Peter’s corner
I had the most amazing experience back in 2020. I saw inside my own heart! I had experienced some irregular heartbeats, so I went for a procedure to identify the problem.
The surgeon put three catheter wires inside my heart to measure how the electrics of the heart operated. He located a minor short-circuit, and worked out that it could not cause me any real problem and was best left alone. He also “took my heart for a spin” to try to reproduce the symptoms I had, but without success.
I was awake during the procedure, watching large monitor displays, and the surgeon explained it to me. When the heart beats, an electrical signal first causes the right atrium chamber to beat. The signal then reaches the AV node, where it is delayed a short time before it travels on to cause the ventricles to beat. The timing delay is just right to ensure efficient pumping of blood. The AV node does other critical things also.
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Category: Peter Mikula
The world’s oldest colour?
Peter’s Corner
The world’s oldest biological colour is pink. Bright neon pink. Or so the scientists announced in 2018, describing research done at the ANU in Canberra. They had extracted organic molecules called porphyrins from marine black shale rocks from Mauritania in Africa — shales that were well known as containing microbial fossil cyanobacteria. Porphyrins are ring molecules important for the colour of biological substances such as hemoglobin and chlorophyll. On this occasion the porphyrins had a purple colour, which becomes pink if diluted.
The scientists were awestruck thinking that these colour molecules could survive for such a long time. How long? 1,100,000,000 years. That is the alleged evolutionary age of the Precambrian strata in which the shales with the fossils, were positioned.
But that age is impossible for any organic substance. The laws of chemistry dictate that organic substances will gradually decompose — even in the fridge, that KFC chicken left over from the party last week is going to break down quite soon.
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Cheesecakes and creation
Peter’s Corner
I’ve been practising making my mother’s baked cheesecake recipe for a while, and I am told it is bearing good fruit.
Now think about this. The chef follows a recipe, or a process, or a code, that is designed to produce a perfect cheesecake. The ingredients do not become a cake just by themselves if we wait long enough. The right amount of time is part of the process – I discovered that when I forgot the cake was in the oven, but fortunately my wife Denise, instead of the fire brigade, came to the rescue.
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The cosmological constant
Peter’s Corner
I fitted another piece to an empty spot in my jigsaw puzzle, and marvelled at finding the only piece that perfectly fitted the shape and picture required for the empty spot. That reminded me how marvellously our universe is put together. It is like a jigsaw built not from cardboard pieces, but from physical and mathematical laws and numbers.
Did you know that scientists have discovered stunning coincidences between the values of some physical constants and the requirements for life? The numbers have amazingly exact values. This is called “fine tuning.” According to Michael Turner, famed astrophysicist, the fine-tuning of some of the constants is as unexpected as throwing a dart across the universe and hitting a precise one millimetre wide target.
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