Author: Discover Main Feed

As discussed on the latest episode of Point of Inquiry (stream, download), Eli Kintisch’s Hack the Planet isn’t the only book just out on this subject. There is also How to Cool the Planet by Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal and a writer for Rolling Stone. This in and of itself is a phenomenon–the two books were clearly racing each other and ended up coming out at about the same time. The question is, is that timing right? I have no doubt we are going to have a big public debate about geoengineering at some point in the future. At that time, one or both of these books could be considered essential reading. However, thus far, neither seems to be having its big publishing breakout moment. Indeed, neither has any reviews yet on Amazon. I myself can’t speak to the books’ comparative quality: I was only sent, and have only read, Kintisch’s, and it’s excellent. For all I know, Goodell’s is equally worthy. If you’re interested, I recommend that you buy both of them. But you are not the general public. And as we’ve learned, 97 percent of Americans have no clue what geoengineering even is. They all ought to be reading these …

A few years ago I was hearing a lot about mirror neurons. There was a hyped up article on The Edge website about them, MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolution. But I haven’t heard much since then, though I’m not neuro nerd so perhaps I’m out of the loop. So I pass on this link with interest, Single-Neuron Responses in Humans during Execution and Observation of Actions:

Direct recordings in monkeys have demonstrated that neurons in frontal and parietal areas discharge during execution and perception of actions…Because these discharges “reflect” the perceptual aspects of actions of others onto the motor repertoire of the perceiver, these cells have been called mirror neurons. Their overlapping sensory-motor representations have been implicated in observational learning and imitation, two important forms of learning [9]. In humans, indirect measures of neural activity support the existence of sensory-motor mirroring mechanisms in homolog frontal and parietal areas…other motor regions…and also the existence of multisensory mirroring mechanisms in nonmotor region…We recorded extracellular activity from 1177 cells in human medial frontal and temporal cortices while patients executed or observed hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions. A significant proportion of neurons in supplementary motor area, and hippocampus and environs, responded to both observation and execution of these actions. A subset of these neurons demonstrated excitation during action-execution and inhibition during action-observation. These findings suggest that multiple systems in humans may be endowed with neural mechanisms of mirroring for both the integration and differentiation of perceptual and motor aspects of actions performed by self and others.

ScienceDaily has a hyped-up headline, First Direct Recording Made of Mirror Neurons in Human Brain.

Update: Neuroskeptic has much more.

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. We’re on to Chapter Fourteen, “Inflation and the Multiverse.” Only one more episode to go! It’s like the upcoming finale of Lost, with a slightly lower level of message-board frenzy.

Excerpt:

There is a lot to say about eternal inflation, but let’s just focus on one consequence: While the universe we see looks very smooth on large scales, on even larger (unobservable) scales the universe would be very far from smooth. The large-scale uniformity of our observed universe sometimes tempts cosmologists into assuming that it must keep going like that infinitely far in every direction. But that was always an assumption that made our lives easier, not a conclusion from any rigorous chain of reasoning. The scenario of eternal inflation predicts that the universe does not continue on smoothly as far as it goes; far beyond our observable horizon, things eventually begin to look very different. Indeed, somewhere out there, inflation is still going on. This scenario is obviously very speculative at this point, but it’s important to keep in mind that the universe on ultra-large scales is, if anything, likely to be very different than the tiny patch of universe to which we have immediate access.

This is a fairly straightforward chapter, trying to explain how inflation works. Given that by this point the reader already is familiar with dark energy making the universe accelerate, and with the fine-tuning problem represented by the low entropy of the early universe, the basic case isn’t that hard to put together. Of course we have an additional non-traditional goal as well: to illuminate the tension between the usual story we tell about inflation and the “information-conserving evolution of our comoving patch” story we told in the last chapter. Here’s where I argue that inflation is not the panacea it’s sometimes presented as, primarily because it’s not that easy to take all the degrees of freedom within the universe we observe and pack them delicately into a tiny patch dominated by false vacuum energy. Put that way, it doesn’t seem all that surprising, but too many people don’t want to get the message.

This is also the chapter where we first introduce the idea of the multiverse. (The multiverse occupies less than 15 pages or so in the entire book, but to read some reactions you would think it was the dominant theme. The publicists and I must share some of the blame for that perspective, as it is an irresistible thing to mention when talking about the book.) Mostly I wanted to demystify the idea of the multiverse, presenting it as a perfectly natural outgrowth of the idea of inflation. What we’re supposed to make of it is of course a different story.

Looking back, I think the chapter is a mixed success. I like the gripping narrative of the opening pages. But the actual explanation of inflation is kind of workmanlike and uninspiring. I really put a lot of effort into coming up with novel explanations of entropy and quantum mechanics, which didn’t simply rehash the expositions found in other books; but for inflation I didn’t try as hard. Partly simply because of looming deadlines, partly because I was eager to get to the rest of the book. Hopefully the basic points are more or less clear.

Last night I was at a bar with my new friend Adam discussing emo music and whether it emerged out of Seattle grunge or something else altogether. Personally I can appreciate Bright Eyes once in a while, but on the whole I just don’t get it. About the time I suspect we’re approaching a shift to 70s punk–which I can really get into–it happens…
“So I googled you. Science, eh?” Adam grins. Here we go again. “Uh, yeah.” “I gotta ask. Climate change. Prove yourself. Make me believe.”
And it starts… You see, I’m used to this challenge. Climate change might as well be the Yankees vs the Sox. It’s a pub conversation about who’s ‘winning’ when everyone is really loses unless we act. And I can already tell Adam’s a bright guy. He’s a skeptical thinker who doesn’t have access to journal articles, but does hear the news media fallout. He’s got a lot of questions about so-called email conspiracies, but at least he’s interested in a discussion. So we have another drink and I tell him a little more about what’s going on in oceans, on land, and in the atmosphere. He listens politely, and soon we’re back to Kurt Cobain.

Last week, Lee Berger unveiled for the world the stunningly intact fossils (that his 9-year-old son actually made while with his dad in South Africa) from what he is calling a new hominid species, Australopithecus sediba. Yesterday, he announced another surprise: Berger says that brain scans just finished in France show that insects that might have feasted on the person after death, and even possibly a piece of the hominid’s brain, may be preserved inside the recovered skull.

Experts at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France have been analyzing the find. The ESRF uses a technique known as micro-tomography to assemble its images. This involves taking a series of a high-contrast, high-resolution X-ray radiographs of the target fossil in rotation to build up a 3D representation [BBC News]. The scientists were trying to study the teeth; the skull comes from a young boy, Berger says, and they hoped tooth analysis could help them pin down his exact age at death. But the 3-D representation revealed these other unexpected finds, including a low-density cavity in the skull that could—could—represent a brain remnant.

Soft tissue like the brain, of course, does not usually fossilize. But in this unusual case, ESRF examiner Paul Tafforeau suggests that perhaps the brain shrank after being decayed by bacteria, leaving the odd cavity that his scanners picked up. “One way to explain that cavity is that when this individual died, it was mummified, and the mummification made the brain shrink by losing water, leading to an odd shape,” Tafforeau said. “Later you had water with sediment come up, fossilizing the individual and filling the brain case, but you still had that brain remnant inside” [LiveScience]. If it’s true, the brain remnant is only one-twentieth the size of the original brain, and wouldn’t prove particularly helpful in reconstructing the structure, and unfortunately it’s unlikely DNA would be preserved.

And then there are the insects. Three fossilized insect eggs, each about a tenth of an inch (two or three millimeters) large, were seen within the skull, potentially hatching larvae that fed on the flesh of the hominid after death, researchers added. Two eggs belonged to wasps and apparently had already hatched, while the third, a fly egg, remained unopened [LiveScience]. While Tafforeau says the density would suggest fossil insects, he can’t rule out that they are modern insects that sneaked in until all the data comes in. Both he and Berger are giving few details as their work continues to go through the peer-review process.

Berger also found some fossils from a female Australopithecus sediba he’d like to study in the same way. But for now, the two are traveling separately for security reasons.

Related Content:
80beats: 9-Year-Old Kid Literally Stumbled on Stunning Fossils of a New Hominid
80beats: 1.5 Million Years Ago, Homo Erectus Walked a Lot Like Us
80beats: A Fossil Named Ardi Shakes Up Humanity’s Family Tree
80beats: Is the Mysterious Siberian “X-Woman” a New Hominid Species?
DISCOVER: Meet the Ancestors (The Hall of Human Origins exhibit review)
DISCOVER: Was Lucy a Brutal Brawler?
DISCOVER: Sunset on the Savanna

Image: European Synchrotron Radiation Facility

Every now and again a new picture from a space telescope comes down the pipe^* that’s a little bit different, a little bit of a step to the left. I think this image counts:

Kewwwwl. That’s the Rosette Nebula as seen by the Herschel far infrared observatory. The Rosette is a huge star forming region, and one that’s been around a while. In optical images its name is obvious; it resembles a huge flower in space. The central region looks empty, and that’s because it mainly is: fierce winds from newborn stars have excavated a giant bubble in the center of the nebula. Acting like a snowplow, they have pushed the material from the middle of the gas cloud out to the edges, where it piles up.

That’s what you’re seeing here; the inner wall of the nebula. This image is a long walk from the optical, though. It’s false color, where blue, green, and red represent the light from the nebula at 70, 160, and 250 microns. For comparison, the reddest light your eye can see is less than one micron in wavelength, so this is way far out in the IR. The reddest light in the image is coming from dust that’s only a few degrees above absolute zero!

The bright spots you see peppering the image are cocoons of gas and dust surrounding stars in the process of birth. They’re not alone; see the finger-like tendrils all pointing off to the right? Those are regions of slightly denser dust which have resisted the winds from the central stars of the nebula (off the edge of this image to the right). Like sandbars forming behind rocks in a stream, these fingers indicate that the tips are denser, and are probably where stars are forming as well.

What I can’t get over is how three-dimensional this image looks! It’s like the mouth to Hell from Poltergeist. Well, a little bit. If the mouth were 5000 light years away, 100 light years (a quadrillion km, or 600 trillion miles!) across, and kept at a chilly -260° C.

That’s a big, cold, far away mouth.

And the analogy isn’t fair, anyway. In the movie, that mouth was where you went after you die, but in reality, this cavernous cloud is where life gets started. Maybe our own Sun was born in a nebula like this; some research indicates it may have been. So while this picture may look a little bit frightening, to me it’s comforting. Even sweet.

After all, who can resist a nursery full of babies?

Image Credit: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium/HOBYS Key Programme Consortia

---

^*Some people say “pike” which is understandable (pike as in road) but I think “pipe” is funnier and apropos, so that’s what I’m sticking with.

I can still remember the details of my wedding day with the most crystalline vividness, from the flower arrangements to the design of the invitations to the contents of my speech. I can also easily recall the sense of elation, hope and fulfilment. These emotional memories are very much fused to my memories of the events themselves, but they aren’t one and the same. A new study suggests that, like everyone else, I recorded these emotional memories independently of the factual aspects of the day.

Typically, the happiness of a wedding day or the sadness of a death becomes inextricably linked to the details of those events, as we repeatedly replay and reflect on them in our heads. To see the true split between an emotional event and the emotions it triggers, you need some very special conditions. Justin Feinstein from the University of Iowa College of Medicine found some – the brains of amnesiac patients.

Feinstein worked with a group of five patients who had a rare condition called anterograde amnesia, the same one that afflicted the protagonist of Memento. All the patients had suffered severe brain damage to both halves of their hippocampus, a part of the brain that’s essential for long-term memory. As a result, they couldn’t form any lasting memories after the point when they sustained their injuries. For the rest of their lives, new facts and experiences are like whispers on a breeze, lingering for moments before vanishing again.

However, it seems that these patients can retain feelings of happiness or sadness long after they’ve forgotten the events that triggered these emotions. Feinstein asked the quintet to watch film clips that either portrayed tragic scenes of loss or death, or comedic scenes of humour and laughter.

Around 5-10 minutes after the clip finished, each patient did a memory test about what they saw. Despite this short gap, the amnesiacs had little or no factual memory for the clips. Most could only remember a handful of details and some couldn’t recall any. A group of five normal people with a working hippocampus had no such problems; they remember around 6 to 8 times as many details as the amnesiacs.

They also answered a detailed questionnaire about their current feelings, before watching the clips, immediately after, just after the memory test, and a final time after half an hour or so. These results were very different. All five amnesiacs responded in the right way, frowning and crying at the sad clips while laughing and smiling at the happy ones. Even afterwards, when their memories of the films’ content had faded, they still stayed emotional for at least half an hour. Even those with the most severe factual deficits managed to hold onto the film’s emotional stings.

Of course, when you’ve only got a sample size of five people (and patients with anterograde amnesia aren’t exactly easy to come by), statistics aren’t really working in your favour. Feinstein acknowledges this, but he notes that every one of the amnesiacs showed the persistent emotions. Consider just one of the patients, known as Am1. The sad clips really got to her and she cried for several minutes. Afterwards, she couldn’t remember a single detail about them, but her sadness lingered for well over half an hour.

This separation between emotional and factual memories seems incredibly counter-intuitive and Feinstein stresses that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to see it in patients without amnesia. For now, we don’t know how long these emotional memories last for, but the important point is that they can be dissociated from factual recollections. Nor do we know how the amnesiacs keep their emotional memories; perhaps the state of their bodies gives them a clue.

Nonetheless, these results support a fascinating and widely misinterpreted study that I wrote about last year, which showed that a drug called propanolol could erase the emotional sting of scary memories. Merel Kindt trained volunteers to fear images of spiders by pairing them with electric shocks. If they were given propranolol, they still expected to receive a shock when they saw the spidery picture but they weren’t afraid of the prospect. The drug hadn’t so much erased their memories, as dulled their emotional sting.

Kindt describes Feinstein’s research as “fascinating” and says that “the data are nicely in line with our own”. But the result that really grabbed her attention was that sad memories lingered to a greater extent in amnesiacs than in normal volunteers. One of the patients, Am2, described her feelings in an interview after the experiment. She said, “It’s not so much with the happy or the good feelings. You just kind of accept them. You don’t worry about why. It’s more for what I would call negative feelings… like when I’m feeling really sad, then I have to find out why. “ She added, “They don’t go away.”

Feinstein suggests that the emotions stick around precisely because the patients don’t have a clear understanding of why they’re feeling sad. Bereft of that knowledge, they can’t deal with their feelings. Kindt says that this could easily have been tested by giving the volunteers an explicit reason for their lingering sadness, and she’s disappointed that this wasn’t done. “Nevertheless,” she says, “the data are strong.”

That has big implications for the way people with memory disorders are cared for. It suggests that something could affect the mood of a person with, say, Alzheimer’s disease, even if they’ve forgotten about the event itself. They might quickly forget a visit from a family member or a funny joke but the good mood might last long after their company has gone and the punchline is forgotten.

On the flipside, Feinstein writes, “Routine neglect from staff at nursing homes may leave the patient feeling sad, frustrated, and lonely (even though the patient can’t remember why).” He adds, “We provide clear evidence showing that the reasons for treating amnesic patients with respect and dignity go beyond simple human morals.”

Studies like these show that the fanciful world of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind is very much a fictional one. Erasing a painful memory may not erase the emotional stings that accompanied them. In fact, it might make things worse, which has ramifications for treatments aimed at selectively erasing fearful memories in, say, people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Remember that Feinstein’s amnesiacs held onto their sad feelings longer than usual because they couldn’t remember the source of their sadness. If this effect applies more generally, it might mean that “erasing negative memories could have the paradoxical effect of actually prolonging (rather than alleviating) feelings of distress.

Addendum: It is rare to read a scientific paper that is written so nicely that I end up liberally quoting large chunks of it, because my own take would be less eloquent. It’s also relatively rare to see the ethical and social implications of the research considered in a meaty portion of the discussion, rather than in a throwaway concluding line. Hats off to Feinstein and his co-authors Melissa Duff and Daniel Tranel for their efforts.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914054107

More on memory:

• The memory molecules – interview with Todd Sacktor (and a feature in Eureka)
• Rewriting fearful memories by bringing them back to mind
• The guardians of fear – molecules that provide safety nets for scary memories
• Molecule’s constant efforts keep our memories intact
• Beta-blocker drug erases the emotion of fearful memories

After 24 years of championing a ban on commercial whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) will soon weigh a proposal seeking to resume commercial whaling. The plan would let Japan, Norway and Iceland hunt the ocean giants openly despite a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. In return, whaling nations would agree to reduce their catch “significantly” over 10 years [AFP]. These pro-whaling nations have kept up their hunts either by officially objecting to the moratorium or by insisting that they’re killing whales for scientific research.

The proposal is due to be submitted before the body’s annual meeting in June in Morocco, leading some conservationists to complain that the IWC should “save whales, and not whaling.” The details of the proposal will made public on Earth day–April 22. Calling the withdrawal of the ban “the best chance to fight overfishing of these animals,” U.S Commissioner to the IWC Monica Medina said: “It’s a global problem, and needs global solutions” [Washington Post].

Making its case to pull back the ban, the IWC said that during the last few decades whale populations have substantially rebounded–with bowhead whale populations off Alaska increasing to between 8,200 and 13,500, eastern Pacific gray whale numbers rising to between 21,900 and 32,400 in 1999, and blue whale populations also rising. Conservationists, however, are seething, pointing out that 1,800 to 2,200 whales continue to be killed each year. “It’s great to be showing success, but should we be planting the flag and saying, ‘We’re there’?” asked Howard Rosenbaum, who directs the ocean giants program at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “We’re not out of the woods yet” [Washington Post].

They say that despite the rise in numbers, several species still struggle to survive. Just 130 or so western Pacific gray whales swim off the coast of Russia now — compared with at least thousands, if not tens of thousands, in the past — and they are still vulnerable to being caught in Japanese fishing nets and offshore energy projects. Even one of the populations that made major gains over the past few decades, the Southern right whale, is experiencing a sudden die-off. Since 2005, researchers have identified 308 dead whales in the waters around Argentina’s Peninsula Valdes, an important calving ground, and 88 percent of the dead were calves less than three months old [Washington Post].

Critics argue that the resumption of commercial whaling would not just endanger future whale populations but would also legitimize behavior by countries like Japan, which many accuse of overfishing the waters of the Southern Ocean sanctuary and which recently won a victory in Doha, Qatar where a proposed ban on the trade of the bluefin tuna was shot down. Norway and Iceland have already disregarded the IWC’s moratorium and have hunted whales commercially.

Australia, meanwhile, has been extremely vocal in its opposition to the proposal, with a spokesman for the Environment Ministry, Greg Hunt, saying it would set too dangerous a precedent. “It is not about protecting whales, it is about a shoddy deal which gives the green light to whaling and is a white flag on plans to end whaling,” he said [Australia Network News]. The United States, while opposed to commercial whaling, said it was waiting to see the final proposal. The proposal needs a three-quarters majority vote to go ahead. A number of IWC nations have yet to declare their position.

Related Content:
80beats:Bluefin Tuna Is Still on the Menu: Trade Ban Fails at International Summit
80beats: Videos Show Collision Between Japanese Whaling Ship & Protesters
80beats: Is the Whaling Ban Really the Best Way to Save the Whales?
80beats: Controversial Deal Could Allow Japan To Hunt More Whales

Image: Flickr / ahisgett

Below I referenced a talk that Peter Thiel gave at the Singularity Summit 2009. In the Q & A I recall that Thiel was skeptical that we’d head into another irrational bubble craze after having gone through two speculative boom & bust cycles in less than 10 years. My friend Michael Vassar points me to an article in Wired from January where Thiel asserts that we are in a bubble. Either I don’t recall correctly, or he’s changed his mind. Here’s the relevant part:

Wired: You’ve had a rough year. The stock market rallied strongly, and Clarium Capital bet the wrong way.

Thiel: I think we’re back to a zone of irrational exuberance.

Wired: Like before the Internet bubble burst?

Thiel: I think it’s maybe even more irrational because there’s no story about the future. At least in ‘99 there was a story.

In ‘99 there was a story based on something concrete, the internet. In the aughts we had a fake story. Now we’re down to no story. Well, at least above the board. If you haven’t you might be interested in listening to this week’s This American Life, which chronicles the market manipulation which one hedge fund engaged in, and which bankers allowed them to get away with because it was in their private (as opposed to corporate) interest. Some people can make money off bubbles, even if aggregate utility is less after than before.

Rod Dreher has a poignant reflection up on his roots in Louisiana. He finishes:

I thought about this memory this weekend, visiting Ruthie and my family. Ruthie and Mike bought part of what was once the orchard from our distant cousins, and built their house there. The rest of the land that had once been Lois and Hilda’s was sold to strangers. The cabin has long been gone; a nice big brick house belonging to someone I don’t know is now where the cabin was. True to Hilda’s palm-reading prophecy, I traveled far in my life. I have now spent well over half my life living away from there. Yet that is home for me, because that is where my family is, and the landscape of my childhood. Now, though, my parents are getting up in years, and my younger sister, at age 40, is battling a disease that may take her life. I hadn’t realized until this crisis with Ruthie how much I had counted on the continuity of her remaining there, even after our parents pass away, to anchor that place as the center of my imaginative universe. She, who has always loved the land and her place there far more than I, and she, whom I could count on to always be faithful to it, however unfaithful I was, sits in her armchair in what was once the orchard, coughing and straining for breath. We hope and we pray for healing, but now the way I thought the world would be may not be the way the world is, or will become. And I am having a hard time coming to terms with that, as both an emotional and a philosophical matter (i.e., trying to understand how to relate to where I come from now that the permanence I assumed would always be there is threatened).

From what I recall Louisiana is a region of the United States where people move least, and are deeply rooted in their locales. In this way I suppose it’s more like Europe and much of the Old World, with the importance of place encapsulated in terms such as Heimat. Though I am an American my family is from Bangladesh, and on the rare occasions that I interact with Bangladeshis I will be asked what my desh is, roughly my ancestral homeland. That would happen to be a small town in the southeast of modern Bangladesh, where my paternal ancestors settled several centuries ago, and where my extended family still has lands. But here’s the thing: I’ve never been to “my” desh. My parents always found this amusing when I asked as a child how my homeland could be a place to which I’d never been, and on some level I think they accept that these terms are anachronistic. Like much of Asia Bangladesh has seen massive urbanization within the past generation, and I get the sense that these old terms are far less relevant. In some ways it may be that Europe and North America, where development and modernization occurred at a slower place, may be the regions where a traditional sense of place remains the most robust because of the more gentle transition from the past to the future.

Study Finds a 1.2 Percent Increase in Faculty Pay, the Smallest in 50 Years:

Over all, salaries for this academic year are 1.2 percent higher than last year, the smallest increase recorded in the survey’s 50 years — and well below the 2.7 percent inflation rate from December 2008 to December 2009.

…

“A lot of faculty are losing ground, and the data probably underestimate the seriousness of the problems with faculty salary this year, because we’re only looking at full-time faculty and, as we’ve seen for several years, there’s an increasing number of part-time faculty, who are not included,” Mr. Curtis said. “Also, the survey doesn’t capture the effect of the unpaid furloughs a lot of faculty were forced to take this year, because the numbers we have are the base salaries agreed on at the beginning of the year, not the actual payroll results.”

Over all, the average salary for a full professor was $109,843, compared with $76,566 for an associate professor, $64,433 for an assistant professor, $47,592 for an instructor and $53,112 for a lecturer. At every type of institution in almost every class of faculty, men were paid substantially more, on average, than women.

Generally, administrative salaries at colleges and universities have been increasing far more quickly than pay for faculty members.

…

Ms. Wellman pointed out that because the costs of benefits, especially health care, are rising so rapidly, total compensation is not slowing as much as salary growth. “Unless we get control over the growth in spending on benefits,” she said, “we’re going to continue to crowd out the resources necessary to get faculty in the classroom.”

There is a distinction between salaries and total compensation. Additionally, I am a bit confused as to what’s going on with administrative costs. You can find the original report online, along with a lot of tables. Tables aren’t so informative at first glance, so I took table 9B and turned it into a line graph. The horizontal axis represents the academic rank, the vertical the average total compenstation within the rank. Each line represents the percentile that the institution is at in terms of average compensation. So that the top line represents the institutions at the 95th percentile in average compensation, and the bottom line the institutions at the 10th percentile. Finally, I added the values for the top and bottom percentiles so you could compare those more easily.

It looks like you’re seeing “winner-take-all” dynamics more at the elite institutions where the pay is high, as the dispersion across institutions increases at the level of full professors (the effect disappears if I do a log-transformation).

“It has been observed at least since the time of Aristotle that people cannot tickle themselves, but the reason remains elusive. Two sorts of explanations have been suggested. The interpersonal explanation suggests that tickling is fundamentally interpersonal and thus requires another person as the source of the touch. The reflex explanation suggests that tickle simply requires an element of unpredictability or uncontrollability and is more like a reflex or some other stereotyped motor pattern. To test these explanations, we manipulated the perceived source of tickling. Thirty-five subjects were tickled twice–once by the experimenter, and once, they believed, by an automated machine. The reflex view predicts that our “tickle machine” should be as effective as a person in producing laughter, whereas the interpersonal view predicts significantly attenuated responses. Supporting the reflex view, subjects smiled, laughed, and wiggled just as often in response to the machine as to the experimenter. Self-reports of ticklishness were also virtually identical in the two conditions. Ticklish laughter evidently does not require that the stimulation be attributed to another person, as interpersonal accounts imply.”

Image: flickr/battywing

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Finally, scientists create a breed of rat that loves to be tickled!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why can’t you tickle yourself?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: rated G

Are the racial stereotypes that each of us holds rooted in social fear? That’s the question behind a study out in Current Biology in which researchers investigated children with Williams’ syndrome. This genetic disorder comes from the loss of 26 genes and is marked by, among other things, a lack of social fear in patients: Meeting strangers for the first time, they’ll treat them like old friends.

According to research by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues, those children seemed less given to racial stereotyping than the children without the condition they studied, and the researchers attribute that to the lack of social fear in the kids with Williams’. This result may jibe with previous brain-scanning studies of people with Williams’ syndrome which found unusual activity in their amygdalas, a brain center associated with fear. Interestingly, the children with Williams’ syndrome showed a similar gender bias as the other children, suggesting a different neurological cause for gender and race bias.

However, some scientists point to problems with the study. The sample size is quite small, which is difficult to avoid when studying a rare condition, but still casts doubt on the findings. For instance, 64 percent of the time the children with Williams’ syndrome gave answers that could indicate racial stereotyping, but the margin for error was so large that the researchers concluded 64 percent was not significantly different from 50 percent, a set of perfectly color-blind answers.

For deeper analysis, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Williams syndrome children show no racial stereotypes or social fear
80beats: Study: Damage to Brain’s Fear Center Makes People Riskier Gamblers
DISCOVER: How Not To Be a Racist

Image: Current Biology

With the scourge of Internet addiction growing ever more fearsome, a Boston-based company has designed a clever way to entice such addicts to once again join the outside world. The trick is allowing them to keep their eyes firmly glued to the screens of their iPhones.

The company’s app, called Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill, is built for a walking tour of that old neighborhood in Boston, kind of like a museum audio tour. But instead of hearing someone drone on drily about the various numbered stops, you follow the map and watch the place’s history unfold in a series of videos corresponding to their locations. The app has been so well-received that its videos are going to be screened on April 18th at the Boston International Film Festival–the first-ever app to make it to a film festival.

This particular app tells the story of the Parkman murder, in which wealthy Bostonian George Parkman is killed and his dismembered body is discovered under a dissecting vault at Harvard Medical School. Harvard instructor John Webster, who owed Parkman money, was convicted of the murder after a sensational trial and publicly hanged.

The app, with its tightly produced videos tells the story of the Parkman murder and, according to the creators, is a “page-turner mystery powered by your feet.”

Xconomy writes:

Normally, viewers experience the story of the murder as they travel a mapped route around Boston’s Beacon Hill, watching sections from the video at eight different stops. At the film festival, though, audiences will stay firmly in their seats, watching all 33 parts of the video in continuous order. “We were just blown away at how watchable the story is in a theatrical setting,” BIFF director Patrick Jerome said in a statement. “It’s quick-paced, full of juicy details, and, to our knowledge, it’s the first location-based application to screen at a film festival.”

The creators hope that this new app, with its high-quality videos will set the pace for development of other apps that can be used for enhanced walking and audio tours. The company is one of the many startups that is focusing on “mobile documentaries” and the creation of software that will force its users to look outward and learn about the world around them.

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Image: Walking Cinema

This week marks three related anniversaries.

April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space. That was 49 years ago today.

April 14, 1970: An oxygen tank disrupts on Apollo 13, causing a series of catastrophic malfunctions that nearly leads to the deaths of the three astronauts. That was 40 years ago this week.

April 12, 1981: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, launches into space. That was 29 years ago today.

I wasn’t yet born when Gagarin flew, and I was still too young to appreciate what was happening on board Apollo as it flew helplessly around the Moon instead of landing on it. But I do remember breathlessly awaiting the Shuttle launch, and I remember thinking it would be the next phase in our exploration of space. I was still pretty young, and hadn’t thought it through, but I’m sure had you asked me I’d have said that this would lead to cheap, easy, and fast access to space, and by the time the 21st century rolled around we’d have space stations, more missions to the Moon, and maybe even to Mars.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought it through. Of all these anniversaries, that one is the least of the three we should celebrate.

Don’t get me wrong; the Shuttle is a magnificent machine. But it’s also a symbol of a political disaster for NASA. It was claimed that it would be cheap way to get payloads to space, and could launch every couple of weeks. Instead, it became frightfully expensive and couldn’t launch more than a few times a year.

This was a political problem. Once it became clear that NASA was building the Shuttle Transport System, it became a feeding trough. It never had a chance to be the lean space machine it should’ve been, and instead became bloated, weighted down with administrative bureaucracy and red tape.

More than that, though, to me it symbolizes a radical shift in the vision of NASA. We had gone to the Moon six times — seven, if you include Apollo 13 — and even before the launch of Apollo 17 that grand adventure had been canceled by Congress, with NASA being forced to look to the Shuttle. Ever since then, since December 1972, we’ve gone around in circles.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for low Earth orbit. It is a fantastic resource for science, and I strongly think we should be exploiting it even more. But it’s not the goal. It’s like walking halfway up a staircase, standing on your tiptoes, and admiring the view of the top landing.

We need to keep walking up those stairs. In 1961, the effects of space travel were largely unknown, but Yuri Gagarin took that chance. He was followed by many others in rapid succession. Extrapolating from his travels, by now there should be a business making money selling tours of the mountain chains around Oceanus Procellarum by now. Of the three anniversaries, looking at it now, Gagarin’s is bittersweet.

In 1970 Apollo 13 became our nation’s “successful failure”. A simple error had led to a near tragedy, saved only by the experience, training, guts, and clever thinking on their feet of a few dozen engineers. They turned catastrophe into triumph, and now, four decades later, we can’t repeat what they did. Think on this: when the disaster struck their ship, the crew of Apollo 13 were over 300,000 kilometers from Earth. Apollo 13 may have been a successful failure, but it’s a failure we can’t even repeat today if we tried.

I’ve written quite a bit about NASA’s future, including my support of Obama’s decision to cancel Constellation, the program that includes the next series of big rockets to take people into space. That may seem contradictory on its surface, but I support the decision because, in my opinion, Constellation was over budget, behind schedule, and had no clear purpose. The idea of going back to the Moon is one I very much strongly support, but I get the impression that the plan itself is not well-thought out by NASA. The engineering, sure, but not the political side of it. And it’s the politics that will always and forever be NASA’s burden.

It was a political decision to cancel Apollo. It was a political decision to turn the Shuttle from a space plane to the top-heavy system it is. It was a political decision to cancel the Shuttle with no replacement planned at all (that was done before Obama took office, I’ll note). It was a political decision that turned the space station from a scientific lab capable of teaching us how to live and explore space into the hugely expensive and bloated construction it is now.

NASA needs a clear vision, and it needs one that is sturdy enough to resist the changing gusts of political winds. I’m hoping that Obama’s plan will streamline NASA, giving away the expensive and “routine” duties it needs not do so that private industry can pick them up. The added money to go to science, again in my hopes, will spur more innovation in engineering.

And NASA needs a goal. It needs to put its foot down and say “This is our next giant step.” And this has to be done hand in hand with the politics. I understand that is almost impossible given today’s political climate, where statesmanship and compromise has turned into small-minded meanness and childish name-calling on the Congress floor.

But I’m old enough to remember when NASA could do the impossible. That was practically their motto. Beating the Soviets was impossible. Landing on the Moon was impossible. Getting Apollo 13 back safely was impossible.

Of the three anniversaries, Apollo 13 is the one we should be celebrating. I’ll gently correct what Gene Kranz said that day: failure really was an option, but not an acceptable one.

Right now, at this very moment, those feats are all impossible once again. But for a time, they were not only possible, we made them happen.

It’s time to do the impossible once again.

Does liquid water still flow on Mars?

We know that in the distant past — like, a billion years ago — liquid water was abundant on Mars. We also know that water currently exists on Mars in the form of ice, sometimes just below the surface (where even small meteor impacts can reveal it). But can there still be liquid water flowing on Mars, even if only for a very, very short time?

Maybe. Just maybe.

This HiRISE image shows a small region of a Martian crater named Russel (click to access much bigger versions of it). There are a lot of sand dunes in it, and as you can see in the lower left, many gullies as well. These gullies were obviously carved by something moving downslope. Sometimes, these gullies can form due to the presence of dry ice: frozen carbon dioxide, which is abundant on Mars. In the summer, as temperatures warm, the dry ice turns into a gas, dislodging material and letting it roll downhill. It’s thought that quite a few gullies on Mars are formed this way (as well as very dramatic avalanches).

But these Russell Crater gullies are different. They do seem to form at higher elevations, near the tops of dunes, as you’d expect. But there are also weird dark spots near these locations, which are poorly understood. The gullies seem to be constrained in their width; they don’t get broader downslope. Mind you, these are super-hi-res images; the gullies shown here are only a few meters across, if even that! You could easily hop across them if you were strolling across the Red Planet’s surface.

The gullies do widen where two tributaries meet, which is exactly as you’d expect from flowing material. That’s probably clearer in this picture of the same region but taken at a different time:

But the really weird thing is how the gullies end. If this were just sand flowing because it was disrupted by dry ice evaporating, you’d expect to see a fan-shaped formation where the gullies terminate downslope. That’s the natural way flowing sand comes to a halt, by spreading out and forming those big triangles. But these gullies don’t do that. Instead, they just kinda stop. The gullies suddenly end in an abrupt narrowing of the trench, as if the material that’s moving is being reabsorbed by the surface underneath it.

That is certainly not what you expect from solid material like sand flowing downhill. It’s far more like the way an actual flowing liquid behaves. Because of this a team of German scientists studying this data think this may be more evidence that water can exist as a liquid on the surface of Mars, at least for short periods, time enough to flow downhill a bit. So we’re talking seconds or minutes here, not years, but still. Holy Haleakala.

Liquid water on the surface of Mars can’t stick around long; even at those low temperatures it will boil away from the low atmospheric pressure, or freeze rapidly. So having any liquid at all is really pretty amazing. But it raises lots of other questions, not the least of which are where does it come from, and why the heck is it liquid at all? You’d expect the water under the surface, if that’s what’s causing this, to be frozen; we see lots of that on Mars. So why is this liquid? Did something happen to liquify it (and it’s a pretty short list of what could do that), or is it liquid already (like in an underground aquifer or a hot spring) and just happened to break through the surface to flow for a short, glorious time?

The only way to know for sure is to keep looking. These images are a red flag for scientists, an alarm raised that we need to keep digging around, to keep our eyes open, and to pay attention to what we’re seeing. There’s a whole lot that Mars is trying to tell us. All we have to do is listen.

Thousands of onlookers gathered on Sunday to watch and film the planned implosion of the Texas Stadium in Dallas. The 65,000-seat-stadium was home to the Dallas Cowboys for 38 years and was witness to some thrilling football moments–but all good things must come to an end. The stadium was demolished because the team moved to the new billion-dollar, state-of-the-art Cowboys Stadium last season.

An 11-year-old named Casey Rogers, the winner of a local essay-writing contest, pushed the button that triggered the implosion, and thus set off 1.5 tons of explosives that brought down the stadium in a systematic manner. In the end, just three pillars stood leaning, leading Herbert Gears, mayor of the Dallas suburb of Irving where the stadium was located, to joke to AFP: “Now we’ve got Stonehenge.”

Not only were curious onlookers on hand to observe the implosion, but so were a group of seismologists. In a project nicknamed “Demolicious,” a team led by Jay Pulliam of Baylor University in Waco, Texas used seismometers around the stadium to try and get a clearer picture of the region’s geological features.

Nature News reports:

Pulliam and his team hope that seismic waves from the planned explosion can help to image Earth’s crust in the region, an area of interest to seismologists because it is where the Ouachita deformation was created when a supercontinent of Africa and South America crashed into North America about 300 million years ago. The team also hopes to improve understanding of why small earthquakes occurred in the region in 2008–09 after waste water was pumped deep underground in the process of extracting natural gas from shale.

Earlier last month, Pulliam and his team set up their instruments–a seismometer, an accelerometer, and a clock linked to a GPS–near the stadium. The instruments were set up to record the exact timing of the implosion and the rate at which the seismic waves traveled through the ground. However, Pulliam wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the implosion’s seismic waves. Speaking to Nature News before the big event, he called the process a “terrific experiment.”

Meanwhile, here’s a video of the implosion:

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Image: Dallas Morning Observer

People with Williams syndrome are some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. They are incredibly sociable, almost unnervingly so, and they approach strangers with the openness that most people reserve for close friends.

Their sociable streak is the result of a genetic disorder caused by the loss of around 26 genes. This missing chunk of chromosome leaves people with a distinctive elfin face, a risk of heart problems, and a characteristic lack of social fear. They don’t experience the same worries or concerns that most of us face when meeting new people. And now, Andreia Santos from the University of Heidelberg has suggested that they have an even more unique trait – they seem to lack racial bias.

Typically, children start overtly gravitating towards their own ethnic groups from the tender age of three. Groups of people from all over the globe and all sorts of cultures show these biases. Even autistic children, who can have severe difficulties with social relationships, show signs of racial stereotypes. But Santos says that the Williams syndrome kids are the first group of humans devoid of such racial bias, although, as we’ll see, not everyone agrees.

Santos compared the behaviour of 20 white children with Williams syndrome, aged 7 to 16, and 20 typical white children of similar backgrounds and mental ages. To do so, she used a test called the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM-II), which is designed to tease out traces of gender or racial biases in young children.

PRAM-II consists of a picture book where every page includes a pair of people of different genders or skin types. The researcher tells a selection of stories to accompany the images and the children have to point to the person whom they think the story is about. As they hear positive or negative adjectives, they reveal any underlying racial bias if they point to light-skinned or dark-skinned people, or men or women, more frequently.

The typical children showed a strong tendency to view light-skinned people well and dark-skinned people poorly. Out of their responses, 83% were consistent with a pro-white bias. In contrast, the children with Williams syndrome only showed such responses 64% of the time, which wasn’t significantly different from chance.

Santos suggests that children with Williams syndrome don’t develop the same biases that their peers do, because they don’t experience social fear. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, who led the study, says, “There are hyper-social, very empathetic, very friendly, and do not get danger signals.” And because they’ll freely interact with anyone, they are less likely to cultivate a preference for people of their own ethnic groups. Alternatively, it could be that because they don’t fall prey to stereotypes, they’re more likely to socialise with everyone.

Santos is quick to rule out alternative explanations for this result. Some of the children with Williams syndrome were more intelligent or mentally advanced than the others, but they behaved in the same way. Nor could it be that they suffered from a general inability to assess people’s features, for both groups of children showed a bias towards their own gender.

But not everyone is convinced. Aliya Saperstein from the University of Oregon praised the study’s “clever research design” and said that it shows the Williams Syndrome children are clearly less biased than normal ones. That is interesting in itself, but Saperstein is sceptical that they lack racial bias entirely. In the PRAM-II test, Santos claims that children without any biases should make pro-white responses half of the time, but she showed that the Williams syndrome children did so 64% of the time. This wasn’t significantly different from a chance result but the estimate was based on a very small sample size. Given larger numbers, those extra fourteen percentage points might indicate an important difference.

Robert Livingston from Northwestern University agrees. He says, “I think that it’s problematic to make strong conclusions on the basis of null findings, particularly with a sample as small as 20 WS children.”

It’s also worth noting that the PRAM-II test doesn’t give children the option of a truly unbiased response. They can’t say that the story could fit either image equally – they can only give fewer pro-white answers. As Saperstein says, “The results don’t demonstrate or prove an absence of bias. And like all similar tests, the study may tap partly into one’s knowledge of social stereotypes not just one’s personal biases.”

Livingston also notes that when we’re talking about racial bias, there is a difference between stereotypes, which are based on our beliefs, and prejudices, which are based on our feelings and evaluations of other people. The Williams Syndrome children may not show prejudice, but Livingston says, “Very few if any people who do not show stereotypes.”

Regardless of whether the Williams Syndrome children lack racial bias altogether, it’s clear that they aren’t affected by it to the same extent as normal children. Santos’s results also suggest that racial and gender biases have different origins. The former is borne at least partly out of social fear while the latter has different roots.

The link between social fear and racial stereotypes fits with the results of previous brain-scanning studies. In people with Williams syndrome, the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing emotional memories, is far less reactive to threatening social situations. The connections between the amygdala and the fusiform face area, which is specialised for recognising faces, are also unusually weak.

The same areas might play a role in understanding information about people’s race: the fusiform face area tends to be more active when we look at people from the same ethnic group; and one study found that the amygdala is more active when both white and black people look at black faces. This will, of course, need to be tested in more experiments.

Reference: Current Biology; citation unavailable at time of writing

More on race:

• Even on mute, TV can perpetuate racial bias
• Social status shapes racial identity
• People overestimate their reactions to racism
• They don’t all look the same – could better facial discrimination lead to less racial discrimination?
• Simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students

Astronomers have discovered the closest new star to us that’s been spotted in 63 years. Though “star” might be a stretch, depending upon whom you ask.

The new find, UGPS 0722-05, is less than 10 light years from here. But sky-watchers missed it for so long because it’s a brown dwarf, a member of the murky class of celestial objects that linger between gas giant planets and low-mass stars. Brown dwarfs have so little mass that they never get hot enough to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that power stars like the sun. Still, they do shine, because they glow from the heat of their formation, then cool and fade [New Scientist]. This dwarf’s temperature is somewhere between 266 and 446 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the coldest scientists have even seen. With its minimal activity, the brown dwarf gives off just 0.000026 percent the amount of light that our sun does.

Like dwarf planets, which cast aside the 9-planet solar system of our childhoods and riled Pluto-philes everywhere, brown dwarfs don’t lend themselves to simple scientific definitions. The International Astronomical Union sets the planet–brown dwarf boundary at 13 times the mass of Jupiter. But that mass limit is an imperfect definition—what of brown dwarf–size bodies that orbit stars, behaving themselves like supersized planets [Scientific American]? The nomenclature could get even messier when the details of this new find are confirmed. Study leader Philip Lucas and his colleagues suggest that the newly discovered brown dwarf is so cool that it might be the first member of a new class of ultralow temperature dwarfs. Although one fingerprint of such a new class, absorption of infrared light by ammonia, appears to be missing, only “time will tell” if the discovery merits a new classification, the researchers note [Science News].

Lucas’ team’s paper is currently being submitted to the journal Nature, where the peer-review process should help to verify how close the team was with its parallax measurement of the brown dwarf’s distance. If they’re correct, UGPS 0722-05 will not only beat out the previous record-holders for proximity to Earth—a binary set of brown dwarfs in the Epsilon Indi system, about 11.8 light-years away—it would also suggest that perhaps more of these shadowy celestial objects linger even closer to us.

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Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)

The bottom of the sea is a strange and marvelous frontier, as we were reminded last week by the discovery of the first known animals to live without oxygen. Today a team of British researchers say their undersea robotic explorers have found something new down in the depths of the Caribbean Sea: the deepest hydrothermal vents ever seen.

The black smokers, named for how they spew out an iron sulfide compound that’s black, sit 3.1 miles deep in the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean [FoxNews]. They beat out the previous record holders, which were located 2.6 miles below the surface in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As the National Oceanography Centre team sailed across the sea in its research vessel, the James Cook, the scientists deployed their robot explorers down to the inhospitable depths. One, called Autosub6000, mapped the seafloor while another, HyBIS, carried high-resolution cameras to capture these images.

Marine biologist Dr Jon Copley said: “Seeing the world’s deepest black-smoker vents looming out of the darkness was awe-inspiring.” He added: “Super-heated water was gushing out of their two-storey-high mineral spires, more than three miles beneath the waves” [BBC News]. The heat record held by the vents in the mid-Atlantic is a scorching 867 degrees Fahrenheit, but Copley and the other researchers say they don’t know yet whether this one is hotter. Geologist Bramley Murton reports mats of microbes covering the vents, but the team is conferring with other scientists before they announce exactly what they found. Whatever lives down there, it’s certainly got grit. The pressure at the bottom of the trough, which is 500 times normal atmospheric pressure, would be the equivalent to the weight of a large family car pushing down on every square inch of the creatures that live there, the researchers say [FoxNews].

You can keep up with the voyage of the James Cook on the team’s Web site. They’ll be cruising the Cayman Trough until the 20th of this month.

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Image: National Oceanography Centre