Oops, almost forgot to do this feature. Every year I try to highlight the results of the Nobel Prizes that actually matter and aren’t completely spurious. I mean I guarantee that everyone in the Chinese-speaking world knows who won the literature prize and plenty of people who read the news are aware that the Peace Prize committee are keeping up their reputation for bizarre choices by picking the European Union. But how many people know who won the prizes for medicine, physics, chemistry and economics or what the discoveries were for? So that’s what this blog post is all about.
First up, the physics prize was won by Serge Haroche of the Collège de France, in Paris, and David Wineland of America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. The two independently invented methods of directly observing quantum systems without destroying their superposition of states. Interestingly, they used opposite strategies. Dr. Wineland trapped ions and used photons to control and measure them. Dr. Haroche trapped photons and sent atoms through the trap to measure them. Both are real-life examples of the famous Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, though on a far smaller macroscopic scale.
A little bit of everything this month and no less than five articles, so let’s get to it.
You’ve probably heard about scientists making robots based on insects and small animals as models. This article with links and accompanying video is all about skipping the robot part and taking direct control of a live cockroach to perform tasks. It’s wireless too. I guess cockroaches are okay for this but I predict serious ethical concerns if they scale it up to larger animals.
The next article comes with the predictable still image from Planet of the Apes. It’s about scientists who trained a bunch of monkeys in a simple pattern matching exercise. They then selectively impaired the monkeys’ performance with cocaine and used a brain implant to restore their original performance. When this worked, they also tested the implant without the influence of cocaine and found improved performance beyond the original baseline. They’re lauding it as a primitive sort of implant to boost cognition, but I’m skeptical. The implant seems tailor designed just to stimulate the right parts of the brain needed for that specific part. It’s hard to see it as an device that can be generalized.
This one is even more deserving of skepticism, being firmly in the realm of pure theory, but it is all about a plausible way to create faster than light warp drives, so that’s enough to get it featured here. In principle, one way to cheat around the light speed limit would be not to move objects faster than light through spacetime, but to alter the geometry of spacetime itself around the objects we want to move. This is the famous warp bubble that we know of all the way back from Star Trek. But even apart from not knowing how to generate them, scientists have long calculated that the energy costs involved would be impossibly high. This latest finding claims that altering the shape of the ring around the spacecraft that generates the bubble would bring the energy costs down to a manageable level and allowing the intensity of the warping effect to oscillate would make it cheaper still.
So surgeons can transplant just about anything these days. The latest record broken is the transplant of the uterus from a mother to her daughter by a team of Swedish doctors to allow the recipient to become pregnant.
Finally a link to a research paper whose results any male could confirm for you for free. The Dutch team found that not only is the cognitive performance of heterosexual men impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex, but mere anticipation of such interaction is sufficient to make males dumber. Furthermore these effects occur even when the males have no idea whether or not the women they believe they will be interacting with are physically attractive.
Participating in the Coursera online courses is keeping me busier than I’d first thought, but I still had time to read up on science-related stuff.
Ever wondered while on a journey why the return trip always feels like it passes more quickly than going there? According to this article in The Irish Times, this is due to how our psychological perception of time differs according to circumstances. The article calls this an act of retrospective timing. That is we try to estimate how much time an event took after it has already passed from memory. However, this is done by recalling the information we stored during the event, and the more information we stored, the longer the duration we perceive it to have taken. This means that when we’re first traveling to a new place, we have all sorts of new data to absorb and store, but during the return trip, most of it will have become familiar already. Hence we perceive the outbound trip to have taken longer than the return trip.
Along with video-gaming nerds, comic books fans have long been relegated to the depths of otaku social outcasts. But this article from The Pacific Standard talks about closely identifying with a superhero may have measurable positive effect on their bodies. A study invited undergraduates, male ones only, to state how familiar they were with Batman or Spiderman and went on to query the students about how they felt about their bodies. Those who did identify with one of the superheroes not only felt better about their bodies, they were also able to demonstrate measurably greater strength, especially when they were shown pictures of a more muscular version of the superhero in question.
This next link seems to be down frequently but it’s such an interesting article that I just had to link to it. It appears on the Psychology Today website and talks about the Baining, an indigenous group of Papua New Guinea, who have the distinction of being known as one of the dullest people on Earth. They apparently have nothing in the way of the usual cultural accoutrements such religious rites, myths, festivals etc. and discourage playful of any kind, even among their children. The only thing they have going for them is work and they value all products and activities that are associated with useful work.
Finally an article about the Curiosity rover currently on Mars. It’s from The Atlantic and it reveals how the engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory built in a little Easter Egg. Specifically the vehicle’s treads are designed to spell out in Morse code the initials J-P-L as the robot slowly makes its way across the red Martian soil. That is such a geeky thing to do I just had to include it here.
Ok, this totally breaks this page’s formatting, but what the heck. Forget the Olympics. This is the greatest spectacle going on right now and it’s not even on Earth. Yes it’s a CGI rendition instead of real imagery but what do you expect about something going on on Mars? The landing procedure is the stuff of science-fiction.
July 2012 has been a less awesome, insofar as science articles go. I guess things do slow down in the summer.
This isn’t the first article about empathy for humans as displayed in dogs that has appeared in this blog, and it won’t be the last! This article from The Economist covers experiments performed to see if dogs can really perform actions out of empathy for the perceived suffering in humans, as opposed to acting out of curiosity. This was done by observing the behavior of dogs when alternately encountering a human crying and exhibiting other signs of distress or merely humming. They also alternated between using a trusted human for the dogs and a complete stranger. The results were that the dogs could indeed recognize distress in humans and react by whining, nuzzling, licking, and fetching toys for the human perceived to be suffering. They did this to the suffering human even if he or she was a stranger and their master was in the same room, indicating that it was the comfort of the suffering human that they sought rather than their own comfort.
Just last month I had an article talking about how more modern pop music is getting sadder and sadder while becoming more emotionally ambiguous. This month I have a new article from Reuters making a different claim: that pop music is getting louder and louder, while at the same time becoming less diverse with a more limited variety of sounds. They’re not directly contradictory but they are odds enough that the two teams should probably have a good long discussion with each other about just what is going on.
This next one is cheating a bit as it’s more of a demonstration video than a science article. Its about the color shifting abilities of a species of cuttlefish in Australia, Sepia plangon. Nothing new, you say? Except that this one is not only capable of shifting its colors, it can apparently shift each side of its body to a different color scheme, in this case, mimicking a female with half of its body and a male with the other half. This demonstrates not only as astounding level of control over its own colors but also an awareness of just who is looking at it from each direction.
Ever wondered while walking in the rain if it would be more effective to run through the rain or walk steadily through it to minimize wetness. I did and judging by the contents of this Washington Postarticle, I’m not the only one. Intuitively, running is better to minimize your time spent in the rain but at the same as you travel fast, you run into more raindrops in your path. Walking steadily increases your exposure time, but you present a small target and you don’t walk into raindrops. The paper summarized in this article concludes that for most cases, running is best but the true answer really depends on your body shape, the direction of the rainfall (vertically or at a lateral angle), the angle of the path you are traveling across and so forth. It is truly a profound topic.
Finally, no rundown would be complete without the biggest scientific news of the month: the confirmation of existence of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. There are many articles about it on the web but I’m partial to this one from the BBC. There are no practical applications for this but it is pretty solid confirmation of the Standard Model of physics.
It’s time for our monthly round-up of the coolest, most fascinating science articles of the previous month and June 2012 has been an especially bountiful month in that regard. So here goes:
How exactly does mainstream pop music evolve over time? This article from the Pacific Standard summarizes research demonstrating that on general pop music has been getting sadder and sadder over time. This is reflected not only in increasingly negative lyrics but also in the slower tempo and music with mixed emotional cues.
The next article belongs in economics which many dispute is really a science at all, though I tend to disagree. This one is from the Library of Economics and Liberty and talks about how employers in different countries are averse to firing workers in different ways. The survey finds that there are two extremes, reflecting the different values of the countries involved. The Anglo-American business world likes being efficient, even if that means ruthlessness. They are more likely to fire expensive, middle-aged workers with middling performance. The Germans are more sympathetic towards middle-aged workers, preferring to fire a younger worker with comparable performance even if his wages are cheaper.
The Economist has an article on a subject that Thomas Kuhn would no doubt heartily approve of: it is dangerous to generalize findings in experimental psychology too widely. This is because a lot of such research uses test subjects that fall into the same demographic category which the authors of the paper being cited have summed up in a media-savvy acronym: WEIRD. This stands for White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. To solve this, the authors have tried to use crowdsourcing to open surveys to a wider group of participants and since there seems to be an infinite supply of people willing to work for next to nothing on services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it’s dirt cheap too.
Normally the articles I like to select about new scientific discoveries rather than the latest technological gizmos. Gadgets are cool and all, but the years and years of research behind the principles that make them work are the really intellectually interesting part in my opinion. But I make an exception when it’s something that could open up cybernetics in a big way as this article from ExtremeTech explains. It’s an implantable fuel cell that generates electricity from the glucose in the human body. Once installed it can generate electricity indefinitely to power any other cybernetic implants you might have. Heck, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have an external port built into your body to charge your mobile phone or similar device with it. The only cost being that you might feel the need to eat a bit more than usual.
The Turing Test is a well known test to determine the quality of an AI by engaging it in conversation. This article, again from the Pacific Standard, can be thought of as a variation of that. Can sophisticated, specially trained music aficionados tell the difference between a composition that is written by a human and one written by a computer program? It turns out that they can’t as a blind survey of musically knowledgeable listeners revealed that they found computer-composed works just as appealing as those written by real humans.
Finally just for fun, this article from the Mail Online covers one of the greatest scientific achievements of humanity: the Voyager 1 space probe that was launched in 1977 is now leaving the solar system. Incredibly it is still in contact with NASA, despite a communications delay of 16 hours. We probably shouldn’t expect it to be able to keep that up for long once it enters interstellar space.
I’m getting an early start on this month’s installment of this regular feature. I’m really digging how this new abbreviated format allows me to burn through more articles in a succinct fashion. Here goes:
The first article is actually a post on Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias who points out that stories, both the telling and enjoyment of them, has interesting and unexpected effects on a person’s outlook on life. In particular, enjoying fiction seems to, in a sense, cause us to buy into the fictional world with its sense of poetic justice and ethical norms. So we believe the world to be more just and less impersonal than it actually is and behave accordingly. Hanson further speculate that this is a benefit that religions also share, regardless of the underlying truth of that belief.
Next we have a real-life, honest-to-goodness version of Robocop. This Phys.org article talks about how South Korea is testing robotic guards in one of its prisons. The robots are equipped with a wide variety of sensor devices and software that helps determine the behavioral characteristics of inmates. They are capable of autonomously patrolling the halls of the prison and are supposed to alert human operators if they detect anything out of the ordinary. They’re not armed yet but it seems the next plan would be to get the robots to perform body searches, looking for hidden and improvised weapons in particular.
Next we have an article about a study confirming something that all dog owners already suspect to be true: just as people yawn when they see and hear other people yawn, so do dogs. This article from The Washington Post covers research which shows that not only do dogs yawn when they hear humans yawning, they are more likely to do it when they hear a person whose voice they recognize yawning.
Online learning is all the rage these days and I’m currently taking free courses for fun from coursera.org myself but the effectiveness of such computer assisted learning is understandably a big point of contention within educational circles. This article from Inside Higher Ed looks at an experiment that compared the results of students who studied in the traditional way with lectures from a live instructor and students who studied using a hybrid format devised by Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative. This involved a mere one hour of live instruction per week with the rest of the time spent on an artificially intelligent learning platform working through lessons and exercises. The results were pretty shocking: the students using the hybrid format needed only about one quarter of the time to obtain the same results as those using the traditional format.
Modern animal researchers are very careful about anthropomorphism, that is explaining animal behaviors through the lens of human experience but as this article from the BBC indicates, for some animals this is actually warranted because they really are so alike to humans. Chimpanzees and orangutans it seems are so similar to humans, due to our shared evolutionary history, that not only can each animal be said to have a distinct personality but their personality types are similar to those of humans. This is after carefully controlling that human observers aren’t projecting human biases into their observations.