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The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is a measure of how painful insect stings are. The Pepsis wasp rates a 4.0 and the pain is described as “blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).” (via that’s how it happened)
Michael Pollan has some good advice for writing about nature and science. “So choose your first person deliberately. Too many newspaper first persons — and a lot of magazine first persons too — are written in the voice of the neutral feature-writer. They’re the voice of the Journalist. That is the least interesting first person you have. Nobody cares about journalists. They’re not normal people. So choose a first person that draws on a more normal side of your personality. And think about which one will help you tell the story. You’ll see that in very subtle ways it will shape your point of view and your tone and unlock interesting things.”
Thoughtful post on the extreme recency of recorded human history. We know very little about the people who lived before the invention of writing and collections of stories like the Bible, save for what we can glean from speechless skeletons, footprints, and other remains.
And look at how much is lost. Between the time of the couple fleeing across a field of volcanic ash and poor dead Lucy lies 400,000 years. If a Bible is a record of the struggle of a people for 2,000 years, we’d need 200 Bibles to tell us the tale of just this one obscure, remote branch of our lineage.
(thx, alexander)
An Intelligent Designer designs a cow. “How about we give it three, no eleven, no four stomachs! Four stomachs! For the efficient eating, of the grass. I am truly inspired! Don’t stop there. How’s this? This animal should urinate milk. From its groin, no less.”
New Scientist watches Sunshine, Danny Boyle’s new movie about the death of the sun (which sounds fantastic given my love of global disaster movies), and evaluates it from a scientific perspective.
Related to the men look at crotches post, here’s an eyetracking study that compares how artists look at a photo with the rest of us. “Non-artists spent significantly more time looking at [human bodies and faces in the photos] than artists.” (via snarkmarket)
17-year-old Mary Masterman built a spectrograph at home for $300, thousands of dollars less than they usually cost, earning her the top prize in the Intel Science Talent Search. Interestingly, 6 of the top 10 winners were women.
Among the many interesting things in Online Journalism Review’s article about using eyetracking to increase the effectiveness of news article design is this odd result:
Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed. Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.
That is absolutely fascinating. I’d love to hear an evolutionary biologist’s take on why that is.
I’m also heartened by the article’s first featured finding: that tighter writing, more white space, and jettisoning unnecessary imagery helps readers read faster and retain more of what they’ve read.
New research on laughter is showing that “It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. Itss not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along. It’s a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.”
Daniel Coyle travels to Russia’s top tennis player factory in search of how to grow a super-athlete. “Deliberate practice means working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback and focusing ruthlessly on improving weaknesses.” The article starts off a bit slow but gets interesting a few paragraphs in.
A man outfitted his family minivan with high-precision cesium clocks to demonstrate to his kids that they gained 22 nanoseconds of vacation time on their mountain camping trip than they would have at a lower altitude.
Remembering a physics conference that took place in NYC 20 years ago about high-temperature superconductors. One session, the “Woodstock of Physics”, lasted until 3:15 in the morning; “it was like the Texas chili cook-off or the Iowa State Fair apple pie bake-off.” The conference was such a big deal at the time that physicists with conference badges were immediately ushered into a nightclub in Chelsea for free by the bouncers.
The cover story in this week’s NY Times Magazine is called Darwin’s God and covers, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, why people believe in God. Most scientists studying the matter believe that humans have a built-in mechanism for religious belief. For instance, anthropologist Scott Atran sometimes conducts an intriguing experiment with his students:
His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will. If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?
Or rather, why are they afraid? One possible reason is that humans are conditioned to be on the lookout for “agents” and we tend to find them even when they’re not there:
So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.
What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”
Another reason for the instinctive religious impulse may be that people are able to put themselves in other peoples’ minds, to think about how another person might be feeling or thinking:
Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads.
The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.
There’s lots more in the article…it’s well worth a read.
Three computer scientists from Israel have developed a software program called Beauty Function. The program scans a human face and then produces an image of “a slightly more beautiful you”. Here are some of the program’s results. (via mr)
Regarding Susan Orlean’s piece on Robert Lang and origami from a couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker has posted a 5-minute audio slideshow of Orlean talking about the piece.
Some recent rigorous radiocarbon dating has thrown into doubt the theory that the Americas were first settled 11,000 years ago by the so-called Clovis peoples.
Honeybee populations across the US are falling due to a mysterious disease. “Almond crops are immediately vulnerable because they rely on honeybee pollination at this time of year. And the insect decline could potentially affect other crops later in the year, such as apples and blueberries.”
The Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique has some neat merit badges, including the “I’ve been published at the New Yorker” badge, the “my degree inadvertently makes me competent in fixing household appliances” badge, and the “I’ve done science with no concievable practical application” badge.
“A six-year Greek study found that those who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.” Among working men, the risk was reduced by 64%. Naps all around!
How to report scientific research to a general audience.
David Shenk is writing a book about genius, specifically “how science is unveiling a rich new understanding of talent, ‘giftedness,’ and brilliance — and the lessons we can all apply to our own lives”, and he’s using a blog to help him while he researches and writes it.
How to extract stem cells from a placenta and store them for possible future use, all from the comfort of your own home. The cost runs in the thousands of dollars but it’s totally doable at home.
A report encompassing the work of thousands of climate experts says that “global warming will happen faster and be more devastating than previously thought”. “The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document — that’s what makes it so scary.”
Winning the Nobel Prize gets you more than $1 million…and two extra years of life.
“Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look.”
A study by researchers at the University of Georgia suggests that women ingesting caffeine (say, in coffee or soda) before a heavy workout reduces post-workout muscle pain by almost 50%, more than Aleve, aspirin, or Advil. (via cd)
Interview with Dr. Nina Jablonski, student of the skin. “[My skin] is my unwritten biography. My skin reminds me that I’m a 53-year-old woman who has smiled and furrowed her brow and, on occasion, worked in the desert sun too long. I enjoy watching my skin change because it’s one of the few parts of my body that I can watch. We can’t view our livers or heart, but this we can.”
Most of what we hear about global warming concerns the atmosphere and its carbon dioxide levels. In the New Yorker a few weeks ago, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about what’s happening in the ocean (not online, unfortunately it is online (thx, tim)). It turns out that like all tightly coupled systems, the ocean and the atmosphere like to be in equilibrium with each other, which means that the chemistry of the ocean is affected by the chemistry of the atmosphere. Much of the extra carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans over the past two hundred years is being absorbed into the ocean and slowly making the ocean more acidic.
The CO2 dissolves, it produces carbonic acid, which has the chemical formula H2CO3. As acids go, H2CO3 is relatively innocuous — we drink it all the time in Coke and other carbonated beverages — but in sufficient quantities it can change the water’s pH. Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans — some hundred and twenty billion tons — to produce a .1 decline in surface pH. Since pH, like the Richter scale, is a logarithmic measure, a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty per cent.
As Kolbert later states, “from the perspective of marine life, the drop in pH matters less that the string of chemical reactions that follow”. The increased levels of carbonic acid in the water means there are less carbonate ions available in seawater for making shells, meaning that thousands of species that build shells or skeletons from calcium carbonate are in danger of extinction. As a particularly troubling example, coral use calcium carbonate taken from the seawater to construct themselves. Climate modeller Ken Caldeira believes that if humans keep emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the same rate as today, by 2075 the world’s coral reefs will begin to disappear because their rate of natural erosion will surpass their ability to grow fast enough to keep up.
The truly worrisome thing about all this is that the ocean is an extremely slow moving machine and that once in motion, it’s difficult to stop or change its course.
Which of the following works would you choose to be lost, if only three could be saved: Michelangelo’s Pieta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity? Not so sure I agree with the conclusion here…surely Einstein’s paper stands as a work unto itself, apart from the discovery it contains. Plus, maybe someone else (or a group of someone elses) wouldn’t have given us relativity as elegantly and usefully as Einstein did. (via 3qd)
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