A study that’s in press at Social Cognition has shown that women rate men’s photos as more attractive when they’re placed near the top of the screen. By contrast, men rate women’s photos as more attractive when they’re located near the bottom of the screen. (…)

The results could help explain why, in even more cases than you’d expect based on sex differences in height, the man in a heterosexual couple is taller than the female. ‘Height could be a cue to power and hence attractiveness,’ they said.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

{ The 13 Archimedean solids are the convex polyhedra that have a similar arrangement of nonintersecting regular convex polygons of two or more different types arranged in the same way about each vertex with all sides the same length. | Wolfram MathWorld | Continue reading }

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

To err on the side of caution, I am stuffing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. (…)

In brief, Brennan wanted to understand why some ducks have such extravagant penises. Why are they cork-screw shaped? Why do they get so ridiculously long–some cases as long as the duck’s entire body? As Brennan dissected duck penises, she began to wonder what the female sexual anatomy looked like. If you have a car like this, she said, what kind of garage do you park it in?

Brennan discovered that female ducks have equally weird reproductive tracts (called oviducts). In many species, they are ornamented with lots of outpockets. And like duck penises, duck oviducts are corkscrew-shaped. But while male duck penises twist clockwise, the female oviduct twists counterclockwise.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

UFO spotters, Raëlian cultists, and self-­certified alien abductees notwithstanding, humans have, to date, seen no sign of any extraterrestrial civilization. We have not received any visitors from space, nor have our radio telescopes detected any signals transmitted by any extraterrestrial civilization. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been going for nearly half a century, employing increasingly powerful telescopes and data-­mining techniques; so far, it has consistently corroborated the null hypothesis. As best we have been able to determine, the night sky is empty and silent. (…)

Here is another fact: the observable universe contains on the order of 100 billion galaxies, and there are on the order of 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. In the last couple of decades, we have learned that many of these stars have planets circling them; several hundred such “exoplanets” have been discovered to date. Most of these are gigantic, since it is very difficult to detect smaller exoplanets using current methods. (In most cases, the planets cannot be directly observed. Their existence is inferred from their gravitational influence on their parent suns, which wobble slightly when pulled toward large orbiting planets, or from slight fluctuations in luminosity when the planets partially eclipse their suns.) We have every reason to believe that the observable universe contains vast numbers of solar systems, including many with planets that are Earth-like, at least in the sense of having masses and temperatures similar to those of our own orb. We also know that many of these solar systems are older than ours.

From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a “Great Filter,” which can be thought of as a probability barrier. The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

If the filter is in our past, there must be some extremely improbable step in the sequence of events whereby an Earth-like planet gives rise to an intelligent species comparable in its technological sophistication to our contemporary human civilization. Some people seem to take the evolution of intelligent life on Earth for granted: a lengthy process, yes; ­complicated, sure; yet ultimately inevitable, or nearly so. But this view might well be completely mistaken. There is, at any rate, hardly any evidence to support it. Evolutionary biology, at the moment, does not enable us to calculate from first principles how probable or improbable the emergence of intelligent life on Earth was. Moreover, if we look back at our evolutionary history, we can identify a number of transitions any one of which could plausibly be the Great Filter.

For example, perhaps it is very improbable that even ­simple self-replicators should emerge on any Earth-like planet. Attempts to create life in the laboratory by mixing water with gases believed to have been present in the Earth’s early atmosphere have failed to get much beyond the synthesis of a few simple amino acids. No instance of abiogenesis (the spontaneous emergence of life from nonlife) has ever been observed. (…)

The other possibility is that the Great Filter is still ahead of us. This would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization. For example, it might be that any sufficiently advanced civilization discovers some tech­nology–perhaps some very powerful weapons tech­nology–that causes its extinction. (…) …a nuclear war fought with arms stockpiles much larger than today’s (perhaps resulting from future arms races); a genetically engineered superbug; environmental disaster; an asteroid impact; wars or terrorist acts committed with powerful future weapons; super­intelligent general artificial intelligence with destructive goals; or high-energy physics experiments. (…)

So where is the Great Filter? Behind us, or not behind us?

If the Great Filter is ahead of us, we have still to confront it. If it is true that almost all intelligent species go extinct before they master the technology for space colonization, then we must expect that our own species will, too, since we have no reason to think that we will be any luckier than other species. (…)

What has all this got to do with finding life on Mars? Consider the implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on Mars (or some other planet in our solar system). That discovery would suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable. If it happened independently twice here in our own backyard, it must surely have happened millions of times across the galaxy. This would mean that the Great Filter is less likely to be confronted during the early life of planets and therefore, for us, more likely still to come.

{ Nick Bostrom/Technology Review | Continue reading }

Final proof that Mars has bred life will be confirmed this year, leading NASA experts believe. The historic discovery will come not on Mars itself but from chunks of the red planet here on Earth.

David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.

He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.

The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

How does popularity affect how we judge music?

We tend to say we like what other people like. No-one wants to stand out and risk ridicule by saying they don’t enjoy universally loved bands, like The Beatles… unless they’re trying to fit into a subculture where everyone hates The Beatles.

But do people just pretend to like what others like, or can perceived popularity actually change musical preferences? Do The Beatles actually sound better because we know everyone loves them? An amusing Neuroimage study from Berns et al aimed to answer this question with the help of 27 American teens, an fMRI scanner, and MySpace. (…)

The twist was that each song was played twice: the first time with no information about its popularity, and then again, either with or without a 5 star popularity score shown on the screen. Cleverly, this was based on the number of MySpace downloads. This meant that the subjects had a chance to change their rating based on what they’d just learned about the song’s popularity. (…)

Berns et al interpreted this as meaning that, in this experiment, popularity did not affect whether the volunteers really enjoyed the songs or not.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

Antarctica is warming, but not melting anything like as much as expected. In fact, during the continent’s summer this time last year, there was less melting than at any time in the 30 years that we have had reliable satellite measurements of the region. (…)

Melting in Antarctica happens almost entirely in the summers, which have warmed very little, say Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and Marco Tedesco of the City College of New York. (…)

But Tedesco warns that as the ozone hole heals in the coming decades, the winds will weaken, the continent will become much warmer in summer – and melting will increase.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

An iceberg that broke off of Antarctica in 2000 is headed toward Australia. Usually, they circulate around Antarctica due to currents there but this one managed to escape, and is drifting northeast toward Australia’s south-southwest coast. Since it broke off the main ice mass it shrank from 140 square kilometers down to 115 square km. Manhattan is 88 sq km. It would fit comfortably inside that iceberg.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

related { Frozen Britain seen from satellite | Plus: A deluge of overnight snow has left much of Britain paralysed, with airports closed, schools shut, normally-busy roads impassable and train lines all but empty. 10 ways to cope with snow. }

For many years now, neuroscientists have been telling the subjects of experiments something like this: “Please lie in the MRI scanner and relax. When you see the task instructions come onto the screen in front of you, do your best.” The researcher would then use the brain’s activity during the “lie there and relax” period as a mere control condition; the object of scientific interest was always what “lights up” when a subject reads, makes financial decisions or performs some other task.

That has changed. It is now appreciated that the mind never rests.  (..)

For the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart people.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related photo { How to train the aging brain }

In November 2002, an obscure Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman caused a sensation in the mathematical community when he posted the first in a series of papers proving the most famous unsolved problem in topology: the Poincaré conjecture. He caused another sensation four years later when he was awarded the Fields medal - the “mathematics Nobel” - for his work, declined to accept it, and then left mathematics altogether. When last heard of, he was living a reclusive existence at his mother’s home in St Petersburg.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Russian math prodigy Grigory Perelman should be a celebrated millionaire. Instead, he is a poor recluse who lives with his mother.

In 2006, Sir John Ball, the president of the International Mathematical Union, travelled to St. Petersburg hoping to convince Grigory Perelman to accept his place as the most celebrated mathematician alive.

Ball spent two days there, locked in an increasingly desperate argument with Perelman, a haughty, dishevelled 39-year-old. Ball asked Perelman to accept a Fields Medal, the highest award for achievement in mathematics. The Fields is given out every four years, to as few as two recipients. Perelman, the man who had solved the insoluble Poincaré Conjecture, refused the award. Four years earlier, he had turned down a $1 million prize for the same solution.

Ball first tried to convince Perelman to travel to Spain for the ceremony. Since Perelman rarely left the dilapidated flat he shared with his mother, that went nowhere. Ball suggested Perelman skip the ceremony, but accept the award. He declined again. Eventually, Ball left, baffled and frustrated. The prize was awarded to Perelman anyway.

{ The Star | Continue reading | Perelman in a Subway [pics] }

related { It may be no accident that, while some of the best American mathematical minds worked to solve one of the century’s hardest problems—the Poincaré Conjecture—it was a Russian mathematician working in Russia who, early in this decade, finally triumphed. | Wall Street Journal }

In the latest edition of Mind Matters, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and John Gabrieli of MIT outline some interesting new research on the link between resting state activity - the performance of the brain when it’s lying still in a brain scanner, doing nothing but daydreaming - and general intelligence.

It turns out that cultivating an active idle mind, or teaching yourself how to daydream effectively, might actually encourage the sort of long-range neural connections that make us smart. At the very least, it’s time we stop discouraging kids from staring out the classroom window, because mind wandering isn’t a waste of time

{ The Frontal Cortex/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Christophe Kutner, Road trip 2 }

For once, social scientists have discovered a flaw in the human psyche that will not be tedious to correct. You may not even need a support group. You could try on your own by starting with this simple New Year’s resolution: Have fun … now!

Then you just need the strength to cash in your gift certificates, drink that special bottle of wine, redeem your frequent flier miles and take that vacation you always promised yourself. If your resolve weakens, do not succumb to guilt or shame. Acknowledge what you are: a recovering procrastinator of pleasure.

It sounds odd, but this is actually a widespread form of procrastination — just ask the airlines and other marketers who save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed. (…)

But it has taken awhile for psychologists and behavioral economists to analyze this condition. Now they have begun to explore the strange impulse to put off until tomorrow what could be enjoyed today.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Although our bodies appear largely symmetrical on the outside, the way our brains are organised and wired is rather more lop-sided. This is obvious to us in relation to handedness, whereby the brain is better at controlling one hand than the other. The idea that, for many of us, the left-hemisphere is dominant for language is also widely known.

However, functional asymmetry between the brain hemispheres also affects our behaviour in more subtle ways that are still being explored. The latest example of this comes from Japan where Matia Okubo has shown that right-handers have a preference for sitting to the right of the cinema screen, but only when they are motivated to watch the film.

The finding is consistent with the idea that in right-handers, the right-hemisphere is dominant for processing visual and emotional input. By sitting to the right of the screen, the film is predominantly processed by the right-hemisphere and the suggestion is that, without necessarily realising it, right-handers are choosing to sit in an optimal position for their brain to digest the movie.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Sometimes songs get ’stuck in our head’. In German, this experience is known as having an ‘earworm’ and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon.

What particularly struck me was that “the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity”.

What is meant by auditory memory here is our ability to consciously remember a short piece of sound or to ‘repeat something back to ourselves’ - often called the ‘phonological loop’ in a popular model of working memory.

This tells us that ‘earworms’ are probably not something getting stuck in our very short-term memory but the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, The Melody Haunts My Reverie, 1965 }

Why are people so blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their personalities?

Take an everyday example: there are some infuriating people who are always late for appointments. A few of these people explain it by saying they are ‘laid-back’, while others seem unaware that they’re always late.

For laid-back people, their lateness is a part of their personality, they are aware of it and presumably not worried about appearing unconscientious. For the unaware it’s almost as if they don’t realise they’re always late. How is that possible?

It’s probably because they’ve never noticed or paid attention to the fact that they are always late so they never learn to think of themselves as lacking conscientiousness. Or so suggests a psychological theory describing how we think about ourselves called self-schema theory.

This theory says that we have developed ’schemas’, like internal maps of our personalities, which we use to understand and explain our current and future behaviour to ourselves, e.g. I’m always on time for meetings so I’m a conscientious person.

However schema theory also suggests that these maps have uncharted areas, leaving people with certain blind spots in their self-knowledge.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

{ What does a doodle do? It boosts your memory and concentration. }

Can a person freeze to death? (…) Death strikes long before the body actually freezes.

Yet our bodies are pretty hardy, as we have two built-in mechanisms to protect us from the cold.

As soon as that bitter air hits your face, your body will try to insulate itself by moving blood away from the skin and outer extremities, such as fingers and toes, and toward its core. This process is called vasoconstriction, and it helps limit the amount of heat you lose to the environment, explained John Castellani of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine.

The second response from your body is shivering. People may experience a little shivering when they’re skin temperatures starts to fall, but major shivering usually doesn’t occur unless your core body temperatures drops, Castellani said.

{ Live Science | Continue reading }

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth. It might also represent the most prolific cradle for new types of animals on the planet, according to new research. (…) In fact, of the 6,615 seabed invertebrates surveyed in the so-called Paleobiology Database, 1,426 evolved in a reef ecosystem. And the result is not just an artifact of reef and shallow-water fossils being relatively more studied. (…)

According to some mathematical estimates, 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. As it stands, estimates of the number of species on Earth at present range from five million to as many as 100 million, with science having identified only two million members of the biodiversity extant today. That means literally billions of species have come and gone in the 4.5 billion years Earth has existed.

New research will be needed to determine exactly why reefs are such efficient cradles for new life-forms. But the threats faced by coral today—from rising ocean acidity to agricultural runoff and rampant disease—do not bode well for marine biodiversity in the near future.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Josh Brand }

{ Demographic studies have indicated that in humans, fertility and intelligence tend to be negatively correlated, that is to say, the more intelligent, as measured by IQ, exhibit a lower total fertility rate than the less intelligent. | Wikipedia }

A fundamental mistake we often make when judging other people is assuming that their behaviour mainly reflects their personality. Unfortunately this ignores another major influence on how people behave staring us right in the face: the situation.

Our personalities certainly have an influence on what situations we get into and how we deal with them, but situational factors — even relatively subtle ones — can completely obliterate the effects of personality. (…)

Often people’s behaviour, and our own, may say very little about our personalities and much more about the complexities of the situation in which we find ourselves.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

Neuromarketers are becoming the next generation of Mad Men. They are working for companies like Google, Frito-Lay and Disney. But instead of directly asking consumers whether they like a product, neuromarketers are asking their brains.

Using electroencephalography (EEG)–a technology typically used by neurologists to diagnose seizures–marketers measure brain wave activity in response to advertisements and products. Electrodes placed on the subject’s scalp collect the data. The consumer herself doesn’t say a thing.

And that’s the point. In the new world of neuromarketing, it is the more immediate, unedited emotional brain-level reaction to a product or ad that presumably indicates what the consumer really wants, even if she doesn’t really know it. The rational and deliberate responses elicited in focus groups are considered unreliable.

No wonder EmSense, a San Francisco-based market research company, succeeded in raising $9 million in capital last month. (…)

Brain activation detected through the band’s sensors is believed to signal the consumer’s emotional engagement with a product. Engagement, in turn, is essential to sustaining interest and in enhancing memorability, important for developing brand loyalty. Yet the practical dimensions of neuromarketing are far from well-established.

First, how well does EEG detect emotion? It can gauge alertness, yes, but the more subtle kinds of mental states that relate to purchasing decisions–such as attraction, disgust, nostalgia or aspirational fantasy–are not accessible via brain wave analysis.

Second, the notion of a discrete “buy button in the brain,” as marketers call the holy grail of marketing, is deeply naive. Response to the shape, smell and color of a product is the culmination of complex processes that engage many areas of the brain.

{ Forbes | Continue reading }

previously { Now, get ready for Genomarketing! }

What does gift-wrapping do for the recipient? Is all this effort worth it for the recipient? For example, do recipients actually like gift-wrapped presents more than unwrapped gifts?

According to a study that was published 15 years ago by Daniel Howard, professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, it appears so.

{ GrrlScientist/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

box { House Industries }