Intrepid Science Blog

Last night I attended the Australian screening of a rather strange documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle .  This film contains a bizarre mixture of half-truths, misinformation and fabrications to argue that changes in the climate seen today are not caused by human activity but are in fact the result of the Sun.  To make some sort of case, the program tied itself up in all sorts of knots, often falling back on results that were over 15 years old.  Essentially the broadcast tried to argue there's nothing to worry about, despite the plethora of evidence that suggests otherwise. A favourite for some There was a lot of controversy when the Australian Broadcasting Corporation purchased the wretched thing, but to their credit they set up an interview with the director, had a panel of experts and business people discuss the content and then opened up questions to a live audience. As I sat through the film listening to the nonsense that was being spouted, I...

Why did the chicken cross the ocean?  It sounds like a bad joke but some Chilean chicken remains are causing a rethink of Pacific exploration. The Polynesian people of the Pacific were one of the great colonizing cultures of the world. Starting around 2000 years ago, they moved out from the islands of Fiji, Tonga and Somoa.  By AD 1300, they had reached Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand. What happened then is unclear.  Did they just stop exploring or continue east and reach the Americas?  Its one of the big unknown questions of Polynesian history.  Up till now there have been several intriguing hints that these great seafaring people made it to the New World.  One of the best clues is the sweet potato. A native of the Andes, this fleshy tuba has been used in the Pacific for over 1000 years.  It seems possible the Polynesians visited the west coast of the Americas and bought the sweet potato back with them.  But not everyone holds with th...

I’m at the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne at the moment.  Its fascinating being here. Normally when you’re at a science conference, there’s a plethora of your colleagues and just a few journalists.  Here, its completely the other way round.  I’m now the odd one out!  Despite this slight unease, the one thing we all have in common is communicating science to the public. Home to the 5th World Conference of Science Journalists We’ve had some fascinating sessions.   A group of us had a panel discussion on the discovery of the hobbit ( Homo floresiensis ) and how the media reported it.   The last half hour was thrown open to the floor and we had quite a chat on why the politics got so much coverage at time (sometimes more than the actual science!).   There was an intriguing point raised that when a newspaper article is printed, that’s pretty much it, but when a television documentary is made, it can be broadcast several t...

There is something odd going on with certain newspapers around the world.   Just a few weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, better known as the IPCC, presented the first part of their report on the state of the worlds climate.  It contained a worrying vision of a climate out of control.  Yet almost as soon as the ink had dried, several newspapers suggested there wasn’t too much to worry about.  Many made a huge song and dance about results reported by Henrik Svensmark and colleagues in the Proceedings of the Royal Society ( doi:10.1098/rspa.2006.1773 ).  Here, experimental results suggested that cosmic rays  highly energetic particles that form deep in space  might play a significant role in cloud formation.  The idea is the weaker the Sun, the more cosmic rays reach the Earth and the more clouds that form.  Although the research article stopped short of saying what this might mean for past climate, some of the newspape...

There was a time, yesterday, geologically speaking,  when kangaroos 3 m tall hopped about Australia, elephants roamed North America and 2-m high birds strutted around in New Zealand. Since the end of the nineteenth century, many different writers have noticed that the world does not have abundant creatures over 40 kg. Collectively, these large beasts are known as megafauna. Alfred Wallace, who wrote the first paper on evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, noted that we live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared. We now know that the extinction of many of these creatures was global and that they died out quite recently. Their bones, when explorers and researchers found them, were not fossilized, suggesting their death was a matter of thousands of years ago. But the extinction seems to have happened at different times in different places. Some regions even kept their megafauna....

Science went back to its roots this week. Results just reported in the science journal Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature05357 ) have focused the spotlight on several chunks of green and white metal that were found in the eastern Mediterranean in 1900.  It might not sound much to get excited about but the century-old find is forcing a drastic reassessment of ancient technology. Next to the island of Antikythera, roughly half way between Crete and the mainland of Greece, sponge divers found a Roman ship that had been transporting Greek cargo. In amongst the recovered objects were 82 fragments of bronze.  Over the years, different people have had a bash at looking at the bits and pieces but the remains continued to puzzle scientists. The British researcher De Solla Price spent much of his career from the 1950s to the 1970s trying to understand them.  He argued they were the part of a sophisticated device capable of astronomical calculations.  Not everyone was convinc...

In 2004, I was a member of an Australian and Indonesian team that reported the discovered remains of a one-metre tall adult human from the Indonesian island of Flores (DOI: 10.1038/nature02956 ). Named Homo floresiensis , but better known as the hobbit, the find was terribly exciting: the individual had a brain the size of a chimpanzee with many anatomical features that harked back to some of the earliest known humans. I was involved with the radiocarbon dating of the site and discovered that the main skeleton was only around 18,000 years old while a white volcanic ash laid down 13,000 years ago capped the final remains of this species.  This may all sound a long time ago but geologically speaking it was yesterday; in Europe, Neanderthals appear to have died out by 30,000 years ago. Next to ourselves, the ages from Flores make the hobbits the most recently surviving species of human. The skull of Homo floresiensis : the Hobbit With the news coverage of the discovery, a fe...