testosterone levels.

Alarmed, I checked out my hand. Uh oh. Definitely not Steve McQueen hands here. I did a little more research at Wikipedia. It turns out that some scientists do use the ‘2D:4D’ ratio as a crude testosterone measurement. Women have equal ratio or 1+:1 ratio. My ratio? Equal.

You hear that? Crude. So maybe I have the testosterone level of a Sally. I can deal with that. I’ve dunked a basketball. Once. I’ll survive.

Stupid hands!

I’d love to hear what your 2D:4D ratio is. Let’s see who the machoest reader is!

The Edge, a fantastic online science and culture publication, released their annual 2009 World Question. This year’s question is “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live and to see?” The answers, as usual for this site, are fantastic and thought-provoking.

Kevin Kelly, editor-at-large of Wired, writes that it will be large-scale artificial intelligence:

When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won’t even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it. We’ll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, including scientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code spread across the globe in windowless boring warehouses, and it lacks a unified body, it will be faceless. You can reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?

Howard Gardner, he of the five kinds of intelligence we all learned in Ed Psych, writes that it will be an unlocking of the nature of genius:

For the first time, it should be possible to delineate the nature of talent. This breakthrough will come about through a combination of findings from genetics (do highly talented individuals have a distinctive, recognizable genetic profile?); neuroscience (are there structural or functional neural signatures, and, importantly, can these be recognized early in life?); cognitive psychology (are the mental representations of talented individuals distinctive when contrasted to those of hard workers); and the psychology of motivation (why are talented individuals often characterized as having ‘a rage to learn, a passion to master?)

Timothy Taylor, archaeologist from the University of Bedford, writes that it will be what it always is for us- our love of things and what these tools can do for us.

Major change often comes stealthily. Its revolutionary effect may often reside in the very fact that we do not recognize what it is doing to our behaviour, and so cannot resist it. Often we lack to words to articulate resistance as the invention is a new noun whose verbal effect lags in its wake. Such major change operates far more effectively through things than directly through people, not brought about by the mad, but rather by ‘mad scientists’, whose inventions can be forgiven their inventors.

Tuck yourself in for this one. It is a feast for the brain.