popplers

Happy Corvidae!

I really enjoyed this TED talk on corvids. I had previously read about crows fashioning their own tools, and I've watched the entire David Attenborough Life of Birds series. But Joshua Klein's peanut vending machine is sublime. Love it!

Science Tuesday

• From today's Globe: Devil Toads! (I just like saying Beelzebufo.)
• From today's New York Times: cephalopod camouflage. (Many of the principles discussed in the article are illustrated in this TED talk by David Gallo: Underwater astonishments)
• Via NASA: don't miss tomorrow's lunar eclipse. Partial eclipse circa 8:45 pm EST Feb. 19, totality around 10 pm.

Sad but true

Even though I work for PharmaCo, Chris still scored higher on this test than I did.

Megascops asio

I've been meaning to finish this post for a while now, but it's been pretty busy of late. At any rate… Three weeks ago, we drove up to New Hampshire to have dinner and play games with Sean (Wii!). When we finally headed for home, it was after 1 a.m.; the roads were still wet and the frogs were out in force. I don't know if this is just a New England thing, but whenever it rains, the frogs seem to love hanging out on the roads. It's nerve-wracking trying to avoid the little guys. To the casual observer, I'm sure it seems like the driver is drunk, high, or both. "No, offisher, I swear— there were frogs all over the road."

So, Chris was behind the wheel of the S2000, playing Reverse Frogger. It was pleasantly cool and not actively raining, so we had the top down. Suddenly, there was a white flash and this owl came swooping down out of the sky. Here's where my memory of the incident gets jumbled. I know I gasped. Chris said he hit the horn and swerved to the right to avoid the owl, but I didn't hear anything. Afterward, he said that he felt really silly, honking at an owl for "cutting him off".

The car hit the owl. Chris pulled over and I got out of the car to check on the little guy. It was too dark to see much, so I asked Chris to turn the car around. The headlights provided plenty of light, and I could see that the owl was flat on his back in the road. He blinked his eyes, and I was struck by how large and yellow they were. I had thought that I'd pick him up and take him to Tufts Veterinary. But as he lay there, clenching and unclenching his talons, I thought better of that.

I went back to the car to grab a jacket, in the hopes that I could wrap him up in that. Chris said something about how he thought it was too late— that the little guy was a goner. "He's still moving," I said, and headed back to the owl. As I was leaning over him, trying to figure out how to execute my cunning plan, the owl suddenly flapped his wings and righted himself. So much for being a goner, I thought.

There was a car coming from the other direction. Chris said that I should try to shoo the owl away from the yellow line, so that he didn't get spooked or hit again. I draped my jacket around him and tried to herd him toward the side of the road. He moved forward a little, then flapped and flew about 50 feet, landing on the verge. At that point, I figured that he must be reasonably well; he had stood up, and he had managed to fly. He probably had at least a mild concussion, but hopefully he'd recover. I got back in the car and Chris drove home, extremely slowly, while trying to avoid the amphibian multitudes out celebrating.

Given that this is actually the second time that Chris has hit an owl, we decided that there must be a huge untapped market for additional devices to scare away animals from automobiles and humans (like deer whistles or bear bells). We haven't patented any of these, but we're looking for engineers interested in inventing owl chimes, frog horns, or badgeridoos.

When we got home, we decided that the owl must have been an Eastern Screech-Owl (Megascops asio), gray morph. So drive carefully out there— the owl that you save may be your own. Or something. As a side note, Slipping on Owls would totally be a great name for a band.

Fountain fun

I knew that Mentos + diet soda = whoosh, but these guys take it to a whole new level. They're solidly in the midst of their fifteen minutes: they were featured on NPR's All Things Considered a few weeks ago ("Orchestrating Mixed-Media Art with Mentos"), in the Boston Globe yesterday ("Mainers earn Internet fame for tricks with Mentos, Diet Coke") and last night on Letterman. And our friend Ben actually knows them!

Mentos: the fwwooooshmaker.

Slashfic and science

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article earlier this week entitled Reading the hand for sex distinctions. There is apparently a theory (ahem) that the length of your ring fingers correlates to the amount of testosterone that you're exposed to in utero. Catherine Salmon of the University of Redlands researched the connection between womens' finger lengths and their taste in erotica, and discussed the results of The Impact of Prenatal Testosterone on Female Interest in Male-Male Romance at the recent Human Biology and Evolution Society meeting. From the Inquirer article:

[…] Slash started in the 1970s with that sexy Star Trek duo Kirk/Spock. A quick Web search reveals dozens of stories with passages like this shower scene: "Jim ran his free hand through Spock's wet, matted chest hair, rubbing the bronze-green nipples with his fingertips…. Spock moaned…." The action gets much more pornographic at that point, and the pair eventually end up in a mind meld.

Many women find this unappealing to the point of disgust, Salmon says, but others report that it fulfills a long-held desire. She wondered whether the difference could be related to testosterone, and perhaps connected to these finger-length ratios. […]"

Reading this (especially with the accompanying illustration) brings to mind Ellen Fremedon's comments on slash shock: Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.

Fishapods in the news

Scientific American offers what I hope will become a recurring feature, Just Another Lousy Week for Creationism: "The glass jaw of creationism suffered a hard uppercut with the highly publicized discovery of Tiktaalik, the wonderful fossil animal that is perfectly transitional between fish and tetrapods."

Times Online has some entertaining silliness in One small step for newt-like things:

Tiktaalik 1: Morning.
Tiktaalik 2: Morning.
T1: Got any plans for today?
T2: Not much. You?
T1: Thought I might go for a walk.
T2: A what? […]

Flu news

I love this sentence: "At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ferret sneezes are frozen in tiny vials and locked up in a high-security chamber called an enhanced biosafety Level 3 laboratory."

Poetry in motion

After reading the A.V. Club's TiVo This Now! feature, we recorded an episode of Peep and the Big Wide World, a show that endeavours to teach science to preschoolers. It stars a spherical yellow chick (Peep), a round red robin (Chirp), and a duck that resembles an eggplant (Quack). I love the simple animation style, and it's narrated by Joan Cusack, with a theme song by Taj Mahal. Never before has science been so cute.

I, for one, salute our Giant Penguin Overlords

Schoolkids discover cool fossil:

[…] The remains were found last month near Kawhia and are thought to be 40 million years old.

Experts think it may be the finest example of the long-extinct bird found. They say the Kawhia giant dwarfed the huge emperor penguin, and had it lived today would have looked many men in the eye. […]

Dive, dive!

Giant Octopus vs. Submarine: Enteroctopus dofleini attacks remote-operated vehicle off British Columbia. This story caught my eye for two reasons: I have 1) a thing for cephalopods and 2) a friend who works on autonomous underwater vehicles. But this quote alone is worth the price of admission:

Jim Cosgrove, an octopus expert at the Royal BC museum, believes the octopus may have been senile.

"It could have been looking for a meal or looking for a girlfriend," Cosgrove said. "It's difficult to know what exactly it was doing or why it wanted to make contact with the ROV for whatever reason."

More science quickies

• Scientists combine 100 images of virus to show 3-D structure of HIV.
• I knew that we shared 99% of the chimpanzee's genes, so I suppose it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that chimps seem to be more closely related to humans than to gorillas and orangutans.
• Did you see the recent news story that basically said men enjoy seeing cheaters suffer? Then don't miss James Gorman's amusing Side Effects column, This Is Your Brain on Schadenfreude.
• Finally, it's only tangentially science-related, but I really enjoyed Yiyun Li's Tang-flavored memoir, entitled Eat, Memory: Orange Crush.

I'd always suspected as much.

Syracuse University researchers investigate the evolutionary trade-off between intelligence and sexual prowess… in bats. Here comes the science:

For some male bats, sexual prowess comes with a price -- smaller brains. A research team led by Syracuse University biologist Scott Pitnick found that in bat species where the females are promiscuous, the males boasting the largest testicles also had the smallest brains. Conversely, where the females were faithful, the males had smaller testes and larger brains. […]

Will no one think of the penguins?

Luc Jacquet, director of documentary hit March of the Penguins, is concerned that his documentary has been hijacked: "It does annoy me to a certain degree," he said. "For me there is no doubt about evolution. I am a scientist. The intelligent design theory is a step back to the thinking of 300 years ago. My film is not supposed to be interpreted in this way."

I'm glad that he finally spoke up. Contrast Jacquet's statement with this all-too-typical view from the religious/ conservative/ I-D camp:

"The complexity of the penguins' lifestyle testifies to a Divine Creator," said one commentator on Christian Answers.

"To think that natural selection or even the penguins themselves could come up with the idea to migrate miles and miles multiple times each year without their partner or their offspring is a bit insulting to my intellect. How great is our God!"

Hrmph. "Insulting to my intellect," indeed.

Beef, pork, chicken, or Wendy

An interesting news story on artificial meat, from a more reliable source than The Weekly World News. Maybe Rudy Rucker wasn't so far off after all.

[…] In a paper in the June 29 issue of Tissue Engineering, a team of scientists, including University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny, propose two new techniques of tissue engineering that may one day lead to affordable production of in vitro - lab grown -- meat for human consumption. It is the first peer-reviewed discussion of the prospects for industrial production of cultured meat.

"There would be a lot of benefits from cultured meat," says Matheny, who studies agricultural economics and public health. "For one thing, you could control the nutrients. For example, most meats are high in the fatty acid Omega 6, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. With in vitro meat, you could replace that with Omega 3, which is a healthy fat. […]

Publish or perish

An oldie (but new to me) from the Annals of Improbable Research (Vol. 2, No. 5): How to Write a Scientific Paper.

Abstract

We (meaning I) present observations on the scientific publishing process which (meaning that) are important and timely in that unless I have more published papers soon, I will never get another job. These observations are consistent with the theory that it is difficult to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough publications to get future jobs.

Poor impulse control

Intermittent Explosive Disorder: legitimate psychiatric problem caused by neurochemical imbalance, or scientific-sounding excuse for inexcusable behavior?

[…] " [Emil Coccaro, a leading anger researcher at the University of Chicago] wrote in a recent journal editorial: People who explode are not very lovable. No celebrity is likely to volunteer to be a poster child for Intermittent Explosive Disorder. And philanthropists are less likely to contribute to research aimed at helping people viewed as perpetrators rather than patients or victims.

The patients themselves can be problematic as well, resisting treatment even when surrounded by wrecked lives.

''People say, 'I don't have an illness, I have an anger -- It's not I who have a problem, it's you," said Ronald Kessler of Harvard University, who led the national study on how common mental illnesses are. […]

She blinded me with science!

Ah, so that explains it:

[…] In other words, strong emotional ties to another person inhibit not only negative emotions but also affect the brain circuits involved in making social judgments about that person. The results, conclude Bartels and Zeki, suggest that attachment involves a push and a pull mechanism – you are pulled along by the strong sense of reward you feel when you love. But you are also pushed by a tendency not to objectively see faults in the other person which might threaten love, or put the brakes on, so preventing you rushing headlong into a relationship, because circuits responsible for critical social assessment and negative emotions are literally switched off. So love really is blind and there is a biological basis for the blindness. […]

What did I just see?

I just read a fascinating article on visual cognition.

In one experiment, people who were walking across a college campus were asked by a stranger for directions. During the resulting chat, two men carrying a wooden door passed between the stranger and the subjects. After the door went by, the subjects were asked if they had noticed anything change.

Half of those tested failed to notice that, as the door passed by, the stranger had been substituted with a man who was of different height, of different build and who sounded different. He was also wearing different clothes.

These two videos (QuickTime required) show the switch from a different angle, so the swap is obvious to us. But it's mind-boggling to me that the person giving directions failed to notice the change about half of the time.

Blinded by science!

Scratch that, reverse it:

A great horned owl found starving in the wild because it had gone blind could be released this spring after having new eye lenses implanted in a first-of-its-kind surgery. […]

Contact lenses for owls-- brilliant!

I am the Pusher Robot, DO NOT trust the Shover Robot…

Via slashdot.org, footage of exceedingly cute robots playing Dance Dance Revolution. (Requires Windows Media Player.)

Day of the Triffids

While we were in Florida, we picked up a small plant that had fallen out of a tree. I called it a triffid, but it is apparently an epiphytic perennial bromeliad known as Tillandsia argentea. We've got it in the shower right now, but it seems like that won't provide enough light. Maybe it will do better in the kitchen, provided that it gets misted on a regular basis. Air plants... how weird is that?