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Participants in a sensory deprivation experiment reported having hallucinations after just fifteen minutes.
They then put the participants, one by one, in a dark anechoic chamber which shields all incoming sounds and deadens any noise made by the participant. The room had a ‘panic button’ to stop the experiment but apparently no-one needed to use it.
(via wired)
Are the problems that have plagued the Large Hadron Collider and previous high-energy efforts (SSC, I’m looking at you here) a result of the Higgs boson travelling back from the future to meddle in its own discovery? A pair of scientists think it’s a possibility.
“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, “Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” It is their guess, he went on, “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an “anti-miracle.”
That’s heavy, Doc.
Update: Bread from the future halted operation of the LHC again.
Not every magnetic substance has a north and a south pole…some are monopolar.
The work is the first to make use of the magnetic monopoles that exist in special crystals known as spin ice.
Spin ice! Also I guess they went with the awkward magnetricity name because electromagnetism was taken. (via mouser, who says “Suck it, Maxwell”)
Using Michael Vick as a pivot, Malcolm Gladwell compares professional football with dogfighting and asks if the former is just as morally unacceptable as the latter. This is former NFL offensive lineman Kyle Turley:
I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field-fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions-boom, boom, boom-lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.
Perhaps this is what Gladwell will be talking about at the upcoming New Yorker Festival?
Update: From Stephen Fatsis, a list of improvements for the NFL players union to consider to protect the health of the players.
N.F.L. players often get excellent medical treatment, but the primary goal is to return them to the field as quickly as possible. Players are often complicit in playing down the extent of their injuries. Fearful of losing their jobs — there are no guaranteed contracts in the N.F.L. — they return to the huddle still hurt.
And from GQ comes a profile of Bennet Omalu, one of the few doctors investigating the fate of these NFL players.
Let’s say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let’s say the scientific community — starting with one young pathologist in Pittsburgh and growing into a chorus of neuroscientists across the country — comes to you and says concussions are making your players crazy, crazy enough to kill themselves, and here, in these slices of brain tissue, is the proof. Do you join these scientists and try to solve the problem, or do you use your power to discredit them?
Update: Commissioner Roger Goodell defended the NFL’s handling of head trauma in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee today.
Goodell faced his harshest criticism from Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, who called for Congress to revoke the league’s antitrust exemption because of its failure to care adequately for injured former players. “I believe you are an $8 billion organization that has failed in your responsibility to the players,” Waters said. “We all know it’s a dangerous sport. Players are always going to get injured. The only question is, are you going to pay for it? I know that you dearly want to hold on to your profits. I think it’s the responsibility of Congress to look at your antitrust exemption and take it away.”
Update: The NFL will soon require players with head injuries to receive advice from independent neurologists.
A video of the Leucochloridium parasite infecting a snail.
The worm is consumed by the snail, and begins its development in the snail digestive tract. Once it grows and matures, it moves into the snail’s optical tentacles, where it will pulsate and writhe as an example of aggressive mimicry, turning the tentacle into a dead-ringer for a caterpillar larvae, and making the snail a visible snack to a passing bird. The worm’s dance is also deadly because it renders the snail insensitive to light, making it incapable of shielding itself from predators. After the bird eats the infected snail, the worm matures fully inside the bird’s digestive tract, there it reproduces and lays eggs. Once the bird excretes the Leucochloridium larva, it is consumed by snails, thus continuing its life cycle.
Seven new species of phosphorescent mushrooms have been discovered, bringing the grand total of documented glowing fungi species to 71. The new discoveries join the ranks of the other luminous mushrooms that produce light as a result of a chemical reaction. Although easily noticeable at night, phosphorescent mushrooms glow all day long. Ten new fungi species were documented between 2002 and 2006, which is surprising considering how difficult it is to write in the dark.
Scientists discovered that it’s likely that some individuals with high testosterone actually perceive other people’s anger as a reward. Researchers tested the subjects’ testosterone levels and assigned them “learning tasks” where images of faces were subliminally flashed in response to their performance. Participants who had higher testosterone levels responded better to angry faces than to neutral ones, even though the faces were on screen too briefly to identify. Michelle Wirth, who led the study, explained how this can possibly be correlated to other testing methods:
“Better learning of a task associated with anger faces indicates that the anger faces were rewarding, as in a rat that learns to press a lever in order to receive a tasty treat. In that sense, anger faces seemed to be rewarding for high-testosterone people, but aversive for low-testosterone people.”
So the next time it seems like that person is trying to piss you off, reward them with a knuckle sandwich.
Just in time for Halloween: a new study theorizes that eating too many Pez will land children in the pen. Researchers believe that using candy as a reward for a chore such as homework drives children to have difficulty handling anything but immediate gratification. The dopamine release that is caused by consuming sugar, and the inherent “addiction” that it causes, can lead to impulsive behavior when treats are withheld from kids. It’s the inability to successfully cope with delayed gratification that has doctors concerned, since rash behavior in children can be linked to criminal acts and violence in adults. The British study, which followed 17,000 children over four decades, found that, by the age of 34, 69% of daily candy eaters were apprehended for violent acts. Perhaps it’s the prevalence of penny candies that leads people to the penitentiary.
Update: It’s all in the subtleties. The article reads:
“The October 2009 study revealed that 69 per cent of those with a criminal record of violence consumed candy daily as children.”
This means that it can be inferred that those who have committed crime had sweet teeth as kids, but not that children who eat candy every day will therefore be predisposed to criminal behavior. Moreover, there are so many variables and unobserved factors that if you eliminated the sugary rewards, it wouldn’t necessarily mean a correlated drop in crime. It isn’t the candy that’s causing the trouble, it’s just that trouble-making and candy seem to be bedfellows. So much for trick or treat. (thx, neil and scott)
Flying in the shape of a “v” allows geese to have an equal field of vision while conserving energy, using wingtip vortices to decrease any drag in flight. The bird in the front is working the hardest, but when the leader grows weary it rotates to a position farther back and allows another feathered pilot to take its place. This formation is so successful in conserving energy that birds who fly in “v” formations have been recorded to have lower heart rates than those who do not. If one of the birds flies out of formation, they will feel the increase in drag nudging them back into position. Perhaps most impressive, if a bird in the formation falls ill or is shot, two other birds will accompany it on the descent, aiding and protecting the injured bird until it either recovers or dies. The two helpful geese will then rejoin the formation.
Nothing like a little science on the Moon, I always say.
Astronaut David Scott in 1971, from the Apollo 15 Lunar Surface Journal. Scott was part of the Apollo 15 crew, and applied Galileo’s findings about gravity and mass by testing a falcon feather and a hammer. The film, shown in countless high school physics classes, is the nerdy, oft-neglected cousin of Neil Armstrong’s space paces.
A new study concludes that babies and dogs do not have an advanced ability to read social cues, but that wolves do. Using a hiding-and-finding game, scientists at University of Iowa and Indiana University have concluded that babies and dogs are distracted by social cues such as adults’ facial expressions and vocal interactions, and that they don’t have a unique or enhanced ability to recall where an object is hidden simply based on social cues alone. Wolves, and older babies, performed better in the study, and were more capable of remembering where the object was hidden. Professor John Spencer, who was at the helm of the research, understands that this could be a difficult fact for parents and pet owners to accept.
“In our view, this is something to celebrate — that we can bring social cognition together with basic cognitive processes. The downside, of course, is that infants, and by analogy dogs, don’t have a special mind-reading ability. For some people, that’s an unpleasant pill to swallow.”
The study was in direct response to one from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences last year, which had found that babies were quite apt at object recall based when the experimenters interacted with them. The oppositional findings raise an interesting question when it comes to our newest arrivals’ cleverness. It remains to be seen how good wolves are at Memory.
Internet, meet Ardi, the newest member of the human branch of the primate family tree.
Or rather, the oldest. Discovered in Ethiopia in 1994, Ardi is a 4.4 million-year-old partial skeleton of a female Ardipithecus ramidus.
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin’s time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link — resembling something between humans and today’s apes — would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior — long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors — is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.
Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas. As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.
This is a major discovery; Science is devoting a special issue to the find with 11 detailed peer-review papers and general summaries. I expect we’ll be hearing more about this in the coming weeks as all that science filters through the lay media. (thx, jeff)
The Spanish ribbed newt has an interesting method of dealing with perceived threats. The creature activates its ribcage like mini switchblades, forcing them through its own skin. Even more remarkable, the newt’s highly adapted immune system and collagen-cased bones allow it to heal quickly and without risk of infection, which makes it one job interview away from a position with the X-Men.
In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall found a bunch of people who were about to die and weighed them as they expired. MacDougall claimed that at the point of death, the bodies became lighter. That lost weight, the doctor assumed, was the escaping soul. He even postulated that the souls of the sluggish in life are slow in death:
The subject was that of a man of larger physical build, with a pronounced sluggish temperament. When life ceased, as the body lay in bed upon the scales, for a full minute there appeared to be no change in weight. The physicians waiting in the room looked into each other’s faces silently, shaking their heads in the conviction that out test had failed.
Then suddenly the same thing happened that had occurred in the other cases. There was a sudden diminution in weight, which was soon found to be the same as that of the preceding experiments.
I believe that in this case, that of a phlegmatic man slow of thought and action, that the soul remained suspended in the body after death, during the minute that elapsed before it came to the consciousness of its freedom. There is no other way of accounting for it, and it is what might be expected to happen in a man of the subject’s temperament.
The weight lost of MacDougall’s first subject at death was 3/4 of an ounce…or about 21 grams. (via radiolab)
To the alarm of the big pharmaceutical companies, the placebo effect appears to be getting stronger. The reasons are many and interesting.
It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late ’90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.
New Scientist reports that Czech beer tastes worse than it used to due to climate change.
Climatologist Martin Mozny of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute and colleagues say that the quality of Saaz hops — the delicate variety used to make pilsner lager — has been decreasing in recent years. They say the culprit is climate change in the form of increased air temperature.
Winemaking regions are shifting due to climate change as well.
Nicola Twilley proposes a Climate Change Tasting Menu that highlights food and drink demonstrating the effects of human activities on climate.
The starter would feature new products that have only recently been cultivated locally, thanks to climate change — Devon olive oil perhaps, accompanied by a nice glass of Kent rosé. The main course might be controversial: test-tube grown imitation meats and vegetables that recreate the flavour and mouthfeel of species that are already lost or threatened with extinction by climate change.
The answer to this Fermi problem is a bit surprising.
Assuming you’re not in a big lecture hall and the professor shuts the door at the start of class, how long does it take for you and your classmates to deplete the oxygen enough to feel it?
Here’s a taste of the reasoning behind the answer:
So one person needs about 2lb of oxygen a day, or .9 kg. But how many liters is that? Oxygen has a molar mass of 16 grams, so oxygen gas, or O2, has a mass of 32 grams per mole. One mole of gas at standard pressure and temperature takes up 22.4 liters.
A commenter over on Fine Structure notes that CO2 is more of a problem than oxygen.
I don’t know if they brought this up on physicsbuzz yet, but lack of oxygen isn’t really uncomfortable (though it can kill you). Increase in CO2 is what triggers the apparent need to breath. I am pretty sure the minimum partial pressure of O2 is around 0.16 bar. Actually, that is the min recommended, I don’t know if that is the pass-out limit.
The newest episode of Radiolab is about parasites. It features what is one of my favorite links from the past few years: the story of Jasper Lawrence’s quest to infect himself with hookworm in order to cure his asthma (also available here).
Based upon what I read, and what I learned about the hookworms I decided that I was going to try and infest myself with hookworms in an attempt to cure my asthma. I was not willing to wait ten or more years for the drug companies to bring a drug to market. It was obvious to me that hookworms, for a healthy adult with a good diet, are quite benign. This account details my experiences, how I went about it, and the things I have done since infestation to calibrate my level of infestation so that in the end I was able to cure my asthma and hay fever with hookworms. These same techniques are of course applicable to any hookworm infestation, whether you want to control asthma, hay fever, colitis, Crohn’s disease or IBD.
Lawrence even sells hookworms to others so that they won’t have to travel to a third world country to contract them.
In addition to its utility in organizing the World Wide Web, researchers say that Google’s PageRank algorithm is useful in studying food webs, “the complex networks of who eats whom in an ecosystem”.
Dr Allesina, of the University of Chicago’s department of ecology and Evolution, told BBC News: “First of all we had to reverse the definition of the algorithm. “In PageRank, a web page is important if important pages point to it. In our approach a species is important if it points to important species.”
The researchers compared the performance of PageRank and found it comparable to that of much more complex computational biology algorithms.
A massive solar flare on September 1, 1859 “caused the most potent disruption of Earth’s ionosphere in recorded history”.
Within hours, telegraph wires in both the United States and Europe spontaneously shorted out, causing numerous fires, while the Northern Lights, solar-induced phenomena more closely associated with regions near Earth’s North Pole, were documented as far south as Rome, Havana and Hawaii, with similar effects at the South Pole.
(via the browser)
As reported previously, colony collapse disorder seems to have multiple causes. In the NY Times’ Room for Debate blog, several scientists and other bee experts offer their commentary on what we currently know about CCD and what’s being done about it.
Meanwhile, individual beekeeping operations have been damaged, some beyond repair because of this malady. Others have been able to recover. The overall picture is, however, not quite as bleak as the press and the blogosphere might lead you to imagine. Colony numbers in the U.S. show the resiliency of American beekeepers.
The soprano problem is the mispronunciation of lyrics by sopranos at the high end of their range. In order to make themselves heard in opera houses, sopranos need their voices to resonate, which they only do when making certain sounds.
Jane Eaglen, a critically acclaimed soprano who has performed Wagner’s works in opera houses worldwide, explains that sopranos must try to find a balance between power and clarity. “It’s really about how you modify the vowels at the top of the voice so that the words are still understandable but so that you are also making the best sound that you can make,” she says.
A pair of scientists have found that the meticulous Richard Wagner may have been aware of this problem and wrote the soprano parts in his operas to minimize the mispronunciations.
Writing in the New York Times this weekend, Robert Wright attempts to reconcile religion and science. The middle ground is the “built-in” moral sense of our universe, in that the universe builds and rewards organisms that cooperate with one another.
I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
This is essentially the subject of the last chapter or two of Wright’s The Evolution of God, the only part of this excellent book that I didn’t quite buy into, even though I’ve been thinking about his conclusion quite a bit since finishing the book.
Scientists are gradually coming to the conclusion that exposure to organophosphate pesticides increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease.
Taken together, 30-plus years of research add up to an increasingly persuasive conclusion: exposure to pesticides and other toxins increases the risk of Parkinson’s disease, and we are only now beginning to wrestle with the true scope of the damage.
(thx, peter)
Using redshift data, a 3-D animated view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was created.
New Scientist has a series of articles about aspects of humanity that scientists don’t quite have a handle on…like pubic hair, art, dreams, and teenagers.
Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases — so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies?
The Gompertz Law of human mortality is fascinating:
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly miniscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.
Read the whole thing…it’s not that long and is super interesting. (via mr)
An article in New Scientist discusses the current state of food allergy research.
Perhaps most striking are the regional differences. “Peach and melon allergy is particularly common in the Mediterranean - in Spain and Greece,” says Fern’andez Rivas. Reports from clinics suggest that Iceland is a hotspot for fish allergy and Switzerland has a higher rate of celeriac allergy than elsewhere.
These regional variations are likely to be due in part to differences in eating habits, causing people to be exposed to different allergens. But that alone cannot explain a pronounced north-south divide in the type of apple allergy people experience. In northern Europe, people react to the uncooked flesh of apples, whereas in the south it’s the skin that sets them off, whether it’s cooked or not. What could be the cause of this strange invisible dividing line that skims across south-west France, cuts through Italy close to Florence, and continues eastwards through the middle of the Black Sea?
Significantly, this line marks the southern limit of the birch tree, a plant whose pollen is one of the causes of hay fever in northern Europe.
Update: Are we being too tolerant of gluten-intolerance?
Our brains have Oprah neurons, Aniston neurons, Eiffel Tower neurons, and Saddam neurons that fire when we see pictures or hear the names of these people and places.
Yet “Oprah neuron” might be a misnomer. The same neuron also fired, albeit much more weakly, to Whoopi Goldberg in one patient. Similarly, Luke Skywalker neurons also responded to Yoda, and those famous Jennifer Aniston neurons flashed to her former Friends co-star Lisa Kudrow. Such connections could explain how our brain relates two abstract concepts, Quian Quiroga says.
And then the Skywalker neurons said, “these aren’t the memories you’re looking for”. Ba doomp.
After someone posted all ten of the Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia along with the most common responses to them, some psychologists cried foul, saying that the responses could be used by people to “cheat” on the tests.
“The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it,” said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather “render the results meaningless.”
To psychologists, to render the Rorschach test meaningless would be a particularly painful development because there has been so much research conducted - tens of thousands of papers, by Dr. Smith’s estimate - to try to link a patient’s responses to certain psychological conditions. Yes, new inkblots could be used, these advocates concede, but those blots would not have had the research - “the normative data,” in the language of researchers - that allows the answers to be put into a larger context.
I was not aware that the inkblot tests were even in use anymore…seems like an antiquated technique.
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