Why do fingers get wrinkly in the water? […]
A hypothesis has been proposed which suggests that the wrinkling might be an evolutionary adaptation to make the handling of objects underwater easier. Wrinkling creates a kind of drainage path for water and so enhances the grip on an object (this is called a ‘rain tread’ hypothesis). In order to test if this hypothesis is true Kareklas et al. have recruited volunteers and tested their ability to transfer wet objects when the fingers are wrinkled and not. […]
20 participants had to transfer glass marbles from one container to another in two different conditions (1) take the marble from a container with water pass it through a small hole and put into an empty container and (2) take the marble from a container without water pass it through a small hole and put into an empty container. […]
When the marble ball was dry there was no difference between the transfer time with wrinkly and smooth fingers. However, when the marble was wet then on average it took 12% less time to transfer the object with wrinkly fingers. Therefore, the study concluded that the wrinkling of fingers improves the handling of wet objects (which supports the rain tread hypothesis). Why are our fingers not always wrinkled then? In paper’s discussion Kareklas et al. suggest that there potentially are some fitness trade-offs to the wrinkly fingers. Maybe wrinkled fingers are less sensitive to pain, pressure, heat etc. and are therefore damaged easier, which would explain why it is not good to always have those wrinkles.
{ The Question Gene | Continue reading }
The work done in this room lies at the heart of a department that handles some of the UK’s most cutting-edge research on forensics and anatomy. […]
The hand is Meadows’ area of focus. Variations in scars, skin pigmentation, the smallest nooks and crannies of the fingernail and, most importantly, superficial vein patterns: all of these can build a body of evidence and allow the police to identify an offender in an incriminating photograph. “The back of the hand is part of the anatomy that an offender is quite happy to have in an image, whereas they wouldn’t necessarily want their face captured,” Meadows says. In 2009, Cahid’s work was instrumental in the Neil Strachan case, part of Scotland’s biggest paedophile ring. His unusually distorted lunula (the white half moon at the bottom of a nail) helped identify and convict him.
Meadows and her colleagues have built up the UK’s only database of the hand’s vein patterns, with around 800 samples. Of the 40 or so cases they have worked on, their data have resulted in over 80 per cent of suspects changing their plea.
{ FT | Continue reading }
evolution, water |
August 11th, 2014
For centuries, horse riding was largely restricted to males. The previous situation is in stark contrast to the present day, when nearly 80 percent of riders are women. Modern-day equestrian sports are unique in that men and women compete directly against one another at all levels, from beginners in gymkhanas to national champions in the Olympic Games. “For this reason it is interesting to consider whether a theory of riding that was developed exclusively for men can be applied to women,” explains Natascha Ille, the first author of the recent publication.
As Ille notes, “It is often assumed that women are more sensitive towards their horses than men. If this is so, male and female riders should elicit different types of response from their horses.” […]
The results were surprising: the level of stress on a horse is independent of whether a man or a woman is in the saddle.
{ University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna | Continue reading }
related { Horses read each other’s ears }
photo { Gérard Marot }
horse |
August 8th, 2014
Common parlance such as “ray of hope” depicts an association between hope and the perception of brightness. Building on research in embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor, we examined whether incidental emotion of hopelessness can affect brightness perception, which may influence people’s preference for lighting. Across four studies, we found that people who feel hopeless judge the environment to be darker (Study 1). As a consequence, hopeless people expressed a greater desire for ambient brightness and higher wattage light bulbs (Studies 2 and 3). Study 4 showed the reversal of the effect — being in a dimmer (vs. brighter) room induces greater hopelessness toward the perceived job search prospects. Taken together, these results suggest that hopeless feeling seems to bias people’s perceptual judgment of ambient brightness, which may potentially impact their electricity consumption.
{ SAGE }
psychology |
August 7th, 2014
Using data from an online hotel reservation site, the authors jointly examine consumers’ quality choice decision at the time of purchase and subsequent satisfaction with the hotel stay.
They identify three circumstantial variables at the time of purchase that are likely to influence both the choice decisions and the postpurchase satisfaction: the time gap between purchase and consumption, distance between purchase and consumption, and time of purchase (business/nonbusiness hours).
The authors incorporate these three circumstantial variables into a formal two-stage economic model and find that consumers who travel farther and make reservations during business hours are more likely to select higher-quality hotels but are less satisfied.
{ JAMA | Continue reading }
photo { Philip Lorca-diCorcia, Roy, ‘in his 20s’, Los Angeles, California, $50 (Hustlers series), 1990-1992 }
photogs, psychology, transportation |
August 7th, 2014
Love stories are dynamic processes that begin, develop, and often stay for a relatively long time in a stationary or fluctuating regime, before possibly fading. Although they are, undoubtedly, the most important dynamic process in our life, they have only recently been cast in the formal frame of dynamical systems theory.
In particular, why it is so difficult to predict the evolution of sentimental relationships continues to be largely unexplained. A common reason for this is that love stories reflect the turbulence of the surrounding social environment. But we can also imagine that the interplay of the characters involved contributes to make the story unpredictable—that is, chaotic.
In other words, we conjecture that sentimental chaos can have a relevant endogenous origin. To support this intriguing conjecture, we mimic a real and well-documented love story with a mathematical model in which the environment is kept constant, and show that the model is chaotic. The case we analyze is the triangle described in Jules et Jim, an autobiographic novel by Henri-Pierre Roché that became famous worldwide after the success of the homonymous film directed by François Truffaut.
The results fully support our conjecture and also highlight the genius of François Truffaut.
{ Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science | PDF }
photo { Man Ray, Rayograph, 1925 }
François Truffaut, relationships |
August 4th, 2014
She also learned an old cop trick: If you’re recovering a body in an apartment building, ask every tenant to make coffee — it covers the smell. “Oldest trick in the book,” one officer told her. […]
She began, as all autopsies do, by inserting a needle into the side of each eye to collect fluid — a delicate procedure Melinek perfected after once popping out a cadaver’s glass eyeball. […] Then she removed Booker’s testes, took a samples from each, and put them back in the scrotum. […]
There was the subway jumper at Union Square, for example, whose body was recovered on the tracks of the uptown 4 train with no blood — none at the scene, none in the body itself. She’d never seen anything like it, and only CME Hirsch could explain: The massive trauma to the entire body caused the bone marrow to absorb all the blood. […]
In one case, a man was shot in the chest, but the bullet was found in his liver.
{ NY Post | Continue reading }
photo { Hiroshi Sugimoto }
blood, new york |
August 4th, 2014
Some people can handle stressful situations better than others, and it’s not all in their genes: Even identical twins show differences in how they respond.
Researchers have identified a specific electrical pattern in the brains of genetically identical mice that predicts how well individual animals will fare in stressful situations.
The findings may eventually help researchers prevent potential consequences of chronic stress — such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and other psychiatric disorders — in people who are prone to these problems.
{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }
neurosciences |
August 1st, 2014
Recent theoretical developments in evolutionary psychology suggest that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to prefer to remain childless than less intelligent individuals.
Analyses of the National Child Development Study show that more intelligent men and women express preference to remain childless early in their reproductive careers, but only more intelligent women (not more intelligent men) are more likely to remain childless by the end of their reproductive careers. […]
Because women have a greater impact on the average intelligence of future generations, the dysgenic fertility among women is predicted to lead to a decline in the average intelligence of the population in advanced industrial nations.
{ Social Science Research | PDF }
photo { Richard Kern }
economics, kids, science |
July 31st, 2014
Everybody knows that men are women have some biological differences – different sizes of brains and different hormones. It wouldn’t be too surprising if there were some neurological differences too. The thing is, we also know that we treat men and women differently from the moment they’re born, in almost all areas of life. Brains respond to the demands we make of them, and men and women have different demands placed on them. […]
They report finding significant differences between the sexes, but don’t show the statistics that allow the reader to evaluate the size of any sex difference against other factors such as age or individual variability. […] A significant sex difference could be tiny compared to the differences between people of different ages, or compared to the normal differences between individuals.
{ The Conversation | Continue reading }
The most important thing to take from this research is – as the authors report – increasing gender equality disproportionately benefits women. This is because – no surprise! – gender inequality disproportionately disadvantages women. […] But the provocative suggestion of this study is that as societies develop we won’t necessarily see all gender differences go away. Some cognitive differences may actually increase when women are at less of a disadvantage.
{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }
genders, neurosciences, psychology |
July 30th, 2014
Everybody knows that real blurry photos can’t be made sharp after the fact. But that’s exactly the premise of the new Illum camera from a startup called Lytro.
Instead of snapping a solitary image, the Illum captures a whole moment—known as the light field—so you can change focus and shift perspective after you’ve taken the shot.
Just by clicking around a screen, the viewer can focus on a birthday cake candle, the person blowing it out, or partygoers in the background.
{ WSJ | Continue reading }
art { Gerhard Richter, Frau Niepenberg, 1965 }
photogs, technology |
July 30th, 2014
Automatically detecting human social intentions from spoken conversation is an important task for dialogue understanding. Since the social intentions of the speaker may differ from what is perceived by the hearer, systems that analyze human conversations need to be able to extract both the perceived and the intended social meaning.
We investigate this difference between intention and perception by using a spoken corpus of speed-dates in which both the speaker and the listener rated the speaker on flirtatiousness.
Our flirtation- detection system uses prosodic, dialogue, and lexical features to detect a speaker’s intent to flirt with up to 71.5% accuracy.
{ Stanford | PDF }
related { First Impressions Count, But How? }
faces, relationships |
July 29th, 2014
What you order may have less to do with what you want and more to do with a menu’s layout and descriptions.
After analyzing 217 menus and the selections of over 300 diners, a Cornell study published this month showed that when it comes to what you order for dinner, two things matter most: what you see on the menu and how you imagine it will taste.
{ Cornell | Continue reading }
economics, food, drinks, restaurants, psychology |
July 29th, 2014
This paper examines whether demands for bribes for particular government services are associated with expedited or delayed policy implementation. […]
[F]irms confronted with demands for bribes take approximately 1.5 times longer to get a construction permit, operating license, or electrical connection than firms that did not have to pay bribes and, respectively, 1.2 and 1.4 times longer to clear customs when exporting and importing.
{ World Bank | PDF }
economics |
July 28th, 2014
Since The Fed’s extension of Operation Twist (and subsequent unveiling of QE3) in 2012, the stocks of “weak balance sheet” companies are up over 100%. In that same period, the stock prices of “strong balance sheet” companies are up a mere 43%.
{ ZeroHedge | Continue reading }
The last 5 days saw “strong” companies outperform “weak” companies by the most in 3 years - something appears to be changing.
{ ZeroHedge | Continue reading }
economics, traders |
July 28th, 2014
Researchers Reconstruct Speech Recorded in the Vibrations of a Potato Chip Bag
