Halloween

Today I woke up to the New White World. This year snow is an early bird. Actually, I can't recall a Halloween with snow. So we have another holiday fun: we will make snowmen!

Assignment

I just completed the first writing assignment for the Writing in the Sciences course. It was inspired by Prof. Kevin McCartney. My thanks to professor. Here it is:

I was just about to summarize a “hot paper” in my field, but suddenly realized how it would bore non-specialists. Let's talk about some major trends in biological evolution. 

If you look at fossils, especially old ones, you would see that they are huge. Many organisms--reptilies, insects, or even microalgae--exceeded all conceivable limits in size. One-meter dragonfles flew among 30-meter trees, whale-sized dinosaurs trampled tree ferns, millimeter algae competed for silicon to build their shells. But then something happened. Up to 90% of Cretaceous organisms extinct, replaced by new Paleogene species. Between Cretacious and Paleogene fossils lies a thin layer known as the K-T boundary, which corresponds to the geologically short time of mass extinction. Scientists hypothesize that the extinctions were caused by one or more catastrophic events, including at least one asteroid impact.

Let's think about it carefully. Why Cretaceous forms are so large? And perhaps even more interesting, why modern forms are so small? Scientists have come up with many answers to the former question, for each group of organisms separatly: entomologists explain the large sizes of insects by a high oxygen content in the atmosphere; zoologists believe that the gigantism of dinosaurs was caused by competition between predators and prey; phycologsts think that algae build massive skeletons because of the greater availability of silicon. I think it is very strange to explain the same phenomenon by so different reasons.

We still do not know basic things about the world we are studying. A few people--even among scientists--ask basic questions. Everyone's just to busy to do so. Nobody seriously addressed the issue of why the life has not become so huge again. What has changed in the world so much that living organisms must be tiny now? This is an excellent reason to think for a while and an endless opportunity for new research.