A good reason not to try sex in space. Yet.

One of the dominant ideas for getting to another solar system within the next few centuries involves the generation ship, vast spacecraft designed to function as their own, self-contained colonies and housing thousands of humans for very long stretches of time, ideally with all the comforts of home. And one of those comforts better be gravity because it turns out that if humans were to start reproducing without that familiar acceleration of 9.8 m/s/s or pretty close to it, their children are likely to be born with cranial defects, collapsed jaws, and buckled spines, among some of the other pleasantries of embryos’ inability to cope with a lack of gravity during the development process.

{ Weird Things | Continue reading }

photo { James O’Mahoney}

Over break I went out with a buddy of mine and played some darts. This got me to thinking, where exactly should someone aim in order to get the largest expected number of points? (…)

Well, something that I didn’t quite realize before I started this adventure is that while the double bullseye in the center is worth 50 points, the triple 20 is worth more: 60 points.

For the uninitiated, in games like 501 you score points based on where the dart falls. The center is the bullseye, where the inner most circle is worth 50 and the ring around it is worth 25, after that you score depending on which of the pie slice things you fall in, the points being the number on the slice. The little ring around the outside is worth double points, and the little ring at about half the board radius is worth triple points.

So perhaps the triple 20 is where you should be aiming all the time.

In order to answer a question like that, we need to develop a model for dart throwing. In this case, I thought it was safe to assume that dart throws are normally distributed about the place you aim, with some sigma determined by your skill level.

{ Ask-a-Physicist | Continue reading }

artwork { Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces , 1955 }

{ DailyMail }

When we cry, we may be doing more than expressing emotion. Our tears, according to striking new research, may be sending chemical signals that influence the behavior of other people.

The research, published on Thursday in the journal Science, could begin to explain something that has baffled scientists for generations: Why do humans, unlike seemingly any other species, cry emotional tears?

In several experiments, researchers found that men who sniffed drops of women’s emotional tears became less sexually aroused than when they sniffed a neutral saline solution that had been dribbled down women’s cheeks.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

artwork { Jules Joseph Lefebvre, Mary Magdalene In The Cave, 1876 }

{ Study: Wind May Have Helped Moses Part Red Sea | NPR | full story }

Statistics is what people think math is. Statistics is about patterns and that’s what people think math is about. The difference is that in math, you have to get very complicated before you get to interesting patterns. The math that we can all easily do – things like circles and triangles and squares – doesn’t really describe reality that much. Mandelbrot, when he wrote about fractals and talked about the general idea of self-similar processes, made it clear that if you want to describe nature, or social reality, you need very complicated mathematical constructions. The math that we can all understand from high school is just not going to be enough to capture the interesting features of real world patterns. Statistics, however, can capture a lot more patterns at a less technical level, because statistics, unlike mathematics, is all about uncertainty and variation. (…)

Bill James once said that you can lie in statistics just like you can lie in English or French or any other language. Sure, the more powerful a language is the more ways you can lie using it. There are a bunch of great quotes about statistics. There’s another one, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know.’

{ The Browser | Continue reading }

photo { Flemming Ove Bech }

The experience of pleasure is the result of mechanisms designed to bring about (outcomes that would have led to) fitness gains. When Jared Diamond asked Why is Sex Fun, the answer had to do with the fact that evolved motivational systems are designed to drive organisms to do fitness-enhancing things, like having sex.

Now, I want to emphasize that this is speculative, but it seems to me that a key piece here is that humans seem to benefit from discovering certain kinds of new information they didn’t previously know. One way we do this is to read blogs like this one, but there are any number of other ways. The pleasure we take in new information depends on a number of factors, perhaps including how hard it is to get (easier is generally better), how many other people might be able to get it easily (fewer is often better, which cuts against the previous factor), the value of the information, how confident we are that it’s true, and so on. Gossip and Wikileaks are both, in a sense, satisfying our evolved appetites for finding out secrets, previously unknown and possibly useful information.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

Last week scientists at Harvard medical school reversed the ageing process in elderly mice. Please don’t get excited, unless you’re a mouse that is. The application to humans is a long way off and even if it will one day be possible, there are many issues attendant on a population that has the means to live forever. (…)

Medical intervention once seemed limited to curing us of diseases that kill. In my childhood, diphtheria and scarlet fever still carried people off, I had friends crippled by polio and aunts deformed by rickets. All this seemed the proper field for medical intervention.

We all know what happened next, a great swathe of advances in hygiene and medicine drove the major killers on to the back foot. From a combination of better lifestyle, cleaner cities and the benefits of a free health service, people began living longer.

We hear regularly of the latest treatments for coronary heart disease, breast cancer, kidney failure, and we live in the belief that when we have an unwelcome diagnosis the full force of medical knowledge will be marshalled for our benefit. We have come to expect better. Now we want life to go on forever. (…)

While most of us don’t want to live forever, many of us would enjoy living longer. At the same time we would like the planet to survive as we know it. There is a contradiction in contemplating a world where everyone lives much longer and where the planet’s resources are finite.

Unless we can learn to eat sand we should bear in mind the fates of places like Angkor Wat and Easter Island, places once dense with people and culture now empty ruins.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

Remember that billion heartbeat limit that seems to confine all mammals, from shrews to giraffes? It’s a pretty neat correlation, until you ponder the chief exception: Us.

Most mammals our size and weight are already fading away by age twenty or so, when humans are just hitting their stride. By eighty, we’ve had about three billion heartbeats! That’s quite a bonus.

How did we get so lucky?

Biologists figure that our evolving ancestors needed drastically extended lifespans, because humans came to rely on learning rather than instinct to create sophisticated, tool-using societies. That meant children needed a long time to develop. A mere two decades weren’t long enough for a man or woman to amass the knowledge needed for complex culture, let alone pass that wisdom on to new generations. (In fact, chimps and other apes share some of this lifespan bonus, getting about half as many extra heartbeats.)

So evolution rewarded those who found ways to slow the aging process. Almost any trick would have been enlisted, including all the chemical effects that researchers have recently stimulated in mice, through caloric restriction. In other words, we’ve probably already incorporated all the easy stuff! We’re the mammalian Methuselahs and little more will be achieved by asceticism or other drastic life-style adjustments. Good diet and exercise will help you get your eighty years. But to gain a whole lot more lifespan, we’re going to have to get technical.

So what about intervention and repair?

Are your organs failing? Grow new ones, using a culture of your own cells!

Are your arteries clogged? Send tiny nano-robots coursing through your bloodstream, scouring away plaque! Use tuned masers to break the excess intercell linkages that make flesh less flexible over time.

Install little chemical factories to synthesize and secrete the chemicals that your own glands no longer adequately produce. Brace brittle bones with ceramic coatings, stronger than the real thing!

In fact, we are already doing many of these things, in early-primitive versions. So there is no argument over whether such techniques will appear in coming decades, only how far they will take us.

Might enough breakthroughs coalesce at the same time to let us routinely offer everybody triple-digit spans of vigorous health? Or will these complicated interventions only add more digits to the cost of medical care, while struggling vainly against the same age-barrier in a frustrating war of diminishing returns?

I’m sure it will seem that way for the first few decades of the next century… until, perhaps, everything comes together in a rush.

If that happens — if we suddenly find ourselves able to fix old age — there will surely be countless unforeseen consequences… and one outcome that’s absolutely predictable: We’ll start taking that miracle for granted, too.

On the other hand, it may not work as planned. Many scientists suggest that attempts at intervention and repair will ultimately prove futile, because senescence and death are integral parts of our genetic nature. (…)

So far, our sole hope for such a voyage to the far-off future — and a slim one, at that — is something called cryonics, the practice of freezing a terminal patient’s body, after he or she has been declared legally dead. Some of those who sign up for this service take the cheap route of having only their heads prepared and stored in liquid nitrogen, under the assumption that folks in the Thirtieth Century will simply grow fresh bodies on demand. Their logic is expressed with chilling rationality. “The real essence of who I am is the software contained in my brain. My old body — the hardware — is just meat.” (…)

According to some techno-transcendentalists, “growing new bodies” will seem like child’s play in the future. (..)

All right, what if one of them finally works? All too often, we find that solving one problem only leads to others, sometimes even more vexing.

A number of eminent writers like Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson and Gregory Benford have speculated on possible consequences, should Mister G. Reaper ever be forced to hang up his scythe and seek other employment. For example, if the Death Barrier comes crashing down, will we be able to keep shoehorning new humans into a world already crowded with earlier generations? Or else, as envisioned by author John Varley, might such a breakthrough demand draconian population-control measures, limiting each person to one direct heir per lifespan?

{ David Brin | Continue reading }

I think we have a 50% chance of achieving medicine capable of getting people to 200 in the decade 2030-2040. Presuming we do indeed do that, the actual achievement of 200 will probably be in the decade 2140-2150 - it will be someone who was about 85-90 at the time that the relevant therapies were developed.

There will be no one technological breakthrough that achieves this. It will be achieved by a combination of regenerative therapies that repair all the different molecular and cellular degenerative components of aging.

{ When Will Life Expectancy Reach 200 Years? Aubrey de Grey and David Brin Disagree in Interview }

To see how far back the immortality fantasy goes, read about Gilgamesh, or the Chinese First Emperor who drank mercury in order to live forever — and died in his forties.

{ David Brin/IEET | Continue reading }

Let’s say you transfer your mind into a computer—not all at once but gradually…

{ Carl Zimmer/Scientific American | Continue reading }

Oxytocin has been described as the hormone of love. This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more.

Yes, you knew there had to be a catch. As oxytocin comes into sharper focus, its social radius of action turns out to have definite limits. The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Glynnis McDaris | Interview }

For centuries people living in the Middle East have dreamed of turning the sandy desert into land fit for growing crops with fresh water on tap.

Now that holy grail is a step closer after scientists employed by the ruler of Abu Dhabi claim to have generated a series of downpours.

Fifty rainstorms were created last year in the state’s eastern Al Ain region using technology designed to control the weather.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

There are now roughly 2 billion Internet users worldwide. Five billion earthlings have cell phones. That scale of connectivity offers staggering power: In a few seconds, we can summon almost any fact, purchase a replacement hubcap or locate a cabin mate from those halcyon days at Camp Tewonga. We can call, email, text or chat online with our colleagues, friends and family just about anywhere.

Yet, along with the power has come the feeling that digital devices have invaded our every waking moment. We’ve had to pass laws to get people off their cell phones while driving. Backlit iPads slither into our beds for midnight Words With Friends trysts. Sitcoms poke fun at breakfast tables where siblings text each other to ask that the butter be passed. (According to a Nielsen study, the average 13- to 17-year-old now deals with 3,339 texts a month.)

We even buy new technology to cure new problems created by new technology: There’s an iPhone app that uses the device’s built-in camera to show the ground in front of a user as a backdrop on the keypad. “Have you ever tried calling someone while walking with your phone only to run into something because you can’t see where you’re going?” goes the sales pitch. (…)

A growing number of researchers here and elsewhere are exploring the social and psychological consequences of virtual experience and digital incursion. Researchers observe the blurring boundaries between real and virtual life, challenge the vaunted claims of multitasking, and ponder whether people need to establish technology-free zones.

{ Stanford magazine | Continue reading }

Our brains appear to have an intrinsic response to “art for art’s sake,” researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have found.

Imaging research has revealed that the ventral striatum, a region of the brain involved in experiencing pleasure, decision-making and risk-taking, is activated more when someone views a painting than when someone views a plain photograph.

The images viewed by study participants included paintings from both unknown and well-known artists. (…)

The idea for the study was based on work by marketing experts Henrik Hagtvedt (now at Boston College) and Vanessa Patrick (now at the University of Houston). Hagtvedt and Patrick had investigated the “art infusion” effect, where the presence of a painting on a product’s advertising or packaging makes it more appealing.

{ Emory University | Continue reading }

Bob spoke about how people tend to walk faster in larger cities, with this relationship surprisingly consistent. (…)

The early movers in this area of research were Bornstein and Bornstein, who between 1972 and 1974 went to 15 countries across Europe, North America and Asia and measured the speed of pedestrians. They took a 50 feet stretch in similar downtown areas of each city and measured the speed of single, unencumbered walkers traversing that distance.

The slowest walkers were from Itea, Greece (population 2,500), who took an average of 22 seconds to cover the 50 feet. In Prague, a city of over 1 million, the pedestrians covered the distance in a flying average of 8.5 seconds.

{ Jason Collins | Continue reading }

related { Peter Jacques Band, Walking on music, 1979 }

Imagine a world where people lacked confidence. We would scarcely be able to face a new day, struggling to summon the courage to show our work to our bosses or apply for a new job. Surgeons would be racked with doubt about upcoming operations. Military commanders would hesitate at key moments when decisiveness was essential.

Confidence is so vital even for the mundane activities of everyday life that we take it for granted. (…) Confidence is widely held to be an almost magic ingredient of success in sports, entertainment, business, the stock market, combat and many other domains. At the same time, confidence can be dangerous.

Confidence in excess—overconfidence—can easily burn out of control and cause costly decision-making errors, policy failures, and wars. For example, overconfidence has been blamed for a string of major disasters from the 1990s dotcom bubble, to the 2008 collapse of the banks, to the ongoing foot-dragging over climate change (“it won’t happen to me”). These events are no blip in the longer timeline of human endeavor. Historians and political scientists have blamed overconfidence for a range of fiascos, from the First World War to Vietnam to Iraq.

We may be surprised by the recurring problem of overconfidence—why don’t people learn from their mistakes? As the archetypal self-doubter Woody Allen suggested, “Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.” But the recurrence of overconfidence is no surprise to psychologists.

All mentally healthy people tend to have so-called “positive illusions” about our abilities, our control over events, and our vulnerability to risk. Numerous studies have shown that we overrate our intelligence, attractiveness, and skill. We also think we have better morals, health, and leadership abilities than others. (…)

Positive illusions appear to be undergirded by many different cognitive and motivational biases, all of which converge to boost people’s confidence. This is dangerous because people are more likely to think they are better than others, which makes aggression, conflict, and even war more likely. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it: “The bottom line is that all the biases in judgment that have been identified in the last 15 years tend to bias decision-making toward the hawkish side.”

{ Seed magazine | Continue reading }

One in five teenagers in America can’t hear rustles or whispers, according to a study published in August in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

These teenagers exhibit what’s known as slight hearing loss, which means they often can’t make out consonants like T’s or K’s, or the plinking of raindrops. The word “talk” can sound like “aw.”

The number of teenagers with hearing loss — from slight to severe — has jumped 33 percent since 1994.

Many researchers attribute this widespread hearing loss to exposure to sound played loudly and regularly through headphones. (Earbuds, in particular, don’t cancel as much noise from outside as do headphones that rest on or around the ear, so earbud users typically listen at higher volume to drown out interference.)

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Loud bangs, bright flashes, and intense shocks capture attention, but other changes – even those of similar magnitude – can go unnoticed. Demonstrations of change blindness have shown that observers fail to detect substantial alterations to a scene when distracted by an irrelevant flash, or when the alteration happen gradually.

Here, we show that objects changing in hue, luminance, size, or shape appear to stop changing when they move. This motion induced failure to detect change, silencing, persists even though the observer attends to the objects, knows that they are changing, and can make veridical judgments about their current state. Silencing demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance.

During silencing, rapidly changing objects appear nearly static, which raises an immediate question: What is the perceived state at any given moment? To illustrate, consider an observer who fails to notice an object change gradually from yellow to red. One possibility is that the observer always sees yellow, never updating his percept to incorporate the new hue – this is freezing, erroneously keeping hold of an outdated state. Another possibility is that he always sees the current hue (e.g. yellow, orange, then red) but is unaware of the transition from one to the next – this is implicit updating.

{ Motion Silences Awareness of Visual Change via Thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

photo { Christopher Williams }

One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.

The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.

The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.

Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.

The editor of the journal, Charles Judd, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, said the paper went through the journal’s regular review process. “Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript,” he said, “and these are very trusted people.”

All four decided that the paper met the journal’s editorial standards, Dr. Judd added, even though “there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results.”

But many experts say that is precisely the problem. Claims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence. Neglecting to take this into account — as conventional social science analyses do — makes many findings look far more significant than they really are, these experts say. (…)

For more than a century, researchers have conducted hundreds of tests to detect ESP, telekinesis and other such things, and when such studies have surfaced, skeptics have been quick to shoot holes in them.

But in another way, Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance. (…)

In one experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.

A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other — but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.

“What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos,” Dr. Bem said, “but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about a forthcoming article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) purporting to provide strong evidence for the existence of some ESP-like phenomenon. (…)

The controversy isn’t over whether or not ESP exists, mind you; scientists haven’t lost their collective senses, and most of us still take it as self-evident that college students just can’t peer into the future and determine where as-yet-unrevealed porn is going to soon be hidden (as handy as that ability might be). The real question on many people’s minds is: what went wrong? If there’s obviously no such thing as ESP, how could a leading social psychologist publish an article containing a seemingly huge amount of evidence in favor of ESP in the leading social psychology journal, after being peer reviewed by four other psychologists? (…)

Having read the paper pretty closely twice, I really don’t think there’s any single overwhelming flaw in Bem’s paper (actually, in many ways, it’s a nice paper). Instead, there are a lot of little problems that collectively add up to produce a conclusion you just can’t really trust.

Below is a decidedly non-exhaustive list of some of these problems. I’ll warn you now that, unless you care about methodological minutiae, you’ll probably find this very boring reading. But that’s kind of the point: attending to this stuff is so boring that we tend not to do it, with potentially serious consequences.

{ Tal Yarkoni | Continue reading }

Misfolded proteins are bad news. Not only are they involved in a number of nasty diseases, they also place potentially severe constraints on evolution. As we’ve discussed before, evolution depends on the ability to survive and function in the face of mutations.

A mutation that causes misfolding, so that instead of a nice functional protein you get gunk, causes a number of important problems. First, you’ve wasted all your effort in transcribing an mRNA from a gene, and then translating the mRNA to produce a protein. Second, you still have to make another one. Third, you have to get rid of the gunk, otherwise it may clog up essential functions

How large a problem is a misfolded protein for the cell, and what matters more, the diversion of protein production capacity or the need to get rid of the gunk? A recent paper from Allan Drummond’s lab reports the results of a determined and careful effort to find out.

{ It Takes 30 | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen Shore }

Author Rachel Aviv talked at length with a number of young people who had been identified as being ‘prodromal’ for schizophrenia, experiencing periodic delusions and at risk of converting to full-blown schizophrenia, following some of the at-risk individuals for a year.  In December’s Harper’s, Aviv offered a sensitive, insightful account of their day-to-day struggles to maintain insight, recognizing which of their experiences are not real: Which way madness lies: Can psychosis be prevented? [PDF](…)

This post is my more speculative offering, contemplating the relation of the content of delusions to the cultural context in which they occur. How do the specific details of delusions arise and how might the particularity of any one person’s delusions affect the way that a delusional individual is treated by others?  Are you mad if everyone around you talks as if they, too, were experiencing the same delusions?

{ Neuroanthropology | Continue reading }

From the point of view of natural right, Hobbes says, and Spinoza will take all of this up again but from the point of view of natural right, the most reasonable man in the world and the most complete madman are strictly the same. (…) The point of the view of natural right is: my right equals my power, the madman is the one who does what is in his power, exactly as the reasonable man is the one who does what is in his. They are not saying idiotic things, they are not saying that the madman and the reasonable man are similar, they are saying that there is no difference between the reasonable man and the madman from the point of view of natural right. Why? Because each one does everything that he can.

{ Deleuze | Continue reading }

The first brain scans of men and women having sex and reaching orgasm have revealed striking differences in the way each experiences sexual pleasure. While male brains focus heavily on the physical stimulation involved in sexual contact, this is just one part of a much more complex picture for women, scientists in the Netherlands have found.
The key to female arousal seems rather to be deep relaxation and a lack of anxiety, with direct sensory input from the genitals playing a less critical role.

The scans show that during sexual activity, the parts of the female brain responsible for processing fear, anxiety and emotion start to relax and reduce in activity. This reaches a peak at orgasm, when the female brain’s emotion centres are effectively closed down to produce an almost trance-like state.

The male brain was harder to study during orgasm, because of its shorter duration in men, but the scans nonetheless revealed important differences. Emotion centres were deactivated, though apparently less intensely than in women, and men also appear to concentrate more on the sensations transmitted from the genitals to the brain.

“Men find it more important to be stimulated on the penis than women find it to be stimulated on the clitoris,” Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen said.

This suggests that for men, the physical aspects of sex play a much more significant part in arousal than they do for women, for whom ambience, mood and relaxation are at least as important. (…)

The experiments also revealed a rather surprising effect: both men and women found it easier to have an orgasm when they kept their socks on. (…)

The scans also show that while women may be able to fool their partners with a fake orgasm, the difference is obvious in the brain. Parts of the brain that handle conscious movement light up during fake orgasms but not during real ones, while emotion centres close down during the real thing but never when a woman is pretending.

{ Times | Continue reading }

photo { Germaine Krull }