What is electricity? It’s moving electrons.

Every living thing moves electrons around, not just in nerves but also in metabolism (oxidize one thing, reduce another).

Is it possible to use this metabolic electricity to communicate with man-made devices? If you could, you might be able to make very sensitive biosensors, or even use bacteria to charge your batteries.

The first question you would need to address is whether you could get the electrons generated by metabolism out to the surface of the cell where they could be captured by a metal electrode.

Several species of bacteria do this naturally. One of the best-studied of these is Shewanella oneidensis, and the reason it needs to move electrons to the surface of the cell is so that it can use metal oxides as electron acceptors when there’s no oxygen around: in effect, these bacteria “breathe” metal.  Lots of applications have been suggested based on this unusual property, including uses in bioremediation.

{ It Takes 30 | Continue reading }

photo { Lina Scheynius }

Recently there was a discussion in the TwoPlusTwo “News, Views, and Gossip” forum, now closed, about a new video casino game that might be of interest to poker players. Called, “Texas Hold’em Heads Up Poker”, it’s a slot machine style console that contains a computer that plays regular old heads-up limit Texas hold ‘em against players who care to put up their money.

What’s especially intriguing is that there’s no rake of any kind charged. Assuming it’s not cheating, which seems unlikely for a machine licensed in Nevada and built by a reputable manufacturer, the only way it can win in the long term is if it plays better than its opponents. That’s an intriguing proposition to anyone interested in the game of poker.

I have a background in software development, game theory, and have been writing an article series for Two Plus Two Magazine reviewing research on developing effective poker playing software, so investigating a game such as this one is right up my alley.

{ TwoPlusTwo | Continue reading }

The best poker players are masters of deception. They’re good at manipulating the actions of other players, while masking their own so that their lies become undetectable. But even the best deceivers have tells, and Meghana Bhatt from Baylor University has found some fascinating ones. By scanning the brains and studying the behaviour of volunteers playing a simple bargaining game, she has found different patterns of brain activity that correspond to different playing styles. These “neural signatures” separate the players who are adept at strategic deception from those who play more straightforwardly.

{ Discover Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Helen Korpak }

You write in Art is Work that the very famous “I ‘Heart’ New York” logo you designed was originally proposed as something else.

It was just a little typographical solution with two lozenges and a word in it, two ovals, and the word inside it; it was not in any way distinguished. But I always thought the whole thing was going to be a three-month campaign.

{ Interview with Milton Glaser | The Believer | Continue reading | Images: I Love NY and New York magazine logotypes designed by Milton Glaser | video: The “I Love New York” Ad Campaign Origin }

related { An Introduction to Graphic Design | Design Observers | full story }

At the forefront of early psychedelic research was a British psychiatrist by the name of Humphry Osmond (1917-2004). In 1951, Osmond moved to Canada to take the position of deputy director of psychiatry at the Weyburn Mental Hospital and, with funding from the government and the Rockefeller Foundation, established a biochemistry research program. The following year, he met another psychiatrist by the name of Abram Hoffer. (…)

The pair hit upon the idea of using LSD to treat alcoholism in 1953, at a conference in Ottawa. (…)

By 1960, they had treated some 2,000 alcoholic patients with LSD, and claimed that their results were very similar to those obtained in the first experiment. Their treatment was endorsed by Bill W., a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous who was given several sessions of LSD therapy himself, and Jace Colder, director of Saskatchewan’s Bureau on Alcoholism, who believed it to be the best treatment available for alcoholics.

Osmond also “turned on” Aldous Huxley to mescaline, by giving the novelist his first dose of the drug in 1953, which inspired him to write the classic book The Doors of Perception. The two eventually became friends, and Osmond consulted Huxley when trying to find a word to describe the effects of LSD. Huxley suggested phanerothyme, from the Greek words meaning “to show” and “spirit”, telling Osmond: “To make this mundane world sublime/ Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” But Osmond decided instead on the term psychedelic, from the Greek words psyche, meaning “mind”, and deloun, meaning “to manifest”, and countered Huxley’s rhyme with his own: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” The term he had coined was announced at the meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957.

LSD therapy peaked in the 1950s, during which time it was even used to treat Hollywood film stars, including luminaries such as Cary Grant.

LSD hit the streets in the early 1960s, by which time more than 1,000 scientific research papers had been published about the drug, describing promising results in some 40,000 patients. Shortly afterwards, however, the investigations of LSD as a therapeutic agent came to an end.

{ ScienceBlogs/Neurophilosophy | Continue reading }

photo { Lina Scheynius }

Researchers create ‘lesbian’ mice by deleting a single gene.

Deletion of a single gene switches the sexual orientation of female mice, causing them to engage in sexual behaviour that is typical of males. Korean researchers found that deleting the appropriately named FucM gene causes masculinization of the mouse brain, so that female mice lacking the gene avoid the advances of males and try to mate with other females instead. The findings probably have little relavence to human sexual orientation, however.

{ ScienceBlogs/Neurophilosophy | Continue reading }

painting { Atilla Adorján }

{ Gilles Caron, La rue du Vieux Colombier, 6 mai 1968 }

A new theory of the brain attempts to explain one of the great puzzles of evolutionary biology: why we laugh.

One of the more complex aspects of human behaviour is our universal ability to laugh. Laughter has puzzled behavioural biologists for many years because it is hard to imagine how this strange behaviour has evolved.
Why would laughing individuals be fitter in reproductive terms? And why is this ability is built-in, like sneezing, rather than something we learn, like hunting?

Today, we get an interesting insight into these questions along with some tentative answers from Pedro Marijuán and Jorge Navarro at the Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud in Spain.

The evolution of laughter, they say, is intimately linked with the evolution of the human brain, itself a puzzle of the highest order. There is widespread belief that the brain evolved rapidly at the same time as human group sizes increased.

Bigger groups naturally lead to greater social complexity. And it’s easy to imagine that things like language and complex social behaviours are the result of brain evolution. But the latest thinking is more subtle.

Known as the social brain hypothesis, this holds that the brain evolved not to solve complicated ecological problems such as how to use tools, how to hunt more effectively and how to cook. Instead, the brain evolved to better cope with the social demands of living in larger groups.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

quote { Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, 1911 | full text }

Words that don’t exist in the english language

L’esprit de escalier (French)
The feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when you think of all the things you should have said. Translated it means “the spirit of the staircase.”

Waldeinsamkeit (German)
The feeling of being alone in the woods.

Forelsket (Norwegian)
The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.

Gheegle (Filipino)
The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.

Pochemuchka (Russian)
A person who asks a lot of questions.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

artwork { Ana Bagayan }

The World Health Organisation’s ICD-10 manual of diseases and health problems has a diagnosis of ‘Strange and Inexplicable Behaviour.’ (…)


R46.0  Very low level of personal hygiene


R46.1  Bizarre personal appearance


R46.2  Strange and inexplicable behaviour


(…)


R46.6  Undue concern and preoccupation with stressful events


R46.7  Verbosity and circumstantial detail obscuring reason for contact

{ MindHacks | Continue reading }

My costume tonight was an over-conceptualized disaster. I always have too many costume ideas. A monthly halloween would be best.

{ Tim Geoghegan | Continue reading | Images: Tim Geoghegan’s Timmovations }

The kymograph was invented by Carl Ludwig in 1847.

P. van Bronswijk argues that the kymograph was the first recording device used to record and compare the influence of drug effects. Specifically, the kymograph enabled the study of the influence of drugs on a specific organ, which van Bronswijk says enabled the development of Pharmacology as an independent science in its own right.

{ History of Psychology | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Jacques André Boiffard, 1929 | 2. Paige de Ponte }

A researcher at New York University called Moran Cerf has produced an article for the science journal Nature [On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons, Nature 467] in which he claims it may soon be possible to create a device that records our dreams and plays them back later.

Obviously, the reality is 909% less exciting than it initially appears. It won’t be a magic pipe you stick in your ear that etches your wildest imaginings directly onto a Blu-Ray disc for you to enjoy boring your friends with later.

What Cerf is actually proposing is a way to make other people’s dreams seem even more boring. But first: the business of capturing them, which all boils down to neurons. After studying the brains of people with electronic implants buried deep in their noggins, Cerf discovered that certain groups of neurons “lit up” when he asked his subjects to think about specific things, such as Marilyn Monroe or the Eiffel Tower. Therefore, he postulates, by recording these subjects’ sleeping brain activity, then studying the patterns generated, it should be possible to work out whether they were dreaming about starlets or landmarks. In other words, he’s isolated the stuff that dreams are made of. And it turns out to be a few blips on a chart.

{ The Guardian | BBC }

Imagine being able to control a computer with your mind. It’s not fantasy, that just happened.

Twelve subjects sat in front of a computer and looked at two superimposed images on a screen, focusing their mind on one of the pictures. The computer responded by making the image stronger while fading the other image away until only one was visible. They picked the image they wanted to look at, and made it so.

All the subjects had epilepsy, and had fine wires inside their brains to monitor seizures. These wires were attached to neurons and connected to the computer.

This new research published in Nature [On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons, Nature 467] could shed light on how information is used in the brain, and how interactions between single brain cells let us make decisions.

{ A Shooner of Science | Continue reading }

Something has been bothering me lately and it is our assumption that China is the world’s next superpower and that we’d darned well better get used to it. Hogwash. We’re into the Chinese decade, not the Chinese Century.

The century belongs to India. (…)

China has the population, the will, the educational system, the foreign currency reserves — everything to make it the next global superpower except two things: 1) an emerging middle class generation comparable to our Baby Boomers, and; 2) a functional diaspora (look it up, I’ll wait).

In contrast to China, India has only those two things: 1) a real Baby Boomer class, and; 2) a functional diaspora (did you look it up?). Nothing else about India works at all — nothing. India is corrupt and divided. While India has a commercial tradition it isn’t an especially functional one. Fractionalism and factionalism, whether economic, social, or religious, will keep India from ever truly pulling together. But that doesn’t matter because my two original points are enough.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

map { Delhi (Modern City), 1914 | enlarge | more }

Words do hurt. Ridicule, distain, humiliation, taunting, all cause injury, and when it is delivered in childhood from a child’s peers, verbal abuse causes more than emotional trauma. It inflicts lasting physical effects on brain structure.


The remarkable thing about the human brain is that it develops after birth. Unlike most animals whose brains are cast at birth, the human brain is so underdeveloped at birth that we cannot even walk for months. Self awareness does not develop for years. Personality, cognitive abilities, and skills, take decades to develop, and these attributes develop differently in every person. This is because development and wiring of the human brain are guided by our experiences during childhood and adolescence. From a biological perspective, this increases the odds that an individual will compete and reproduce successfully in the environment the individual is born into, rather than the environment experienced by our cave-man ancestors and recorded in our genes through natural selection. Developing the human brain out of the womb cheats evolution, and this is the reason for the success of our species.


When that environment is hostile or socially unhealthy, development of the brain is affected, and often it is impaired. Early childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, or even witnessing domestic violence, have been shown to cause abnormal physical changes in the brain of children, with lasting effects that predisposes the child to developing psychological disorders.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

photo { Ken Rosenthal }

In her new documentary, Picture Me, Columbia University student Sara Ziff chronicles her 4-year rise and exit through the fashion modeling industry, zooming her personal camcorder onto supposedly systemic abuses—sexual, economic, and emotional—suffered by fashion models. Among the many complaints launched in the film is an aesthetic that prizes uniformly young, white, and extremely thin bodies measuring 34-24-34” (bust-waist-hips) and at least 5’10” in height. It’s an aesthetic that many of the models themselves have a tough time embodying, pushing some into drastic diets of juice-soaked cotton balls, cocaine use, and bulimia—in my own interviews with models I discovered similar, but not very common, practices of Adderall and laxative abuse.

It’s also an aesthetic that has weathered a tough media storm of criticism, set off in 2005 with the anorexia-related deaths of several Latin American models, and which culminated in the 2006 ban of models in Madrid Fashion Week with excessively low Body Mass Indexes (BMI).  And yet, as a cursory glance at the Spring 2011 catwalks will reveal, thin is still in.

In fact, bodies remain as gaunt, young, and pale as they did five years ago, and it’s entirely likely that in another five years models will look more or less the same as they do now.

What’s the appeal of an aesthetic so skinny it’s widely described by the lay public as revolting?

{ Ashley Mears/Savage Minds | Continue reading }

photo { Hedi Slimane }

My problem is Judy loves chick flicks.

I can’t forget when she forced me to see Brokeback Mountain and insisted that I look at icky scenes that no red-blooded American boy like me should have to see.

No man (and that includes Alan Alda) is so sensitive that he can sit through these long-winded duller-than-dirt chick movies. And yet no man is ready to admit how much he hates these films. Why? For fear of sexual reprisals delivered in the form of “Not this year, dear. I have a headache.”

And do you want to know how far this sexual intimidation has come? I still have nightmares about the night in 1996 when we went to see The English Patient (the single worst movie I ever sat through in my life).

I remember the night Judy and I went to see this movie. The East Hampton Cinema was filled with couples. The women all fluttery . . . the men all reserved.

I remember looking at Judy and, quite frankly, I was turned on. I figured it was an early movie and the night was young and so was Judy. I planned on drinks and soft music and, you know . . .

Judy gets very emotional at movies and that night she was in fine form. She started to sob the minute they put on that computer-animated horror that tells you to eat popcorn and drink Coca-Cola but don’t talk, etc., etc.

“Judy,” I whispered. “Why are you crying? The movie hasn’t started yet.”

“I know but it’s going to be so . . . so . . . sad.”

Well, in The English Patient, Ralph Fiennes plays a Nazi who is badly burned in a plane crash. So the whole movie consists of this guy who I swear is so burned that he looks exactly like the creature in that monster film of the ’50s, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I knew from the beginning of the movie he was going to die. Spending three hours watching a guy who is made up to look like a burned-to-a-crisp monster dying is not my idea of a fun Saturday night.

There were a lot of other story lines and characters in the movie – one duller than the other. The burned guy kept remembering this love affair he had with this married woman who was, you guessed it, his best friend’s wife.

Well, this was not one of those wham-bam affairs. No sir. This was slow. So slow that they managed to do the impossible . . . make sex boring. And the more the nurse who was taking care of the guy who was burned to a crisp heard the story of the affair, the more she was interested in climbing into bed with the crisp.

At one point I said to myself, “If she goes near this guy, I’m going to be sick. The only thing that is going to save me from throwing up is that this movie is so boring I’m starting to doze off.”

That’s when Judy poked me.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” she declared with tears streaming down her face. Her tone told me that if I told the truth I could forget about the drinks and soft music later. So I did what any red-blooded young man would do under the circumstances. I lied. “It’s wonderful . . . wonderful. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in years,” I said.

“How come you’re not crying?” she whispered.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I was so caught up in the story that I guess I forgot to cry,” I said.

{ Jerry Della Femina | Continue reading }

I answered, “If you’re a terrorist, you’re going to hide your weapons in your anus or your vagina.”

“Yes, but starting tomorrow, we’re going to start searching your crotchal area–this is the word he used, ‘crotchal’–and you’re not going to like it.”

“What am I not going to like?” I asked.

“We have to search up your thighs and between your legs until we meet resistance,” he explained.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Ralph Mecke }

{ Victorians commonly made jewelry using hair and teeth of the person passed in times of mourning. | Ana Finel Honigman | Continue reading }

{ Akos Major }

{ Olivia Bee }

{ Emmet Malmstrom }