Only four articles since I’ve been away or else occupied for much of this month.
According to the scientists covered in this article from the BBC, rats may be observed to feel regret. The experiment involved setting up lines for food and the rats could choose whether to stay in line or switch to a different one. When they realized that their new choice was worse than the previous one, they were observed pausing and looking back towards the reward they had passed over.
This article from recode.net talks about how computer algorithms are being used to devise customized treatments for cancer patients. The process involves sequencing the DNA of both the patient’s normal cells and that of the cancerous ones to add to the usual wealth of data that is then fed into the algorithm to generate precisely the correct treatment. All this is still in the trials stage of course, but it’s one of the biggest steps yet towards the long talked-about era of personalized medicine.
One of the biggest science news this month was the discovery of a truly massive body of water located deep beneath the Earth’s surface. This article for example from New Scientist provides details of how the underground has a total volume three times that of all the oceans on the surface, supporting the idea that all of the water currently on the surface gradually oozed out of the Earth’s interior rather than originating from comets.
Facebook recently revealed that it had conducted an experiment in which it intentionally manipulated the emotions of its users by tweaking their news feeds to be either sadder or happier than normal. They then monitored the posts of these users to see if the emotional tone matched. This article from The Independent gives further details. The change in subsequent seems small but most people are more shocked that Facebook chose to perform such an experiment without notifying users and asking for their permission. Naturally this also raises the question of whether other online companies tweak the content received by their users in similar ways.
I’m getting an early start on the May instalment of this regular feature due to not being around next week. Here are six science articles from the past month that deserves your attention:
The most exciting of these is news about how scientists have been able to seemingly reverse aging in older mice by the relatively simple expedient of infusing them with the blood of younger ones. This article from The Boston Globe has more, but really it’s been published everywhere. The results seems to be similar over a number of different studies and the procedure is known to improve muscles, the heart and the brain. Naturally the joke going around is that vampirism has turned out to really be the key to immortality.
This next article from The Guardian talks about a project that created synthetic DNA letters, effectively similar to creating a new X-Y base pair to add to the normal G-C and T-A base pairs. The scientists inserted this new base pair into E coli bacteria and then bred them. This was done to prove that synthetic DNA, once introduced into a species, could then stably be passed down to future generations.
Why do Westerners tend to be individualists while Asians tend to be collectivists? For understandable reasons this is a difficult question to answer as it is far too easy to content oneself with just-so scenarios and answers that fit one’s biases. This article from the South China Morning Post presents yet another theory: rice-growers tend to be collectivists because growing rice requires heavy labour and hence the assistance of neighbours. Wheat-growing on the other requires less cooperation with others. Intriguingly China itself is used as a test-case because while southern China grows rice, northern China grows wheat and indeed surveys by the researchers demonstrate that southern Chinese tend to be more collectivist while northern Chinese tend to be more individualistic.
Whether or not genes determine intelligence is one of the most controversial questions in biology. But if they do, would it be possibly to identify the set of genes that do so? This article from The Economist covers the discovery of how a particular version of a gene, called KL-VS may be responsible for about 3% of the variation of IQ in the general population. The gene apparently codes for increased levels of a protein known as klotho. Experiments on mice show that mice that are genetically engineered to produce more of this protein perform much better in intelligence tests than on unmodified mice, suggesting that a drug that acts to elevate klotho levels might boost general intelligence.
The next one is just for fun, about the discovery of the fossilized bones of what is now thought to be the largest dinosaur ever to walk the Earth. This article from BBC News tells the story of the discovery in Argentina. This new and as yet unnamed species of dinosaur must have weighed over 77 tonnes and stood 20 metres high, with an overall length of 40 metres from the nose to the tip of the tail. Cue jokes about Argentina being the final resting place of Godzilla.
Finally here we have at least one article that isn’t about biology. Instead this one is about experimental success in reliably transmitting quantum information. This article from the New York Times talks more about the process. Although the term quantum teleportation is used, the speed of light is not violated as the process still requires the measurement information to be transmitted classically. But this measurement information is then used to decode the original information encoded in one of the two entangled electrons so that the information itself needs never be transmitted, resulting in theoretically uncrackable data transmissions.
Quite a few articles this month though there’s no single big piece of news that dominates everything.
This fascinating article in the New York Times talks about how an entirely new language is observed to be in the process of being born in a spontaneous manner in an isolated community in Australia. Apparently it began as baby-talk from parents in a mixture of three languages but the children then took the proto-language and added innovations to it that were not present in the original language and it was then used as well by older members of the community.
Here’s a link to a paper on PubMed that reveals how people seem to be able to accurately gauge a man’s intelligence from a photograph of his face, but are unable to do so for women.
For fun, the next piece talks about how many people would we need to start a sustainable colony in another star system. The idea is that we need to have enough people to maintain sufficient genetic diversity to deal with unknown conditions while too few people would result in in-breeding and vulnerabilities to diseases. It appears that the minimum number seems to be about 10,000 people.
This article from NewScientist talks about a mathematical proof that appears to be correct but since it is approximately as long as the entirety of Wikipedia is far too long for human mathematicians to check by hand. The proof was generated by a computer and can only be verified by computer using a completely different method.
In tech news, this article from the HuffingtonPost covers how the U.S. Navy is experimenting with a process that converts seawater to a hydrocarbon-based liquid fuel. There’s no magic in this however as the process is lossy, energy-wise. Electrical energy is required to produce hydrogen and extract carbon dioxide from seawater and convert the gasses into usable fuel. The idea is not to generate energy but to have a reliable source of fuel while in the field. But it could also be a very handy way of storing excess electrical energy for later use.
Finally this last one is probably the most significant of the findings here with many implications for other studies, past or future. Appearing in Science, the article covers the startling finding that mice actually feel different levels of pain in response to stimulants depending on the gender of the experimenter handling them. Apparently the mice were able to detect male odours, which boosted their stress levels and decreased their sensitivity to pain. The worry is that humans may respond similarly, such that a male or female doctor administering a treatment would have different effects. This may invalidate large parts of a lot of research.
Despite my recent focus on films, I haven’t exactly forgotten this ongoing series and there are quite a few of these articles for the previous month:
The obvious starting point is the biggest scientific news of the month and perhaps the biggest cosmological finding of the decade. There are countless articles about it but here’s one from National Geographic for emphasizing what the results imply for the existence of a multiverse. This follows observations made at the BICEP2 facility in Antartica of curling patterns in the distribution of temperature and matter, which stands in for gravitational waves. These findings not only support the rapid inflation theory of how the currently observable universe was formed but suggests that ours is only one of many universes that may exist.
This next article from the Los Angeles Times reads like something right out of a bad sci-fi thriller. It’s about how a 30,000-year-old virus was found and revived from the Siberian tundra. This sample represents a particularly large virus that infects only amoeba but the obvious horror movie scenario is that some commercial drilling operation might unearth an ancient virus that would be dangerous to humans.
In another piece of cool cosmological news, Crain’s Detroit Business has an article about how scientists have managed to measure the spin of a distant, supermassive black hole. The object in question is at the centre of a quasar about 6 billion light years away from Earth. The scientists were able to take advantage of gravitational lensing effects to accurately measure the distant light and found the black hole to be rotating at about half the speed of light.
This next bit has also appeared in various places but this version is from the Utah People’s Post. It talks about how elephants have been found to be able to recognize different languages spoken by humans, as well as the age and gender of the speaker. The research was performed in Kenya and used different tribal peoples, some of whom actively hunted and killed elephants and some of whom ignored them. They found that the elephants were able to recognize the languages spoken by the Masai tribe which usually kills elephants and react accordingly by fleeing or bunching together to protect each other. They were also able to moderate their responses if the speaker was a child or a female, indicating a low threat.
Male-female inequality isn’t anything new but I’ve been paying more attention to this recently since it’s become a hot issue within the gaming community. This article from ThinkProgress show how investors respond better to sales pitches made by men compared to those made by women, even when the content of the pitches is exactly the same. Oddly, they even found that investors responded better to good looking men, but attractiveness in women didn’t seem to make a difference.
The next one is a news release rather than a real alert and it’s from EurekAlert! It’s about how computers are better able to tell when someone is faking being in pain than people. Humans fake being in pain for many reasons of course, including when it comes to demanding insurance compensation. The computer system works by looking at the faces of the people involved and trying to work out whether or not the grimaces are generated by voluntary or involuntary facial movements. Apparently the system was able to achieve accuracy rates of 85 percent while even trained humans were only to achieve rates of 55 percent, that is only slightly better than chance.
And finally for another right out of sci-fi story, this article from NewScientist covers an experimental treatment for victims of severe physical trauma. It’s only meant as a last resort specifically for people who are immediately in danger of dying from gunshot or knife wounds and the doctors believe that they will die before the wounds can be treated. The idea is to drain out all of the victim’s blood and replace it with a cold saline solution. This very rapidly cools down the body and stops almost all cellular activity. This also means that the victims become clinically dead. This gives the doctors about two hours during which they try to fix as much of the physical damage as possible before replacing the saline solution with blood again and restarting the heart. Naturally, if this works, it will lead to questions about just how long we can keep a person in suspended animation in this way.
Starting with this article from Big Think that provides some insight about how humans can make economically irrational decisions, in this case, the tendency of people to overvalue the things that they already own, a phenomenon known as the “endowment effect”. It cites research showing how Hadza Bushmen in Tanzania who have no contact with the modern economy do not experience the effect. But once roads have been built to connect their isolated communities to tourists, they become involved in the modern economy quickly pick up the effect.
The next one is from Bloomberg and covers research into implantable probes that can help people who have suffered memory losses to recover some of what they have lost. It’s designed for soldiers who have suffered injuries however and works only to help with lost motor skills rather than abstract knowledge-type memories, but it looks like a promising start.
This next one is a favourite of mine. Researchers already know that when people experience art such as a painting or music, certain parts of the brain are activated and this can be detected using MRI scans. This article from the BBC shows how the brains of mathematicians are activated in similar ways when contemplating mathematical formulas. In fact, the more aesthetically pleasing the formula is, the greater the response measured, with the most beautiful formula of all being of course Euler’s identity.
Science has long known that more physically attractive people tend to achieve greater success in a wide variety of fields, many of which are seemingly unconnected with beauty. This article from The Economist tries to tease out these effects by studying participants in the Tour de France bicycle race. Subjects were asked to rate the attractiveness of Tour de France contestants without knowing about the performance of the contestants. The researchers found that physical attractiveness is indeed correlated with being better cyclists in a field in which there should be no bias towards attractive people. The working idea is that physical attractiveness is itself an indicator of good genes and good health, and hence better performance at sports.
Here’s another article from the BBC that talks about research that allows one monkey to control a limb of another monkey. The monkey being controlled and electrodes were inserted in its spinal cord. The master monkey had a brain chip implanted which could monitor the activity of its neurons. The readings were then fed to the sedated monkey, allowing the other monkey to control its limb.
This great article from BPS Research Digest goes into detail about researchers’ attempts to circumvent the inability of people to tickle oneself. They implemented a body swap illusion in which the participants wore goggles that showed video feed from a camera. They were seated opposite an experimenter and the camera would either show a normal forward facing view or a view of themselves from the perspective of the experimenter. Both the participant and the experimenter held a rod with a foam at the other end which could be used for tickling. The idea is that the subject would be confused about who was doing the actual tickling. It turns out even when the subjects were completely fooled by the illusion, they still found it impossible to feel a tickling sensation when it was really their own hand moving the rod but did feel it when it was the experimenter’s hand moving.
The first of the series for 2014. It’s a light start for the year:
First, we have this New York Timesarticle covering a study that looks into how technology might be changing how people interact with each other. This one works by filming public spaces in New York and comparing them to similar footage filmed forty to fifty years ago. The researchers carefully identified persons in the footage that were observed to be using mobile phones and similar devices and tried to draw comparisons between then and now. It turned out that publicly visible usage of such technology was lower than they expected and that mostly by loners. They also found that more people are meeting and loitering in public spaces and speculate that technology may be a reason for the boost.
Next, this Atlanticarticle talks about how even sleep has a placebo effect. In the study, scientists informed participants that REM sleep is more restful and getting more REM sleep is correlated with better performance on learning tests. They hooked up the participants with sensors and told them that this would measure the amount of REM sleep they had gotten the previous night. This was however a lie as the scientists had no way of knowing that fact. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that participants who were told that they had gotten more REM sleep did perform better on cognitive tests compared to those who were told that they had gotten less REM sleep than average.
Finally, here’s a direct link to a paper that seems spurious but actually makes perfect sense. The idea is to search for time travellers from the future by searching for prescient content on the Internet. This includes content about events that preceded the date of the event and search engine queries about events before the events could possibly have been known about. Not surprisingly, the search revealed no evidence of any time travellers on the Internet.
No less than four article this month, which makes for a good store of reading materials:
The Guardian has an article on yet another anti-ageing breakthrough. This one focuses on a compound called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide which apparently restores the communications system between the mitochondria of a cell and its nucleus. The dramatic results of trials with mice were that two-year old mice which were given the compound had their ageing indicators reversed to that of six-month old mice. As usual, this is just a very narrow result that has been vastly generalized for popular news consumption since the ageing process involves many more factors and it looks like this applies only to muscle cells. But it’s still one more step in the fight against mortality.
It is well known that humans have specialized brain structures for facial recognition. This article from The Independent showcases research which suggests that dogs not only have similar skills to recognize the faces of other dogs, they may also be capable of recognizing the faces of their human owners. The results were based on the usual metrics of observing which images dogs’ eyes were focused on and how long their attention lingered on each image. Especially notable is the observation that dogs still preferred looking at the faces of other dogs rather than the faces of their owners.
The Scientific American has an article that has immediate, practicable use to anyone who uses social networking. It details research on something called the cheerleader effect which causes faces shown in images to be perceived as being more attractive when they are presented in a group. In other words, you look better in a photo when you are surrounded by other people compared to when you alone in a photo. An associated effect is that the impression that viewers have on the group as a whole influences the perception of any individual who is part of the group. This means that if you want to cultivate a specific impression on other people, it would be useful to have photos taken of you in the company of other people who can convey the image you want.
The placebo effect is something that most readers of this blog should be familiar with and it is an essential element that needs to be taken into account when considering the efficacy of drugs and medical treatment. This article from The Wall Street Journal talks about fake knee surgery seems to be work just as well as real surgery to reported pain and other symptoms in some patients suffering from torn knee cartilage. The trials involved patients who underwent the actual procedure and control patients who did not undergo the procedure, but efforts were made to make it seem like they did, for example by pressing instruments against their skin and keeping them in the operation theatre for the exact same length of time. They found that those who underwent the real procedure had slightly better short-term results but there was no difference between the two groups after one year had passed, suggesting that natural healing worked just as well.