Majorly late with this one, I know. I’ve been in Kuala Lumpur for extended period lately. But better late than never and I’m determined to keep this blog alive if updates now are less frequent. So let’s get on with it.

• This first one is a bit trite and still a truth worth keeping in mind. It’s from the BPS Research Digest and talks about how people tend to think of their own names as being rarer, and therefore more special, than they really are. Also connected is the finding that people with genuinely rare names tend to be happier with their names, further confirming the observation like to be special. But I think people should be careful about going too far and end up choosing names that are just plain ridiculous.
• The next article from the website MNT and covers the subject of how people might be able to solve mathematical problems unconsciously. The study in questioned distracted the participants with another stimuli while an arithmetic equation or a verbal expression was displayed. The result, to no one’s surprise, is that the so-called unconscious stimuli primed participants to be more likely to respond with the correct answer. Personally I find this particular piece of research to be fairly dubious. The mathematically problem given as an example seems to simple that it should be solvable by reflex so it’s not clear to me what the news here is.
• Next up is a feature from The New Yorker which talks about the world’s grandest computer simulation of a brain. The initial target is to simulate the brain of a macaque monkey on a collection of ninety-six of the world’s fastest computers. It’s more of an overview of this area of research than this particular project since we have only the announcement and not much else to go on. Count me in as one of the skeptics on this one. I have a feeling that brain computation involves more than just neurons and ignoring the rest of the complex biochemistry going on is a mistake.

A mixed bag of articles for this month, ranging from the funny to the weird. Let’s get to it.

•  Regenerative medicine, or growing replacement body parts from one’s own cells, will be the next frontier of medicine. This article from the admittedly skanky Global Post site demonstrates that it has the potential to covers external organs as well as the more commonly considered example of internal organs. In this instance, a woman had a replacement ear grown on her arm as a substitute for the original one which was removed due to cancer. The new ear was fashioned using cartilage from her rib.
• The next article from the Wall Street Journal covers a paper that is cleverly titled “The Power of Kawaii”. The claim is that human test subjects perform assigned with greater care and precision after being exposed to pictures of cute things, such as puppies and kittens. The tasks ranged from the delicate, such as picking up small objects from a hole without brushing the sides, to the purely logical, such as finding a target from a sequence of random numbers. As a control, participants were also exposed to pictures of adult dogs and cats and food items, which did not result in the same improved performance.
• As this next article from The Economist states, we’ve found so many extrasolar planets now that they’re no longer exciting. The difference with this one is that it’s orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the three gravitationally bound stars that form the trinary Alpha Centauri system. This is the nearest system from our own Sol system at a mere four light-years, close enough that we could conceivably launch an expeditionary probe to it. The bad news is that it is located far too close to its parent star to have any chance of harboring life with one of its “years” lasting 3.2 Earth days. But where we’ve found one planet, we’re more likely to find more. You can bet that astronomers all around the world are feverishly working on it.
• Ever wonder if animals are capable of recognizing their own dead and responding to it? This post at the The Scorpion and the Frog blog talks about a research paper on just this topic. The animals in question are western scrub-jays and the researchers tested their responses towards both an actual scrub-jay carcass, complete with feathers, and a collection of painted wood pieces arranged vaguely to look like a dead scrub-jay. The live birds reacted furiously to the real carcass, hopping about and calling loudly, while taking far fewer peanuts strewn on the ground as usual. Testing further with a realistic mounted great horned owl, a predator of scrub-jays, led to similar reactions, leading the scientists to conclude that the reaction wasn’t about grief but about alarm and physical danger.
• Finally, here’s a longer article about the evolution of lactose intolerance in humans from Slate. It’s not about a specific new discovery, more of an overview of the subject. Apparently the ability to digest lactose in adult humans spread very quickly once the mutation occurred, unreasonably quickly according to most scientists, and the reason why is still something of a mystery.