Category Archives: Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Apr ’12)

No less than five articles this month! I’ve been a little busy bee, especially with moving into a new house and all.

  • Jon Stewart commented that you rarely see a headline in 2012 that sounds like it should be a headline in 2012 when you were just a kid. This is of course apropos of the asteroid mining plan announced by space startup Planetary Resources. There are lots of articles on this all over the web but this one from Forbes talks about the firm’s plans to be cashflow positive even though no actual mining will happen for more than ten years at least. That makes it sound a bit more real and less of a pipe dream, even if it is backed by Google’s founders and the creator of Microsoft Office.
  • The wise old mentor is a trope that everyone knows, but is it true? Does age actually confer wisdom? Inasmuch that wisdom can be quantifiable, researchers from the University of Waterloo, Canada, has attempted to verify just that, as detailed in this article from The Economist. The results are nothing short of astonishing. North Americans do appear to gain wisdom with age, but the Japanese appeared to be nearly as wise as wizened North Americans even when young and their wisdom scores never varied much with age. This is just the sort of finding that calls for lots more cultural study.
  • When I was studying in France, my French language professor liked to comment about how the Chinese can say so many things with so few words. This is because each syllable in the Chinese language is unusually dense with information, possibly because of the different tonal variations possible. This Scientific American article shows how to correlate this fact with another observation: different languages are spoken at different speeds. It turns out that while each syllable in Chinese is packed with more information than the norm, the Chinese language is also one of the slowest spoken languages, so its overall information transmission rate still roughly matches that of other languages. In the same way, languages which are spoken very fast, such as Spanish, have less information per syllable.
  • Ever since buckyballs were invented in 1985, it was hailed as a game-changing revolutionary material and science writers loved to hype it up. I suspect that it’s at least partly because using the word buckminsterfullerene in print is so fun. Until very recently however, very few practical applications have been found for its unusual properties. This blog post points at a completely unexpected use for it. A team studying the long-term toxicology effects of the molecule by giving it to rats in a solution of olive oil not only found it to be completely non-toxic, it actually extended the lifespan of the rats by some 90% making it the most effective life-extension treatment ever found for rodents. Now, that is game-changing indeed.
  • On the astronomy front, a huge new discovery about what surrounds the Milky Way is new reason to think that the mysterious dark matter might not exist after. Dark matter was posited to explain why the relatively sparse matter that we can observe is far less than the mass that the universe needs to have. It turns out that we simply haven’t been looking hard enough. This news release from the AlphaGalileo Foundation trumpets the discovery of a vast structure of satellite galaxies and clusters of stars that surrounds the Milky Way. I guess space just isn’t that sparse after all.

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Mar ’12)

Once again, I’m sacrificing verbosity for sheer quantity of science-related links. Here goes:

  • I notice that despite that my very liberal political sympathies, many of my posts have been showing a markedly anti-democratic bias. This article from LiveScience is a good demonstration of why democracy is inherently flawed: most people aren’t smart enough to judge the competence of other people. The article cites research by a Cornell University psychology which shows that not only are people incompetent at judging the competence of other people in fields in which they are not an expert, they are ignorant about their own incompetence. As the familiar anecdote goes, most people, if asked to rate their personal ability in a particular field, will give themselves an above-average rating. This poses obvious problems for democracies which in theory rely on elections to help us pick the most qualified leader. But as always, the Churchill dictum that democracy is the worst form of government, except all of the others, remains true. Such findings don’t invalidate that. They merely remind us that natural and inalienable human rights should never be contravened even by a democratic majority and that direct rule through referendums is probably a bad idea.
  • I remember when mixing descriptions between senses, like hearing a color or feeling a smell, was just a literary flourish but as this article from The Economist points out, not only do synaesthetes exist, but most people probably have cross-modal associations of this sort without being consciously aware of it. In this case, researchers from Oxford University asked volunteers to describe different smells and tastes in terms of music, and there turns out to be a surprisingly correlation in how people associate the same type of smell or taste with the same pitch or even specific musical instrument.
  • This doesn’t count as a science article in that sense of news coverage of a recently published scientific paper. It’s a blog post by a statistics expert but I’ve come to like his blog very much so here it is. This one is an analysis of the relationship between changes in the availability of pornography and perceived social effects. The upshot is that increased availability of pornography has no detrimental effect on anti-social behavior. Japan for example, which many now know for its widespread availability of violent pornography, went from almost no porn to lots of porn within a short of period time, actually reports a decrease in sexual crime. It’s worth noting that increasing availability of porn reduces sexual crimes only and has no effect on other crimes. Watching porn does seem to induce some sociological changes, such as reported happiness in marriages among different types of couples, but I’ll leave it up to the reader to read the report in full and judge if it’s good or bad.
  • Another year, another species of early hominid discovered. This article, also from LiveScience, covers fossils of heretofore unknown species discovered in China. Daubed the “Red Deer Cave People”, they are unusual in that they have a combination of both modern and archaic anatomical features and seemed to have coexisted with modern humans in the earliest age of agriculture up to around 11,000 years ago.
  • Finally, an evolutionary psychology article. I just love them, both for what they reveal about cognition and for how they drive a certain class of intellectual bonkers. This one comes from ScienceDaily and talks about how communities of chimpanzees seem to have police officers of their own. These take the form of respected and senior members of the community who intervene as a third-party in disputes.

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Feb ’12)

February may the shortest month of the year but there’s certainly no shortage of interesting science-based news. Maybe because it’s a leap year?

  • The New York Times has a story about how Alzheimer’s spreads from brain cell to brain cell like an infection. What’s particularly interesting here is that it’s not being spread by viruses or bacteria, but by distorted proteins known as tau. I pay special attention to all news articles about Alzheimer”s as it’s an especially terrifying disease to me.
  • Also from The New York Times, the next article talks about how people who suffer from dyslexia, which is usually associated with impaired reading and learning ability, may benefit from unexpected side effects. In particular, people with dyslexia seem to have superior peripheral vision and can process an entire image at a glance, as opposed to specific details in an image, more quickly. The article then goes on to speculate if these improved abilities have any real world applications.
  • Nanotech robots circulating in your blood stream to fix your body has been a science-fiction staple since at least the 1966 film, Fantastic Voyage. This article from BBC News covers research into an attempt to build similar devices out of strands of DNA molecules. Unlike the film, the proposed DNA robot doesn’t come equipped with a tiny surgical laser. Instead, its mooted use is to deliver exactly determined dosages of drug molecules to pinpoint sites in the body.
  • Everyone knows that 2012 is a leap year, but did you know that there are also leap seconds? As this article from The Economist explains, leap seconds are inserted into our timekeeping to account for the very slight discrepancy between the strict definition of 86,400 seconds in a day and irregularities in the Earth’s rotations. Without this contrivance, our account of time would eventually fall out of sync with perceive day/night cycles, though hundreds of years for it to become noticeable in day-to-day life. This system however may soon be coming to an end as it is inconvenient for computers around the world to have to manually reset their time every so often whenever a leap second needs to be added. Instead, the powers that be seem likely to allow the discrepancies to add up and fix them in one go later.
  • When we think about planets, our first impression is that all planets are like the Earth, in that they are part of fixed system orbiting around a star. This article from the Stanford Report says that this picture is probably untrue and that by far most planets that exist in the universe are actually nomad planets that wander through space without orbiting a star. Such planets may even be big enough and have enough of an atmosphere to support life, relying on radioactive sources and tectonic movement to generate heat energy. Attention all science-fiction writers, update your space exploration paradigms, stat!

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jan ’12)

The first month of 2012 has been a good month for interesting reads of all kinds, not just science ones, but this series is all about the science, so here goes:

  • Scientific American reports on a clever experiment which attempts to shed light on how multicellular organisms evolved. These have always been a bit of a conundrum since indications are that the earliest such organisms were clusters of single cell creatures that somehow “decided” to stick together and work together for the common good. This is perplexing because while it makes sense for a single cell to snag resources for its own well-being, it’s a bit of leap from that to how the cells came to subsume their own self-interest in favor of that of the group as a whole. In this experiment, single-celled yeast were observed to achieve the earliest forms of multi-cellular organisms when selection pressure induced by the scientists encouraged them to cluster together and even develop a rudimentary version of division of labor.
  • The next article is from Malaysia’s very own The Star (actually just an article bought from Reuters, but whatever.) Researchers on Alzheimer’s disease have known for some time that people who actively exercise their brains through activities like reading and playing games seem to build up a sort of reserve of mental capacity. This allows their brains to function normally even after the destructive proteins that characterize the disease show up. However this new finding indicates that such activities do more than that. It appears that as long as these activities are started early on in life, they actually help to prevent the plaques from forming in the first place. The caveat is that starting brain-stimulating activities after Alzheimer’s has already been diagnosed does nothing so only a lifetime’s habit of being intellectually engaged appears to help.
  • The next two articles are somewhat related and they deal with open-mindedness, and what might or might not cause it. Discovery News highlights a finding that contravenes a commonly held belief, that as people age, they tend to become more conservative. This is based only on statistical data from surveys from 1972 to 2004, plus interviews, so it’s not exactly hard science. I think it makes sense with the key being that even if old people are conservative, their views become less extreme as they age and they learn to appreciate a greater range of other views from a lifetime of experience, even if they don’t agree with them.
  • The last article however is the controversial of all. Live Science cites research claiming that conservative beliefs are correlated with low intelligence. In particular, the correlation is between low levels of IQ measured as children and conservative beliefs held as adults when they grow up. As usual correlation doesn’t prove causation but the working theory is that it is more mentally draining to deal with people who are different from you and hence people with lower IQ gravitate towards beliefs and ideologies that stress conformity to tradition and resistance to everything that is new and different. These findings were buttressed by other studies that showed that people with lower cognitive abilities had less contact with people who did not share their race and were more likely to be prejudiced against homosexuals.

Interesting links

I’ve been remiss in updating lately, mostly because I’ve been embroiled in yet another personal programming project. So here are a few of the more interesting articles I’ve read recently to tide you over:

  • Probably due to the dysfunction exhibited by the U.S. government over the past year, libertarians have recently been abuzz about creating new countries of their own from scratch, Ayn Rand-style. The most impressive projects are the sea-steading ones of course that so eerily mimic the underwater city of Rapture from the BioShock games, but these are pipe dreams with not much chance of coming to fruition. Surprisingly, the most realistic of these initiatives is Honduras’ attempt to create a Hong Kong-style charter city which would be autonomous from the host country. Even Honduran police and the court system will not have authority in the designated zones as they will outsourced to the private sector and the courts of Mauritius respectively. The Economist has the details.
  • So Kim Jong Il died last month and the North Korea population promptly exploded into an orgy of mass grieving. This short article from MSNBC offers a few tantalizing glimpses of how this works in the hermit kingdom, which includes people being punished for not participating in organized mourning sessions or even not being seen to cry in a genuine manner.
  • By now everyone has heard of the cruise ship that sank off the coast of Italy and the idiot captain whose latest claim that he accidentally fell into the lifeboat and thus didn’t mean to intentionally abandon ship. But do you wonder what happens next to that ship? Do they let it sink? Do they try to refloat it? Well, this amazing feature from Wired covers an international team of experts who specialize in just this sort of thing, traveling all around to refloat capsized ships or just salvage what can be saved. They’re paid big bucks but their company earns money only if they succeed as their contracts are based on a percentage of the value recovered and as the article makes it painfully clear, theirs is a mortally dangerous job. The article is so good it could be made into a summer blockbuster, highly recommended.
  • Finally, on a more light-hearted note, I’m sure what with the Wikipedia blackout and all, everyone knows about SOPA and how it’s supposed to help with copyright violation, i.e. IP piracy. In a move that combines the futility of fighting against file sharing and the ridiculousness of organized religion, Sweden has officially recognized the Church of Kopimism as a religious organization. This church was founded in 2010 and upholds the right to file-share as a sacred tenet. Its religious symbols are CTRL+C and CTRL+V, i.e. copy-paste. PCMag has the story.

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Dec ’11)

I spent some time looking for cool stuff to share but only have a couple of articles for the last month of 2011, so here they are anyway:

  • The Economist has a simple story about how the usual practice of cutting off an infant’s umbilical cord immediately following birth may not be a good idea. The theory is that as long as the cord is still attached, blood continues to flow from the detached placenta to the infant. If the cord is cut too soon, not enough blood flows into the infant, causing anemia. Indeed, a study found that infants who had their umbilical cords cut after at least 3 minutes following birth had up to 45% more iron in their blood compared to those whose cords were cut within 10 seconds when they were 4 months old. As the article suggests, this may be what nature “intended” as other mammals tend to leave the cords attached for some time following birth.
  • The next article is the latest in a long line of findings in evolutionary psychology which show that human infants are born with an ingrained sense of morality. What makes this one different is that it also shows that infants’ sense of morality is capable of quickly growing more sophisticated as they grow older. Previous studies showed that infants like to reward actors in events that they perceive to be good, which usually means an actor that has been seen to be helping other actors in a scenario, such as retrieving an object for them or helping them climb across an obstacle etc. However, this time the researchers showed that at the age of about 8 months, the babies, when asked to reward an actor, would choose to reward a bad actor if they had previously seen this actor doing bad things to another antisocial actor as opposed to another actor who only did good things all the time. This means that they are rewarding an actor who they think is justly punishing someone bad.

Recent Interesting Science Articles (Nov ’11)

I didn’t exactly forget to write one of these for November 2011. It’s just that between personal issues, my participation in the 2nd International Melaka Walkathon and most of all, spending lots of time on my entry for the AI Challenge 2011, I just never got around to it. Well, better late than never and here’s a whole bunch of articles to make up for the tardiness:

  • This is purely based on survey data, i.e. asking people what they believe rather than observing it in them, but this article reports how happiness is correlated with high ethical standards.
  • One of the most interesting events in November was how the Earth was almost destroyed by a passing asteroid. Of course, almost is a relative term and astronomers have long calculated that the asteroid, 2005 YU55 will miss our planet, coming no closer than about 320,000 kilometres. This article has all the details.
  • One of the basic assumptions in science is the laws of nature remain constant. This extensive blog post looks at one very intricate experiment that suggests that this may not necessarily be true. In particular, the experiment looks at the fine-structure constant, itself a combination of several constants including the electron charge, Planck’s constant, the speed of light and ? by studying the spectra of quasars. Their observations currently suggest that the fine structure constant appears to have been different in the distant. If this checks out, it could mean that the laws of physics themselves change over time.
  • This Freakonomics blog post covers the work of an economist who thought to ask: hey, with all those sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, I wonder what that means for their membership and donation numbers? It turns out that the scandals have indeed led to a drop in the number of people attending Catholic Church with commensurate gains elsewhere. In particular, it looks as if Baptist churches picked up most of the fleeing Catholics.
  • Can animals laugh? In particular, can animals laugh when they’re being tickled? This blog post covers the work of Jaak Panksepp who tickled rats to find out. It seems that rats make a chirping noise in the 50 kHz range under certain conditions and this researcher sought to prove that this response has an ancestral relationship to human laughter. They found out all sorts of things, for example, that the most playful rats tend to be the most ticklish, that tickle response rates drop after adolescence, that the tickle response tends to help with social bonding and that rats will even run mazes for the sake of being tickled.
  • Ever since quantum mechanics was invested, physicists have long argued over how it can be interpreted. Lately, most scientists prefer to treat it as a purely statistical tool, absolving them of the need to treat the results as something that exists physically. A recent preprint of a paper suggests that this interpretation is flawed and that the results of quantum mechanics do reflect intrinsic physical reality after all.