Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2008 August 13

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August 13

silverback gorillas

Hello,

My friend and I are having a drunken argument about gorillas. He says there's only one silverback, and he turns silver when he becomes the leader of the group, I say its just old age, he becomes silver when he goes grey. What dya rekon? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.122.244 (talk) 00:33, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

According to our article, you are (more or less) correct. Male gorillas grow the silver hair with maturity (not old age). At about the same time, they leave their troop and go looking for some females of their own. Algebraist 00:41, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

See Harrison Ford for more information. Plasticup ^T/C 16:19, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Mosquito species?

Which species of mosquito is the most common in Moncton, New Brunswick? I think it's different from the mosquitos that commonly sting me in Toronto, Ontario. I remember the New Brunswick ones as being more abundant and somehow "fluffier" in appearance (from having longer limbs, not from being furry), and I hardly notice when I'm occasionally stung by one in Toronto.--Sonjaaa (talk) 01:51, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

• According to this, there are 32 mosquito species in the greater Moncton area. This doesn't answer your question about "most common", though. --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 19:11, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Welding Smoke

What kind of toxins, chemicals, vaporized metals, etc. are in the smoke produced during shielded metal arc welding? I looked here, but that was only a brief description. I would like specifics, please. Thank you, Ζρς ι'β' ^¡hábleme! 02:32, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, there will be fumes and vapors resulting from combinations of whatever's in the arc area. Metal oxides, droplets of the metals (electrode and substrate) themselves, ozone and notrogen oxides if your equipment or technique doesn't allow for adequate shielding of the weld by the shield-gas, burned bits of flux. DMacks (talk) 03:47, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

(e/c) Basically, everything in the weld rod and the material being welded are present in the smoke. The welding process vapourizes a bit of everything. You need to look at the composition of the particular electrode and the particular metal. Each of these should have a safety data sheet that will have some information. The best course is to ask your local welding supply company for information, they are always happy to provide it. It is very important to evacuate the smoke produced by SMAW or any other welding process if you are doing it in an enclosed space. Franamax (talk) 03:53, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

should I ask them to shave them off or wax them off? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.49.159.116 (talk) 04:04, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Up to you, but either one would likely be preferable to electric-arc methods. DMacks (talk) 04:19, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Once again, I've scrolled up to this answer to a misplaced post and once again I am convulsed with laughter. Thank you DMacks and all RefDeskers and sorry to the IP - this just really makes me laugh! :) Franamax (talk) 00:58, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

When cabernet sauvignon comes snorting out the nose, it is hard on a computer keyboard. Edison (talk) 01:15, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps this should be taken up further then at either of the Humanities or Computing desks? It was Kokanee this time, does that make a difference? It may be disrespectful, but this is bookmark-worthy for me. :) Sorry again to the IP who innocently mis-posted.Franamax (talk) 02:51, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

A recent article in Mother Jones suggests that the big risk is manganese vapor. [1]

Atlant (talk) 19:09, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Eyebrows

When swimmers shave their eyebrows, how long does it take for them to grow back? Reason why I'm asking is I'm considering shaving my eyebrows off for a cancer fundraiser, however I work in the finance industry and have to see clients on a regular basis. I dont want to look stupid for too long :P —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.49.159.116 (talk) 03:09, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I'd take care to shave in the hair growth direction, not against it or you're more likely to have multi-directional regrowth. *_* As for growing time, hair grows faster in summer, so... Julia Rossi (talk) 03:25, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

O rly? Who conducted such an experiment? bibliomaniac15 04:05, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

0.16 mm per day according to this article. The article requires payment but a snippet of the data inside can be viewed via google scholar.--Lenticel ^(talk) 05:18, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't necessarily want to dissuade you from helping cancer patients, but be aware of unintended consequences. Someone I know shaved off their eyebrows as a bar-bet, and afterwards said that he didn't realize how important eyebrows were in keeping forehead sweat out of your eyes. -- 128.104.112.147 (talk) 16:32, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

@Bibliomaniac -- women of course, masterful frequent experimenters in appearance change and their priestesses of wax and pluck, the beauticians. Not this woman, because scientifically, I watch and learn. |;-) Julia Rossi (talk) 23:58, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Of course, you could use eyebrow pencil to paint on the missing eyebrows, and look like a bizarre waitress from a diner in Tennessee I saw years ago. Edison (talk) 01:13, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

And remains indelible -- Julia Rossi (talk) 03:32, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Autism-spectrum disorders and evolution

Are autism spectrum disorders a distinctly Holocene phenomenon? If not, how would they have survived the natural and sexual selection of the Pleistocene, given

• the problems that weak or idiosyncratic nonverbal communication would have caused before the development of complex language, in both coordinating a hunt and attracting a mate?
• the tendency toward narrow specialization, when the Pleistocene demanded generalists?
• the difficulty in developing a theory of mind, which would clearly be a prerequisite for Animism?
• the problems that sensorimotor issues would have caused in hunting?

NeonMerlin 04:22, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, the causes of autism are still very much unknown (despite the crackpots who say they've got it all figured out). However, if it is genetic and recessive then it will have no problem passing generation to generation without the need for selective pressures to weed it out. -- MacAddct  1984 ^{(talk • contribs)} 05:35, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

The original poster seems to assume that it's fully or largely genetic. However, if autism has significant environmental components, such as multiple chemical exposures or dietary factors only common to the modern world, then it may have been only rarely expressed prior to the last century or so, meaning there would have been little selective pressure against it. StuRat (talk) 13:27, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

One might find inspiration in the superficially even more difficult question of how homosexuality would be genetically based (e.g., kin selection or whatever—that such a trait would not be selected against if there were some advantage to having one member of your tribe have the specific skills that would come with such a thing). Which is just a way of saying that you needn't imagine all evolution and genetics as being about individuals; the operations of a tribe, for example, can have genetic effects on the individuals within it, obviously. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 15:37, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Even if entirely genetically based, there is no problem with some deeply serious conditions persisting in the gene pool even though the result is disasterous for the individual. What can happen is that there can be genes which individually are beneficial to the individual - but in some combination are a serious disadvantage. I was talking about the Sickle Cell disease before - it's a great example. If you get one copy of the gene, you are immune to the worst effects of malaria (a HUGE advantage in some parts of the world) - if you get two copies of the gene, you die at an early age. The disease doesn't get selected out because the probability of getting two copies is roughly half the probability of getting just one copy - so if malaria is a sufficiently serious impediment to reproduction then the gene will persist in the population and people will continue to fall foul of the two-gene version. This same effect can explain any number of genetic conditions...if the posession of a combination of a particular set of half a dozen beneficial genes prevents reproduction - the disease will continue to pop up on rare occasions. Hence we could certainly envisage a genetic cause for things like homosexuality and serious conditions like autism. In the case of autism, the existance of less nasty versions of the condition (Aspergers syndrom) which has some benefits to the individual as well as a downside could explain why full-blown autism still exists. Genetic selection FOR Aspergers could easily preserve the genes for Autism in the population. Worse still, as our society becomes more knowledge/technology based, the existance of Aspergers people becomes increasingly beneficial - and despite their social inadequacies - have an increasing chance of managing to reproduce. This could easily explain the rise of full-blown autism in modern society. SteveBaker (talk) 14:52, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

The End of the World!

If for some reason the LHC creates a black hole and it does not evaporate through Hawking radiation but instead engulfs the Earth, how long would it take? Will it be slow enough to enable me to see a news broadcast about the impending doom on the other side of the Earth? --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:42, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes. The surface area of the event horizon of 100 TeV mass black hole is much much smaller than the nucleus of an atom. As a result, if such a micro-blackhole can eat anything at all (which is not obvious), then it would be expected to do so very slowly initially. In fact, it would not be surprising if it took years before it got large enough that anyone even noticed such a black hole. Dragons flight (talk) 05:27, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I would expect it to swallow a charged particle and then the electromagnetic forces will dominate and the black hole will stick to something and not fall forever. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 05:54, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Are there any theories about an electron-charged micro black hole orbiting a single proton? I guess that would be something like a hydrogen atom with an electron of scalable mass plus a distinction of the quantum properties of the electron and those of its electrical field. 93.132.149.230 (talk) 06:56, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

As the orbiting particle is then heavier than an electron the atom would be like one of those Exotic atom#Muonic atoms? --Ayacop (talk) 08:07, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

If a micro-black hole settled within the Earth and if it began to accrete matter, it would take several thousand years to accrete its first proton. After that, things really speed up and it should swallow the Earth in less than 80 billion years. Plasticup ^T/C 16:09, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

This discussion is taking all the fun out of rampant unsubstantiated speculation.

I'm curious why "it would take several thousand years" for a micro black hole to swallow a proton. Is that because it would have to swallow a lot of smaller stuff first, in order to get big enough to attract a proton?

If a micro black hole became part of (say) a sodium atom, and that atom was part of a grain of salt, and that grain was in a saltshaker with a bunch of other grains, would there be any way to determine which grain contained the black hole?

If that is too tough, how about if 10% of the sodium atoms in a grain contained black holes?

Thanks, Wanderer57 (talk) 17:25, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Most chemicals are white. You could make no distinction between anthrax and table salt. I'd guess you wouldn't see a difference between table salt and blackholisodium chlorid. But perhaps blackholisodium would chemically act like neon if the negative charged black hole occupies one of the innermost orbits per lepton type without substantially disturbing the electron orbits --- after all, it's a different kind of fermion. 93.132.149.230 (talk) 21:41, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm very uncomfortable with this scenario. On the one hand you're asking that a black hole behave in a fundamentally quantum way (occupying an orbital normally occupied by an electron). On the other hand you're asking that it not decay. I can't make any sense of that combination. I'm happy talking about classical black holes that never decay and take 80 billion years to consume the Earth, and I'm happy talking about quantum black holes, but quantum black holes would decay, because that's what quantum objects do. It's part and parcel of the quantum rules. I don't see how you can strip out that behavior without stripping all the sense from the theory. -- BenRG (talk) 02:03, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

If charge is mediated/effected by photons, which can't escape a BH, can a BH be seen as "charged"? Saintrain (talk) 17:32, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, a black hole can have charge, mass and angular momentum, but supposedly all other properties get "eaten", according to the no hair theorem. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 23:22, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

My question is, since it looks like the latest from CERN is first beam on 10 September [2], are we going to start a Wiki-pool to predict the date of the last post to the Reference Desk before the black hole swallows the servers? Franamax (talk)

Last admin alive gets to delete the main page. DMacks (talk) 15:32, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Protein Bending

A couple of days ago I heard about fold it, which is a video game in which you help to fight against cancer and other stuff by bending proteins on your Pc. Very weird. Anyway my question is do we actually have the means of bending proteins if we actually found out their shapes? And secondly which entity of ourselves is concerned with the bending? And are the shapes of the proteins also in the DNA?Bastard Soap (talk) 08:05, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

You do not bend, it's the water molecules that do the bending in reality. The 'video game' probably is a screensaver that only shows a simulation of it. The problem is that with a given protein, if we know the amino acid sequence, we still don't know the 3D form that it takes, especially when interacting with lots of small water molecules. This can be computed but takes much computing power, so you are asked to help by providing your computer for the task.

So, if there were only the protein (whose amino acids are determined by the DNA sequence and possible other transcription processes like splicing) and water, then yes, we would after such a simulation know how the protein bends in such an environment. This is something that could have previous only known by making a crystal of the protein and using X-rays to look into that crystal. Very slow and expensive process, therefore we compute now. The task, however, is complicated by interaction of the protein with other proteins (e.g. receptors) or other small molecules. -Ayacop (talk) 08:17, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

But what determines how the water bends the water? There must be some mean of controlling it, no? 195.158.110.60 (talk) 09:58, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

We have an article on Foldit and we also have an article on protein folding. The screensaver that Ayacop refers to is probably the Rosetta@home distributed computing project. Scientists are not trying to control the folding - they are trying to work out how a particular protein is folded, and what can go wrong in this folding if, for example, one of the amino acids in the protein is exchanged for another one because of an error in the DNA template or the transcription process. Gandalf61 (talk) 10:30, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

The whole chemistry except nanotech is just mixing molecules and let them do their dance, so to speak, we don't have control at the molecular level. Even catalysts are more or less found by chance. --Ayacop (talk) 14:09, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Each protein has a certain 3D structure that is the result of how its amino-acid chain behaves in (essentially) water. So the 3D structure is in a sense controlled and determined by the sequence (each protein folds a certain way, each different protein folds differently). The trick is that nobody fully understands and is able to predict the 3D structure of some arbitrary sequence. If you could, then you could design a 3D shape by programming the sequence, or could know what alterations to a known protein would cause what changes in shape. DMacks (talk) 14:19, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Two-stroke engines

HOW CAN ITS FUNCTIONING BE EXPLAINED IN A LUCID MANNER? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tsm krishnan (talk • contribs) 12:41, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

First, there is no need to SHOUT (typing with caps lock on). Second, have a look at our detailed article, Two-stroke engine. --Bruce1ee^talk 12:55, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

As in lucid dreaming? ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 19:10, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

(in case you're serious) Nah, lucid as in "easy to understand". --Bowlhover (talk) 06:51, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Have you read our two-stroke engine article? It even has a nice animation to help folks understand. After reading the article, if you still ave questions, please write back!

Atlant (talk) 19:02, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Heparin suppresion of platelet count

I understand that heparin causes a transitory loss of platelets. Heparin itself has a relatively short biological half-life of 1.5 hours once administered. Does this mean the platelet drop shares the shame biological half-life, or does the recovery of platelet count lag the heparin drop ? If so, what is the time period required for the platelet count to fully recover ? Also, is there any diff between unfractionated heparin and low molecular weight heparin in this regard ? StuRat (talk) 13:16, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I can't find anything about platelet reduction in Heparin#Mechanism_of_anticoagulant_action. Rather, heparin binds to factor proteins and makes them inactive. --Ayacop (talk) 18:10, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

see heparin-induced thrombocytopenia. - Nunh-huh 18:13, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Under the "Type I" section it states: "Platelet counts recover even if heparin continues to be administered". However, it doesn't say how long it takes for this to occur. That's the info I'm after. StuRat (talk) 00:33, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

There's no solid number (someone who drops to a platelet count of 75,000 and someone who drops to a platelet count of 100,000 obviously have different amounts of recovery that will be needed), but it's on the order of several days to a week. It's certainly not related to the biological half-life of heparin. It's the same, roughly, as the amount of time it takes to recover from Type II once heparin is withdrawn. - Nunh-huh 01:27, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. StuRat (talk) 16:09, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Need info about penis meds

Have any of those pills and potions that claim to embiggen the penis or increase volume of ejaculation or sperm count actually been scientifically proven to work? I'm not asking for medical advice. I've just seen these products advertised a lot recently. --90.241.191.110 (talk) 14:20, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

No more than a placebo. See penis enlargement. Plasticup ^T/C 15:54, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

If any of them did have any legit scientific proof, you would know about it, as advertising such proof would make their product worth millions, perhaps billions. StuRat (talk) 16:04, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

There could easily be some effective therapies for low sperm count (depending on the cause)- but they'll come from a legit doctor, not a late-night infomercial. Friday (talk) 16:08, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Also pay close attention to the claim. For example, there are a lot of those "Smilin' Bob" commercials that seem to claim to greatly increase the size of the penis. The actual claim is that an erect penis is normally much larger than a flaccid penis. The claim has nothing to do with the pill itself. -- kainaw™ 16:18, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

That's good advice for any of the shady "supplement" companies out there. Pay very close attention to what they are saying and what they are not saying. Words like "promotes" are meaningless. If a company isn't willing to just come out and say what their product does then they are skirting along the edge of the law and I would be very leary of any company who likes to play those kinds of games. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 19:14, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I think that some of the supplements do work to expand the size of the (probably flaccid) penis. But only by causing increased fluid retention in all tissues in general, at some risk to your health. Seems like a pretty dumb tradeoff to me. As noted above, those entertaining infomercials present the smiln' guy saying "oh yeah, it got bigger" - they cut away before "then it turned black and fell off" :). Franamax (talk) 00:43, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Remember, Enzyte (the "Bob" commercials) is promising "natural male enhancement"; while we all "know" what that euphemism means, what they're literally promising you is completely vague so you will never be able to prove you whether or not you were enhanced in some obscure way after taking their pills. Perhaps your enhancement is that, although poorer, you are now presumably wiser.

Atlant (talk) 18:59, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

My favorite is those commercials that support a product that is assured to "enlarge that certain part of the male body." The tongue? the eyelid? The toenail? I mean no offense, but if you're dumb enough to fall for the rhetoric these companies use, they've earned their money. --Shaggorama (talk) 05:22, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

The catch with all of these things is that if they worked, they'd be illegal without a prescription. This was a problem in the UK where there are pretty serious laws about claiming things of your product that aren't true. Vendors of "wrinkle removing" face creams had to either say that their product DIDN'T remove wrinkles - or say that they actually did penetrate into your body and do something to your tissues - in which case they most certainly would have to be regulated as drugs. The adverts for these things in the US make all manner of wild and crazy claims - where in the UK, they merely offer to moisturise or affect the APPEARANCE of your skin. Truth in advertising laws are a very good thing...and they'd stop the Enzyte bullshit dead in it's tracks. The other one that always makes me laugh is where they offer a "risk free" trial or a "money back if not satisfied" deal. The truth is that these things probably cost just a few pennies per package to make - so they can make a profit just on the inflated postage costs they charge. So "free - you just pay postage" means that they are STILL ripping you off. This is true of an awful lot of things - those "Video professor" computer learning CD's that you can get for "free" for example. Bulk CD's cost about 25 cents to press - the amount they charge for "Shipping and processing" is about $8. SteveBaker (talk) 08:41, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Measuring age

Is there any way to scientifically prove how old someone is? If so, how accurate is it? To a month? A year? A decade? Not talking about looking on someone's birth certificate.--El aprendelenguas (talk) 21:56, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, there's no way, for example, to determine age closely enough to determine how many of the Chinese girl's gymnastics team are competing illegally. There are a number of ways to estimate developmental age for children. In fetuses and stillborns, developmental age can be estimated from long bone length; in infants and juveniles, dental x-rays are useful; and in older children, "bone age" is often estimated from x-rays of hands, feet, and knees: specific joints tend to calcify at certain ages. But the variability is up to 10% of the estimated age, so someone who is estimated to be 14 years of age may be 12 and a half to 15 and a half years old. - Nunh-huh 22:13, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Remembering from my archaeology classes: You can, to various degrees. Certain age ranges can be very accurate, while others aren't. You can look at features such as the plates fusing in the skull and basion bone fusion (I hope I remembered that correctly). Teeth provide fairly accurate age determination (say plus/minus a year or two). The classic example is wisdom teeth (third molars) indicate late teens/early twenties. Beyond a certain point, it's difficult, and you are left estimating using less accurate techniques, such as tooth wear. (This is from an archaeology POV; there may be some "soft tissue" ways). --Bennybp (talk) 22:18, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Age can be determined pretty well from bones, yeah. Skilled forensic anthropologists like William M. Bass have it down to an art -- it's not entirely exact, of course, but as I recall, they've done pretty amazing things, like correctly determined a victim's sex, age and size from nothing but a small piece of hip bone. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 10:13, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Though it should be noted that the hip in particular gives a lot of information. If you know what you are looking for, it's the easiest way to tell a male from a female human skeleton in one glance—female hips are arranged for pushing out babies, unlike male hips. Whereas there's some variation in other measures, like angle of jaw, etc., like the song says, hips don't lie. (An obligatory reference to Cuvier's amazing pioneering work in showing how the tiniest bone could be used to extrapolate all sorts of information might also be made here.) --98.217.8.46 (talk) 20:56, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

If you had DNA you could look at telomeres but I doubt the precision is very good. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 22:20, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

With horses, you can look at their teeth[3]. Julia Rossi (talk) 23:49, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Unless they are gift horses.. DuncanHill (talk) 01:16, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

If they were born after approximately 1946 or so, you can pin it down to within 1.6 years - but you'll need to pull a tooth to check the leftover radiation from atmospheric nuclear tests. [4] Franamax (talk) 00:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

And, of course, a person can become younger by walking around the North or South Pole. If he walks eastward in a circle around the Pole, the calendar date will go back by one day each time he steps across the International Date Line. It would not take long to walk in a small circle around the Pole. By this means, an old man could make himself young again. Hmmm, could that be true? Andme2 (talk) 23:56, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

And that reminds me of the story The Wandering Jew, by Rudyard Kipling, collected in Life's Handicap. It is described by the Kipling Society thus-

John Hay is a wealthy man, driven by the fear of dying. Someone tells him that he who travels eastwards round the world gains a day, and this becomes an obsession for him. He travels incessantly towards the rising sun, in the belief that he is extending his life. Eventually he begins to go crazy, and - to give him some rest - his doctor gives him the idea of swinging above the ground and letting the world rotate beneath him. The story ends with Hay sitting in a swinging chair on the coast of southern India, over a sheet of steel to cut him off from the attraction of the wheeling world, as his brain finally ceases to work

DuncanHill (talk) 00:06, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

A man wouldn't have to be on a swing. He could use a backpack rocket unit to suspend himself over the earth's surface, letting the earth rotate (from West to East) beneath him. Each time the International Date Line passed beneath his feet, the calendar date would move ahead one day and he would be one day OLDER.

But he would get one day older even if he stayed on the surface of the earth. But then, how do people get older if they do not cross the International Date Line, moving westward?

I know the answer to all this. I'm waiting to see if someone else comes up with it. I will post the solution 24 hours from now. (I am not walking around the North Pole, and I am not suspended by a backpack rocket. So I will be 24 hours older then.) :Andme2 (talk) 01:55, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

International Date Line concepts are tricky to deal with. I changed my writeup above more than once. But here is how it all makes sense. Moving to the East across the Date Line sets the calendar date to one day earlier. But continued movement to the East will cross time zones. When a time zone demarcation line is crossed, the time changes to one hour later (one hour closer to the next day). There are 24 time zones around the globe. Thus, if a person travels all the way around the globe and could do it instantly, he would go back a day when crossing the Date Line, but go forward 24 hours, 1 hour at a time, crossing the time zones. (He could start the trip from anywhere, and he travels East until he gets back to his starting point.)

Thus, that poor guy tramping around the North Pole, trying to get younger, will just get older all the time.

I find this problem simpler to think about if I recall that Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th, but it was December 8th in Japan when the bombs were dropped. East of Pearl Harbor, the point at which the date changed from the 7th to the 8th was the time zone demarcation line at the end of the 12 p.m. zone - that is where the 1 a.m. time zone starts, and where watches would be set ahead one hour when entering the time zone; for instance 12:45 p.m. would become 1:45 a.m. the next day.

Thinking about the International Date Line makes me understand why the man in Rudyard Kipling's tale stopped thinking at all. Andme2 (talk) 01:44, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that story about the person in a swing over a steel sheet to defend from the earth's influence. It got me thinking. I'd been worrying because my head has gone much further than my feet what with walking round on this sphere that is the earth. By rocking back and forth in a swing I can compensate for it somewhat I believe :) Dmcq (talk) 09:15, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Communiction with Aliens

My physics professor proposed a challenge to the class:

"Suppose mankind was able to communicate via-radio with an intelligent alien race. It is unknown where these aliens live, what they look like, or their unit of measurement, though we have been able to translate thier language and therefore communicate. What questions should we ask in order to compare their units of measurement for Length, Mass, and Time, with our own?"

After a long discussion, the lcass came up with the following answers:

• Length: "What is the length of one wave of this radio frequency?"
• Mass: "What is the mass of this radio wave?"
• Time: "How long did it take me to ask this question?"

The professor said that our answers for Length and Time were correct, but our answer for Mass was not. However, he did not say why. What was wrong with our Mass answer, and what would be a correct answer to the problem? --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 22:09, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, photons have zero rest mass, so that's your problem there. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 22:15, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Are you allowed to reference things other than radio waves? You could just ask them what the mass of an electron was, if that was the case. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 22:17, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I'd probably suggest asking them for the mass of something that universally occurs at a certain mass - a hydrogen-1 atom or an electron is probably the easiest, or if you've already established what their unit of length is you could ask them for the mass of a cube of, say, water with sides equal to that length. Photons, as radio waves, don't have a rest mass which makes asking for that at best doomed to a confusing answer. ~ mazca ^{t | c} 22:21, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

(ec)What is the mass of 6.02214×10²³ atoms of ¹²C? should do it. DuncanHill (talk) 22:23, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

The thing is that radio waves are the only things we know that we both have. The aliens might not have discovered the atom or the electron yet, and even if they have, they probably wouldn't call it an electron, or Hydrogen, or water. The class's first attempt at an answer was asking for the mass of an atom, but the professor didn't accept that answer, per the above. --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 22:25, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Photons have energy, and hence by special relativity they have mass (strictly speaking it is more natural to say that they have momentum, even though their rest mass is zero), but a radio transmission is not a single photon. Rather radio communication works by emitting energy in many directions (with a very large numbers of photons), and each listener recieves only a small portion of the energy in the original signal. Since you have no way of knowing what portion of the total emitted energy the aliens are recieving, you don't have a way of interpreting their response. Dragons flight (talk) 22:26, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

You could always ask the aliens to compute the energy of one photon using E=hf and report the apparent mass calculated by E=mc^2. Asking for the complete calculation would also reveal their unit of energy. --Bowlhover (talk) 22:47, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Radio technology was discovered before photons, so there is no guarantee that a radio capable civilization would know what a photon was or have discovered Planck's constant. Dragons flight (talk) 23:07, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't the unknown radio Redshift confound the length measurement ("What is the length of one wave...")? -hydnjo talk 23:12, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

So Star Trek was right and everyone speaks English? Or is there some symbolic method of communication developed here?

It seems to me that all your class answers are right, but you would need a serial set of communications to pin it all down. The alien species will presumably know how to measure the momentum of a single photon (rather than mass), maybe that is the missing piece? In any case, I think that for each of your question/answer pairs, you would need to re-transmit something that you predict will yield the equivalent measurement at the other end. Then by each measuring the errors and re-transmitting iteratively, you will be able to converge on a mutual definition. Franamax (talk) 00:29, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

And looking at this again, to repeat, I think your better question #2 would be "what is the momentum of this radio wave?". Anyone else? Franamax (talk) 02:34, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

There are two problems with the mass: red shifts (both doppler and gravitational), and the fact that you did not specify that you want the mass of exactly one photon. The "time" and "length" questions are also ambiguous, since you do not know the relative velocity of the aliens or the difference in gravitational potential. I would ask for all three quantities relative to the same physical phenomenon, the photon emitted by a particular atomic phenomenon, namely the "transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. " (see Atomic clock.) The questions are:

1. length: What is the wavelength of the reference photon?
2. time: What is the frequency fo the reference photon?
3. mass: how heavy isthe reference photon?

For cross-reference, you can ask the same question for several other reference photons. -Arch dude (talk) 03:31, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that whatever your professor considers the "correct" answer will depend on unspoken assumptions that only he knows, making the question rather arbitrary and uninteresting. If you can't assume they know what an atom is, how can you assume they know what a radio wave or a photon is? Or (to be picky) what the concepts of mass, time, or length are? All we really know is that they have some language and own radio transceivers. --Allen (talk) 04:21, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that he assumes that the aliens must know what a radio wave is because they can receive them. I personally disagree. They might be able to "hear" radio waves and simply know how to amplify them. They might be using directional antennae to isolate signals, which have nothing to do with knowing the frequency. You could just teach them how to find the values you're looking for. I'd tell them how to find each physical constant, then use Planck units. — DanielLC 16:05, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

You don't need to ask for quantities with units of length, time, and mass, just for any three quantities with linearly independent units. I would first of all ask for the gravitational constant in units of M⁻¹ L³ T⁻² and the vacuum speed of light in units of L T⁻¹, both of which have been known to humans for longer than radio has. Then practically any third quantity would allow you to solve for all units, such as the spectral lines of a substance of their choice in units of their choice. That would avoid having to use the radio signal as a reference, which is problematic because of redshift as people have mentioned. For that matter you could let them choose all three quantities; they understand the problem as well as you and additionally know what data they have available. I agree with Allen and DanielLC that your professor is being unreasonable. -- BenRG (talk) 16:11, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

The illustration on the Pioneer plaque

You might enjoy our article about the Pioneer plaque -- That was an attempt to come up with practical answers for some of these questions.

Atlant (talk) 18:53, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I have to object to answers that require responses from the aliens - it's very unlikely that we'll get an answer to our question within a human lifetime. We'd want to communicate everything we needed to say in a single communication and hope that a single response tells us everything we need to know.

A reasonable definition for a unit of mass could be "An Avagadro's number of protons at rest in your inertial frame". The standard definition of a second ("the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.") should be good enough for explaining time. Once you've explained time then length can be "the distance a light beam travels through a vacuum in such-and-such amount of time". So our basic units are easy enough.

Some more interesting problems would be describing what you mean by "Left" and "Right", "Clockwise" and "CounterClockwise". You can try sending pictures - but how do you know whether they are looking at them upside-down or mirrored or something? Talking about colours of things would be hard too - we don't see pure colours - we only see the relative amounts of red, green and blue. An entire spectrum of each material from radio to gamma-rays might be needed in order to explain the "colour" of something to unknown alien eyes. Sending pictures (other than diagrams) would be exceedingly problematic if they don't see in visible light because each pixel has to be an entire spectrum - and we don't have "cameras" that work like that.

Even sending simple diagrams would be tough - we don't know that they have the same way of drawing graphs as us - maybe they habitually use polar coordinates or use log axes all the time. Our diagram conventions like the idea that an "arrow" indicates direction is quite meaningless to our aliens who hunted by throwing lots of spikey phthnaaags using a huge polished worchniff and who never invented the bow and arrow. Maybe they use a highly stylised image of the head of some local insect to indicate direction? Maybe the insect was chosen because it walks backwards? Communicating without words AND without knowing what conventions the other guys have is REALLY tough. Perhaps they don't even use two-dimensional images - maybe they do everything in 3D or represent a graph as an animation of a 1D line with time representing the X-axis.

Numbers are things we represent with digits - 123 means 100+20+3. If the aliens work in (say) base 8, we can still talk - but supposing they use sums of consecutive primes or sums of fibbonachi numbers or something instead of sums of powers of 10 as we do? In all the science fiction books ("Contact" is an excellent example) we start off by sending a series of prime numbers - but what if you saw "K KK KKK J KKJ KH KKKH KKJH HKH KKKHH"...would you recognise that this is a series of primes? (It's written in backwards roman numerals with K=I, J=V, H=X). If we saw a system like Roman Numerals without being taught what they mean - would be be able to figure them out?

Understanding what we say could be almost impossible!

It would be interesting to split your class in two - have each half try to think like an alien, then have the two halves send messages to each other and see if you can understand each other. You can't use ordinary writing - you have to invent your own number system - pictures can be screwed with in all sorts of creative ways. I think it'll be REALLY tough to talk at all!

SteveBaker (talk) 00:06, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

If you assume that the humans and aliens can understand each other enough to find out each other's units of measurement, the other difficulties you listed are comparatively trivial. Just reference a few distant quasars and tell the aliens to go from one to the other. That'll establish our concept of clockwise and counterclockwise. Then, tell them to imagine a circle in front of them rotating clockwise. The very top would be rotating to the right; the bottom would be travelling left.

As for graphing issues, the aliens should be able to figure out that an out-of-place marking indicates emphasis, regardless of whether an insect head or an arrow is used. Send a graph showing time versus distance for light, clearly labelling both axes, to make human conventions clear. Use words if necessary.

As for numbers, the most logical number system in electronic devices is binary. Send a list of prime numbers in binary, making sure each number is well separated from the others, and the alien cryptoanalysts would likely suspect binary before anything else. --Bowlhover (talk) 05:48, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

The questioner states that one of the ground rules is that: "It is unknown where these aliens live" - so you can't use a map of some quasars to tell clockwise from anticlockwise because you don't know on which side of these quasars they live. If they are on the same side of the quasars as us - then your approach works - but if they live on the opposite side of these objects, they'll deduce that we send our pictures as raster scans that go right to left and top to bottom or left to right and bottom to top - and you'll have inadvertently switched clockwise from anticlockwise and left from right. Even when you've successfully explained clockwise and anticlockwise, you can't use those to define left and right because you have assumed that they understand the concept of "top" and "bottom". That's easy to understand if you are a human growing up on a planet where gravity indicates the obvious "down" direction - but what about a creature that lives in deep space - or is like a jellyfish with radial symmetry and neutral bouyancy that is just as comfortable swimming at any angle. Left and right might not exist as concepts at all for a creature with three-fold symmetry and exclusively 3D writing and diagramming technologies. This is precisely the trouble you get yourself into when considering how you'd send these messages. It's far to easy to assume that aliens would share inherent biasses that we have because of who we are.

The Voyager plaque is particularly ill-conceived. The two human figures to the right could just as easily be interpreted as maps of the two continents we live on or as a polar-axis plot of some bizarre math function we're trying to impress them with. The map of the solar system is already wrong - Voyager itself found rings around Uranus that aren't on the map - and putting Pluto as the last planet turns out to be wrong because there are other, larger "planets" further out that aren't on the map. Aliens who try to use the map to find our solar system will probably reject ours out of hand because it has too many planets and the third and nineth ones out from the star are considered by their criteria to be binary planets and there are no binaries shown on the map! Then there is the arrow showing how Voyager travelled - which could just as easily mean "Please destroy the planet that shot at me with arrows as I flew past them"...or almost anything else you could imagine. Quite how anyone would see the dumbell thing at the top left as representing the wavelength of light from a hydrogen atom is beyond me! I doubt I'd have guessed it if I hadn't read NASA's description of the plaque. Since there is no indication in the binary numbers which is a '1' and which is a '0' and whether the numbers should be read left-to-right or right-to-left, there are four interpretations possible even if you realise that a positional number system is being used.

There are plenty of other ways to represent numbers using strings of two symbols...perhaps an infinite number of ways. Again, I urge you to consider roman numerals where you have I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X for the numbers from 1 to 10, no positional notation (you need completely different sybols for 5, 50 and 500 or 1, 10, 100 and 1000) and no concept of zero! The idea that an I before a V or X means "subtract" and an I after a V or X means "add" is not at all obvious. But if our aliens had used roman numerals for aeons before we came to talk to them then they might be totally unaware of binary notation. Worse, there are other "positional" schemes you can come up with - recall that any even number can be represented by the sum of two primes - so any number can be represented as the average of two primes. We could have a system where X.X.. means five because it translates to: "sum the third and fifth primes and divide by two". There are quite a few 'alternative' number representations that have been proposed in the past for making addition and subraction of negative and positive numbers easier where each digit is flagged as either positive or negative rather than the number as a whole. You have to think 'outside the box'.

SteveBaker (talk) 08:25, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

The Big Bang Theory

am bit confused by the big bang theory as logic would have it, something cant come out of nothing, yet this is what is being put forward!i read somewhere that although the universe is expanding, at some point it will slow then contract on its self. if this is the case, does the possiblity exist that at some point the universe will contract to such a point that it will, again? at some point explode outwards? a friend of mine says that the bang radiated out FROM a given point but the materials were travelling in one general direction, not circular. if this is the case, could it also be possible that this universe is made from material from another universe ejected by a huge black hole? My keyboard is playing up some cant find the "tilde" key to end this message!jonathon47 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.29.21.231 (talk) 22:37, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

You might want to read Big Bang Theory and Metric expansion of space. And the tilde key is above "Tab". Alternately, you can click the button that looks like and it'll sign for you. --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 22:48, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Also, you may want to see ultimate fate of the universe. -- kainaw™ 22:52, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

The big bang only says that the universe was in a very hot dense state 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding since then. It doesn't say that the hot dense state was the beginning of the universe, or that it came out of nothing. That's a combination of overenthusiastic speculation by physicists and misreporting in the popular press. The truth is that nobody knows where it came from, and that's not what big bang cosmology is about (it's about the expansion afterwards). Your friend is incorrect—the bang didn't radiate out from a point and the matter doesn't travel in one particular direction. The book you're thinking of might be A Brief History of Time, which is now very outdated (the cosmology parts, anyway). The location of the tilde varies widely depending on your keyboard layout, and sometimes doesn't even match what's painted on the key caps. -- BenRG (talk) 15:26, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Let's take this a bit at a time:

• something cant come out of nothing

Why not? The laws of physics become seriously whacked when all of everything is squished into a teeny-tiny sub-microscopic dot. Our "normal experience" is simply not valid there anymore. We're gradually pushing the laws of physics closer to the absolute origin of everything - but it gets tough when things are that compressed.

• i read somewhere that although the universe is expanding, at some point it will slow then contract on its self.

This is the Big crunch theory - and it's not currently what mainstream science believes - but I don't think it's known for sure either way.

• if this is the case, does the possiblity exist that at some point the universe will contract to such a point that it will, again? at some point explode outwards?

That is the Cyclic Universe theory - and it's possible. The trouble is that if everything started as a literally zero-sized dot as big-bang (and indeed big-crunch) theories say - then absolutely no information can pass from one universe to the next. That includes the knowledge that there ever was a previous universe. So it's likely that we'll never know. That's a shame because it's a really nice theory. Perhaps even time gets crunched up and our present universe's collapse to a big-crunch is the cause of the big-bang that started the universe. We simply don't know yet.

• a friend of mine says that the bang radiated out FROM a given point but the materials were travelling in one general direction, not circular.

No - that's definitely not true. But it's not untrue in the way you'd expect. You'd expect me to say "it expanded out like a sphere" but it wasn't just that there was all this big empty space with a teeny-tiny dot in it - then the dot exploded and threw stuff everywhere. That's NOT the present theory. Because mass curves space - if all of the mass is squished into an infinitesimal dot - then space is curved so tightly that space is also squashed into that dot. Time too. So the universe expanded in all directions at once - but space expanded too. But your friend is 100% wrong. There is no "special direction" - we've proven that by looking at how the cosmic background radiation is distributed. This is radiation left over from the big bang. If your friend was right then all of the radiation would be coming from one direction - but it's not. No matter which way we look, the cosmic background radiation is roughly the same brightness. This can only be the case if the universe was all compressed into a dot and no matter which direction we look - we're looking directly towards that dot.

• if this is the case, could it also be possible that this universe is made from material from another universe ejected by a huge black hole?

Well, kinda. Yes. If the universe undergoes a "Big crunch" (and I repeat - that's not what we currently believe) then in it's latter stages, the universe would in a sense become one big black hole. The cyclic universe theory would (presumably) allow this universe to come about from the big-crunch of a different universe. There are lots of speculations in these directions - but because absolutely no information can survive a big-bang/big-crunch scenario - there is no way for us to ever know. So - feel free to speculate - but we can't know for sure.

SteveBaker (talk) 23:04, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Chemistry and /or biology

I'm not a chemist or biologist, but it seems to me that there are not many questioning these subjects. Anyone say why that might be? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.76.229.54 (talk) 23:40, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Most colleges and high schools in the English-speaking world are not in session yet. Give it a couple weeks and we'll have tons of homework questions here. I particularly like the ones that don't even omit the question numbers. -- kainaw™ 23:51, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Can you clarify your question? --Shaggorama (talk) 05:16, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Blood types

Is there an evolutionary advantage for a population to have multiple blood types? Would it possibly protect against some kind of disease making it more an advantage to have diversity? Or is it just something that simply varies among individuals, like hair color? Nadando (talk) 23:55, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Well in some respects, I think it is advantageous to be AB, but my a insignificant margin. This adaptation means you can "survive" if there is a blood shortage, because you can accept a wider range of blood types from different donors. Also, there is some risks that occur during pregnancy when a woman AO gets pregnant the second time with an embryo growing inside her that has "foreign" receptors on the cell membrane. Maybe this clue will let someone else finish what I'm trying to recall. In general, the only risks I remember are the pregnancy thing, which I don't want to write what I think is accurate. There are plenty of good experts who will read this and help you better. Sentriclecub (talk) 00:05, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

My blood group is at a disadvantage—i'm O- Rh. This means I can give blood to anyone, so it's fairly invaluable to others, but it means i'm in a bit more trouble if I lose 20 or so units of blood. —Cyclonenim^T@lk? 02:19, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I susoect you are thinking of Rh disease, also known as Rhesus disease. DuncanHill (talk) 01:13, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think blood types evolved in an environment in which transfusions were an option, so being "able to accept a wider range of blood types" can't be anything to do with evolution. — PhilHibbs | talk 09:32, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I did always rather think that the sheer number of blood-types is evidence enough of god not existing. Bit of a simpleton reason but I just thought...why? Why would an 'all powerful god make mankind with so many different blood types? I suspect the retort would be that he made one and they mutated, but I still think that we are far far too complex to be 'created' (if I was all powerful and making my own creatures I certainly wouldn't make us as complex inside as we are - why make us dependent on such a set mix of oxygen and other chemicals, why make us able to eat x but not y, etc. etc. Sorry got a little off topic!) 194.221.133.226 (talk) 13:54, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Diversity is a massive advantage. If some nasty virus appears that attaches to whatever gene produces type-O blood then maybe everyone with type-O dies. Without diversity - it's game over. With diversity, a bunch of people still die - but most survive because they don't have that gene. It's a blip. This is why it's very bad for us to (for example) generate all of our corn from cloned corn plants - there is zero diversity - so the at the first sign of trouble, we lose ALL of our crop.

If there were no genetic diversity then evolution would come to a grinding halt...if everyone were equally "fit" then "survival of the fittest" would fail to produce any change. As the environment changes around us, we NEED that diversity to survive. If something in our environment were to change to favor one particular blood type - then over enough generations, that type would begin to dominate the population and we'd evolve to adapt to that environmental change. If we all had the same blood type and it wasn't the favored one then we'd fail to adapt and do much worse as a result. If the population has a wide range of blood types and they are all equally good - then we're primed, ready to evolve just as soon as the need arises. Same deal with different hair color, eye color - all of those variations help us to evolve and protect our species from being eradicated by virulent diseases.

Even things we consider to be genetic defects are sometimes there for a reason. Look at sickle-cell anaemia - this is a gene that controls the shape of blood cells. You inherit one copy from each parent - it's mostly found in human races that evolved in tropical climates. If both of these genes are "defective", you have a drastically shortened lifespan (maybe 45 years). If only one of them is defective, it happens to confer virtual immunity to malaria. Before we could treat malaria effectively, if you lived in topical regions, it was essential to have sickle-cell prone individuals in society to keep and spread that gene. If nobody had the gene - we'd all suffer from malaria. If everybody had the gene, then everyone would develop anaemia and die early (but not so early as to prevent you from passing the gene onto your children). Only when roughly half the population have it could life continue comfortably in tropical climates. These days, our "environment" has changed - we can prevent and treat malaria fairly easily. Humans are probably evolving to slowly eradicate the gene - but not enough time has gone by for it to completely disappear and there are still MANY cases of sickle-cell disease.

SteveBaker (talk) 22:47, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Just a note - in the USA and Europe we can prevent and treat malaria fairly easily, however it remains a major killer in Africa. DuncanHill (talk) 22:54, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah I understand the advantage of diversity, I was more looking for specific examples of blood type affecting fitness. Thanks for the response- nice to see you back SteveBaker. Nadando (talk) 03:05, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Chimpanzees an us have the same system of major blood types so it definitely looks like there is an advantage to us in the diversity. Richard Dawkins says about this in The Ancestor's Tale: for particular genes you are more closely related to some chimpanzees than to some humans. Dmcq (talk) 10:02, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

128.104.112.147's comment in the 'Self-sacrifice in non-human animals?' thread above got me thinking. Now, I'd always thought that the Queen bee was the dictatorial ruler of the colony and the only bee with a form of rudimentary individual intelligence, issuing commands to her army of chemically-stunted-and-controlled, utterly dispensable offspring-slaves from the safety of the bowels of the hive. On more than one occasion, I actually have found myself thinking what a shame it is that the worker bees don't have the capability to realize how badly they're being screwed. :)

So anyway, to my question. Are there any social insect species where the above scenario does apply? --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 23:59, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I won't necessarily answer your question but I will point out that since the ultimate goal of life is generally for genes to propagate themselves, it is very much in the worker bee's interest to hang around the hive. They are (I think) 3/4-related to the queen so the best chance of propagating their own particular genome is to hang in there with the queen. The "fly-away-and-be-free" scenario doesn't work out so well for honeybees, since they'd need to organize a group rebellion, in order to have a workable group to handle food collection and storage, defence, etc. Franamax (talk) 00:13, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, about every 2 or 3 years, the workers DO rebel. If the queen's egg laying declines, the workers raise a number of new queens. The queens in the hive then either go on a killing spree and battle it out to the death with any other remaining queen, or leave, taking a wad of workers with them called a swarm. Furthermore, while the drones live it up during mating season, roaming freely in and out of any hive at will, at the end of the nectar gathering season, they get kicked out of the hive and starve to death. Worker door women stand guard at the entrance to the hive and prevent the drones from returning. So the drones don't have it as well as you might think. The worker bees live on the average about 6 weeks during the height of the nectar gathering season. They literally work themselves to death, flying back and forth up to seven miles to get nectar and pollen. When there is an intruder, I don't really think the workers know they're going to die after stinging. When a bee gets injured, it put's off a stong odor. It's probably a ferimone thing. When the other bees smell that smell, they go crazy. I'm sure it's uncontrollable, having experienced it many times. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.163.102.226 (talk) 18:28, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I am reminded of the story The Mother Hive, in Actions and Reactions, by Rudyard Kipling. In it, a wax moth foments rebellion amongst the more impressionable members of a hive. DuncanHill (talk) 00:38, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Bees are one of those creatures where thinking about it in terms of individuals makes not a whole lot of sense. I find it easier to consider the entire hive a single organism, since genetically and practically that is how it functions. The worker cannot flee the hive any more than your hair can choose to flee your head.

In any case, I don't think the queen has anything like a "rudimentary" intelligence, and she doesn't "issue orders". Don't confuse the political metaphors we use as applying at all at the insect level. She isn't really a "queen", they aren't really "workers", and they certainly have nothing like the human concept for "freedom". They're little robots at best, doing the only things they are pre-programmed to do. Every member of the hive is like this. All insects are like this. Brains are not where their exceptional abilities lie. --98.217.8.46 (talk) 00:39, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah - I agree. Bee hives and Ant nests are best considered to be single individuals made up of many sub-units. Just as we humans have semi-independent white blood cells swimming around in our veins. We don't consider those to be separate beings because they can't survive and reproduce on their own - and the same thing is true of individual bees and ants. Calling the lone egg-layer a "Queen" is to antropomorphise the situation. She's just one part of a composite organism. The ways ants communicate and get work done is bizarre if you look at individual ants. They do the dumbest things - but the net result of a bazillion individuals working mindlessly is some kind of hive-brain. An intelligence that lets the entire colony react to problems and deal with them appropriately. It's an "emergent property" of all of that dumb behavior. SteveBaker (talk) 03:53, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Curiously, you've just made a good stab at describing Wikipedia! Franamax (talk) 23:35, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Have you considered that the bees may be right and you wrong in your thinking? Am I a slave to look after my children? Should I resent it? I am here because of all my ancestors and I do what I do because they did what they did. Dmcq (talk) 08:35, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

You might like looking at Polyergus (Amazon ants) for a real case of slavery amongst ants. Do you suppose the slaves are happy or sad about this :-) 08:50, 14 August 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dmcq (talk • contribs)

How are they any more slaves than other ants? They were born in a different colony to a different queen, but it's not like they have any way of knowing. — DanielLC 15:43, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, the normal "purpose" of any animal is to perpetuate it's genes into the next generation. When the "slave" Formica ants work for the "slavemaster" Polyergus ants, they aren't working to perpetuate their own genes - they are perpetuating the genes of the Polyergus and ensuring that future generations of the Formica species will do less well than they otherwise would because there will be more Polyergus around. They are working without hope of earning any payback...work for no pay is either volunteerism or slavery. They clearly don't volunteer - so I'd have to call them slaves. However, ants aren't exactly smart as individuals - the Formica's are captured a pupea and when they hatch, they evidently have no clue that they are enslaved. They aren't under coercion - they could walk away at any time and return to their original colony if they wanted to. So it's hard to tie this to a human analog...slaves who don't even know that they are slaves?! It's dangerous to anthropomorphise. What about the cuckoo? Momma cuckoo lays an egg in another birds' nest - the baby cuckoo has evolved to hatch in less time than it's nestmates and it's instinctive first act after it hatches is to push the other eggs out of the nest - thereby "murdering it's step-brothers and step-sisters". Is this a morally unacceptable thing - or is it merely a clever evolutionary strategy? The more we learn about this stuff - the harder it is to attach values to these kinds of actions. SteveBaker (talk) 03:53, 15 August 2008 (UTC)