Chance & Necessity

A murmuration of starlings

Murmuration is my new a favourite word, it means a flock of starlings. It is one of the old English collective nouns for a group of animals, like a murder of crows, a skulk of foxes or a gaggle of geese. And as the YouTube clip above shows murmurations are simply astonishing. The Guardian also has a gallery with some pretty amazing pictures. Thousands of starlings flying through the air as if they were a single organism. Flicking back and fore like cat’s tail, not like the thousands of bird spread across maybe 100 m that they are.

Hard drinking starlings

I have just learnt that the European Starling can take its drink. Alcohol is metabolised, in starlings and in us, by an enzyme called Alcohol Dehydrogenase. By weight starlings have approximately 14 times as much Alcohol Dehydrogenase activity as we do. The data are in a paper by Prinzinger and Hakimi. I will now look at starlings with new respect.

You may be asking yourself, why do European Starlings have this impressive ability to take their drink? Fruit is a major part of the diet of starlings. Fallen fruit tends to ferment of course, which produces alcohol. So it may be that starlings have evolved a high tolerance to booze to allow them to eat lots of fallen fruit without then being reduced to zig-zagging across the sky in a rather drunken way.

Don’t take liquids for granted

Water is everywhere – we have been inundated with the stuff over the last few months. But maybe we should not take it for granted. In Britain water is everywhere but in the universe as whole liquids of any sort are extremely rare. And even on Earth, water is pretty much the only liquid around.

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While watching Numb3rs on TV I was struck by an ad for Gold Collagen. It showed a woman drinking from a small plastic bottle as if this would change her life. This looked a bit weird. Gold Collagen is some sort of food supplement that contains mainly collagen. Indeed, like the webpage says: “Collagen helps the skin to preserve its firmness and elasticity.” It forms a network that holds the cells together so indeed contributes significantly to the skin’s elasticity.

Using analogy to understand how chameleons change colour

The video shows artificial models of the key structures in a type of cell called a melanophore. This is from a nice paper by Aoyama et al. Melanophores and similar cells are how animals like chameleons change colour. The blobs that show up as bright here in the fluoresence microscopy images are actually dark brown under natural conditions. They contain eumelanin, the brown pigment that makes brown hair brown.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me

I quite like this saying. I have been fooled twice a fair few times. Above is a tiny, single-celled, creature called Stentor. They are only about a millimetre long. For a single-celled creature this is huge, but it is still pretty small.

The Autopsy of Chicken Nuggets Reads “Chicken Little”

The title is fantastic but it is not mine sadly. I stole it from a paper by deShazo, Bigler and Skipworth. Thanks to them for that. The paper analysed chicken nuggets from fast food outlets. Spoiler alert: they don’t contain a lot what of would be conventionally regarded as chicken meat, although most of it did in the past belong to a chicken. Somewhere on a chicken’s body. Somewhere.

Availability error and the Daily Mail

I have just started reading a classic book on how we think: Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland. It is 20 years old but has been reissued. As the title suggests it is about how we (all of us) routinely think and make decisions in a pretty dumb way. One of the most commons ways we mess up is due to what is called ‘availability error’. We make decisions based on the most immediate and striking facts available to us, the ones in the forefront of our minds. These striking facts are often unreliable and unrepresentative.

Heart of glass

For the benefit of the younger readers I should say that this is a reference to the classic Blondie song. Video is here, you can click on it and read this post while listening to a real classic. I wrote it while listening to it more-or-less on a loop.

Measurements and speculation are different, and you can tell the difference if you try

Below are the final exchanges from a piece on Thursday’s Today programme. Justin Webb is the Today presenter, Brian Hoskins is a scientist from Imperial College, and Nigel Lawson is the ex-Chancellor. It starts with Hoskins addressing the measurement (note that word, it will come up again) that although over the last 40 or so years we had significant global warming, the temperature rise (at the surface) looks to have slowed a bit over the last 10 to 15 years.