In materials science, creep is the tendency of a solid material to slowly move or deform permanently under the influence of stresses.
Creep is more severe in materials that are subjected to heat for long periods, and near melting point. Creep always increases with temperature.
photo { Matthew Tammaro }
Harris has conducted two studies that show we may not enjoy watching a movie for two reasons: what we’re watching and who we’re watching it with. Particularly, the combination of watching a steamy love scene with your parents proved to be most unpleasant. (…)
The study focused on those uncomfortable movie-viewing moments and how viewers acted during the movie and after it. Harris said the gender of the viewer influenced reactions, a somewhat surprising result.
“Contrary to gender stereotypes, women were actually more likely to talk about it, both during the movie and after,” Harris said. “Men were more likely to do the avoidance types of responses: start talking about something else, not say anything at all or pretend it didn’t bother them.”
painting { Cary Grant by Kurt Kauper }
The simple act of closing our eyes has a significant effect on our moral judgement and behaviour. Eugene Caruso and Francesca Gino, who made the observation, think the effect has to do with mental simulation, whereby having our eyes closed causes us to simulate scenarios more vividly. In turn this triggers more intense emotion. (…)
Overall, there was no evidence that the eyes-closed participants had simply paid more attention to the scenario than the eyes-open participants, but they did experience more negative, guilt-based emotion and it’s this effect that probably underlies the study’s central finding.
Many regions of the brain literally shrink in size as adults grow older. The hippocampus, which is associated with memory and spatial tasks, is known to lose about 1-2% of its volume per year. As a result, memory eventually begins to suffer. But hippocampus shrinkage isn’t necessarily inevitable. Adults with higher physical fitness levels have been found to have larger hippocampi than less fit adults of the same age. Translation: Exercise now can prevent brain loss later in life. (…)
Aerobic exercise is the elixir of youth for hippocampi.
A double bind is an emotionally distressing dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, in which one message negates the other. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will be automatically wrong regardless of response.
Double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.
Tens of thousands of New York City employees who did not report for work during the snowstorm on Thursday could lose a day of leave — even though Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sent out a predawn message that day saying that all city nonemergency offices and schools would be closed.
A memo went out to the heads of all city agencies on Monday saying that office employees will lose a day of vacation or comp time unless they write an acceptable excuse note.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
You’re probably wondering how on earth microbes have anything to do with the 3 feet of snow you had to dig your car out from under last week…
I have two “believe it or not” statements for today:
First, believe it or not, microbes are ubiquitous in the Earth’s atmosphere (Bowers et al. 2009, and others). “Ubiquitous” is a fantastic word that simply means “absolutely everywhere” and it’s especially true with microbes. (…) Microbes are also extremely abundant in the air around us, above and beyond our reach, floating in the breeze and being carried thousands of miles on trans-oceanic trade winds. (…)
[Two]: many of those atmospheric microbes have been found to nucleate ice (Bauer et al. 2003). What I mean by “nucleate ice” is that they can serve as the starting point for ice crystals to begin to form.
This paper investigates the relationship between environment and behaviour in a butterfly.
Adult butterflies are highly visual animals, relying on their keen eyesight to locate and identify appropriate mates by looking at and comparing their wing colours and patterns. Many butterflies show variations in wing colours and patterns depending upon the season they experienced as caterpillars or whilst cocooning. Knowing this, it is reasonable to assume that differences in wing colours and patterns (known as polyphenisms) could affect how adult butterflies interact with each other. But do wing polyphenisms affect adult butterfly behaviours? If so, how?
Dr Katy Prudic, and her postdoctoral advisor, Dr Antónia Monteiro, researchers in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, investigated the relationship between the environment and behaviour in the east African butterfly species, the squinting bush brown butterfly, Bicyclus anynana.
Even though this butterfly species has been bred and raised in captivity for 30 years, Dr Prudic was the first person to notice that female B. anynana appeared to be colour-coded according to season. When the adult butterfly holds its wings closed, as when perched on a flower, the exposed dorsal wing surfaces show distinct seasonal differences: adult butterflies that experienced a wet warm season as caterpillars have brighter and more numerous eyespots (figure 1A) than those seen in the cooler dry season form (figure 1B):
You can tell a person’s personality from the words they use. Neurotics have a penchant for negative words; agreeable types for words pertaining to socialising; and so on. We know this from recordings of people’s speech and from brief writing tasks. Now Tal Yarkoni has extended this line of research to the blogosphere.
For pop-language watchers, January marks the end of the words-of-the-year ritual that has so far given us ‘refudiate’ (New Oxford American Dictionary), ‘austerity’ (Merriam-Webster), and ’spillcam’ (Global Language Monitor). On Friday, members of the American Dialect Society will meet to consider the likes of ‘vuvuzela,’ ‘halfalogue,’ and ‘gleek’ for spots on its 2010 list.
Not all the annual wordfests, however, are celebratory. Since 1976, Lake Superior State University in Michigan has been issuing a list of words and phrases to be banished ‘for mis-use, over-use, and general uselessness.’
As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”
Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. (…)
The North American lottery system is a $70 billion-a-year business, an industry bigger than movie tickets, music, and porn combined. (…)
It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.
artwork { Erik Bulatov }
Ask any second grader what you can do with the rings on a tree, and they’ll respond, “Learn the age of the tree.” They’re not wrong, but dendrochronology—the dating of trees based on patterns in their rings—is more than just counting rings. The hundred year-old discipline has given scientists access to extraordinarily detailed records of climate and environmental conditions hundreds, even thousands of years ago.
The ancient Greeks were the first people known to realize the link between a tree’s rings and its age but, for most of history, that was the limit of our knowledge. It wasn’t until 1901 that an astronomer at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory was hit with a very terrestrial idea—that climatic variations affected the size of a tree’s rings. The idea would change the way scientists study the climate, providing them with over 10,000 years of continuous data that is an important part of modern climate models. (…)
Dendrochronology operates under three major principles and a handful of other ground rules. The uniformitarian principle is perhaps the most important. It implies that the climate operates today in much the same way it did in the past. The uniformitarian principle does not imply that the climate today is the same as it was in the past, or even that today’s climatic conditions ever occurred in the past. It simply states that the basic processes and limiting factors are consistent through time.
{ Ars Technica | Continue reading | Dendrochronology | Wikipedia }
photo { David Stewart }
Defining a galaxy sounds so simple. We all know what a galaxy is, right? Well, not really. Surprisingly, there is no universally agreed upon definition and the ones generally bandied around leave a great deal of wriggle room.
All this has been thrown into stark relief in recent years by the discovery of a growing number of small, faint, galaxy-like objects that were entirely unknown until now. These have been given various names such as ultra compact dwarfs, ultra-faint dwarf spheroidal galaxies and dwarf elliptical galaxies.
But it isn’t entirely clear whether they have more in common with galaxies like our own or globular clusters, which astronomers generally do not think of as galaxies.
That makes the problem of defining a galaxy a growing concern.
photo { Wallpiercing LED lighting system, designed by Ron Gilad for Flos }
One of the more curious debates in science focuses on the laws of physics and why they seem fine-tuned for life.
The problem is that the laws of physics contain various constants that have very specific, mysterious values that nobody can explain. These constants are balanced in such a way that life has evolved at least once, in one small part of the Universe.
But why do the constants have these values? Various scientists have calculated that even the tiniest of changes to these constants would make life impossible. That raises the question of why they are so finely balanced.
One explanation is that this is pure accident and that there is no deeper reason for the coincidence. Another idea is that there is some deeper law of nature, which we have yet to discover, that sets the constants as they are. Yet another is that the constants can take more or less any value in an infinite multitude of universes. In ours, they are just right, which is why we have been able to evolve to observe them.
None of these arguments is easy to prove or disprove, although that may change as other evidence accrues, says Don Page, a theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta in Canada.
photo { Stephen Shore }
Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go into a shop and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to go left, leaving you walking round in circles.
Last summer I met 55-year-old Karen Byrne in New Jersey, who suffers from Alien Hand Syndrome.
Her left hand, and occasionally her left leg, behaves as if it were under the control of an alien intelligence.
Karen’s condition is fascinating, not just because it is so strange but because it tells us something surprising about how our own brains work.
Karen’s problem was caused by a power struggle going on inside her head. A normal brain consists of two hemispheres which communicate with each other via the corpus callosum.
The left hemisphere, which controls the right arm and leg, tends to be where language skills reside. The right hemisphere, which controls the left arm and leg, is largely responsible for spatial awareness and recognising patterns.
Usually the more analytical left hemisphere dominates, having the final say in the actions we perform.
The discovery of hemispherical dominance has its roots in the 1940s, when surgeons first decided to treat epilepsy by cutting the corpus callosum. After they had recovered, the patients appeared normal. But in psychology circles they became legends.
That is because these patients would, in time, reveal something that to me is truly astonishing - the two halves of our brains each contain a kind of separate consciousness. Each hemisphere is capable of its own independent will.
photo { Chris McPherson }
The food scientist Beverly Tepper is director of the Sensory Evaluation Laboratory at Rutgers University. Her research combines nutritional science and psychology with the genetics of taste perception in order to better understand the links between flavor, diet, and health. We talked about some of the innovations she thinks will reshape our food in the coming years, where food scientists have gone wrong in the past, and what she thinks of molecular gastronomy.
(…)
To give you a specific example, the food industry often uses a technique called encapsulation to protect a flavor that they’ve placed in a food product. That means you coat it in some kind of material that allows the flavor compound to stay fresh and separate within the food product until you release it by eating it. The next generation of encapsulation uses nanotechnology, which will open up an entirely different dimension in the kinds of technologies that can be placed in foods and food packaging. For example, there are things that you can place on the inside of a food package that act as a sensor to tell you if the food is spoiled or release molecules into the package that fight bacteria.
photo { Todd Fisher }
The secrets behind your flowers.
Chances are the bouquet you’re about to buy came from Colombia. (…)
To limit coca farming and expand job opportunities in Colombia, the U.S. government in 1991 suspended import duties on Colombian flowers. The results were dramatic, though disastrous for U.S. growers. In 1971, the United States produced 1.2 billion blooms of the major flowers (roses, carnations and chrysanthemums) and imported only 100 million. By 2003, the trade balance had reversed; the United States imported two billion major blooms and grew only 200 million.
photo { Alison Brady }
Odors can be a subtle factor affecting human mating, similar to the behavior of other animals. Monitoring the responses of men after smelling t-shirts worn by ovulating women, non-ovulating women and some not worn at all, they observed reactions and biological changes. This study provides evidence that ovulatory cues are detectable.
photo { Susan Meiselas }
Halitosis literally means “condition of the breath” and has many causes and just as many home remedies. Original therapies (and by original I mean 1550 BC) like heavily herb infused wines didn’t remove the bad breath but like mints and other modern treatments they just attempted to cover the bad smell with something more pleasant.
Halitosis can be divided into two distinct problems, transient halitosis (morning breath) and chronic halitosis. While the difference between these conditions is the time frame of affliction both have the same root cause. Sulphur.
A study by Suarez et al. looked at what caused the odour in people with morning breath and found that the unique smells produced by people were due to three sulphurous gases combining into a malodourous mixture.
photo { Jaimie Warren }
Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.
He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.
bonus:
{ Butterflies are characterized by their scale-covered wings. The coloration of butterfly wings is created by minute scales. These scales are pigmented with melanins that give them blacks and browns, but blues, greens, reds and iridescence are usually created not by pigments but the microstructure of the scales. This structural coloration is the result of coherent scattering of light by the photonic crystal nature of the scales. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
A new paper in Nature Neuroscience by a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. (…)
Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI) they were able to obtain an impressively precise portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered (using ligand-based PET) is that music triggers the release of dopamine in both the dorsal and ventral striatum. This isn’t particularly surprising: these regions have long been associated with the response to pleasurable stimuli. It doesn’t matter if we’re having sex or snorting cocaine or listening to Kanye: These things fill us with bliss because they tickle these cells. Happiness begins here.
The more interesting finding emerged from a close study of the timing of this response, as the scientists looked to see what was happening in the seconds before the subjects got the chills. I won’t go into the precise neural correlates – let’s just say that you should thank your right NAcc the next time you listen to your favorite song – but want to instead focus on an interesting distinction observed in the experiment.
In essence, the scientists found that our favorite moments in the music were preceeded by a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate. They call this the “anticipatory phase” and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favorite part.
We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.
A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.
{ The New Yorker | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
screenshot { Kissinger and Nixon | excerpted from The Kid Stays in the Picture, 2002 }
