cortex | July 16, 2007It's a brilliant new approach to treating the traumatized minds of war veterans: having them care for rescued and abused parrots. By developing a bond of trust with a bird, the PTSD patients slowly recover their faith in humanity. Listen to the NPR story.
And here's a shot of my own parrot, eating her vegetables before the Boss:
cortex | July 16, 2007Is this a living missing link? Scientists in the Congo have found a band of primates that seem to engage in some very sophisticated hunts. The Guardian reports:
Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla.
Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western…
cortex | July 13, 2007I like good coffee as much as the next pretentious writer, but this is a little gross:
To connoisseurs of fine coffee, only one is good to the last dropping.
Human hands don't harvest the beans that make this rare brew. They're plucked by the sharp claws and fangs of wild civets, catlike beasts with bug eyes and weaselly noses that love their coffee fresh.
They move at night, creeping along the limbs of robusta and hybrid arabusta trees, sniffing out sweet red coffee cherries and selecting only the tastiest. After chewing off the fruity exterior, they swallow the hard innards.
In the animals…
cortex | July 13, 2007Yesterday, PZ linked to a short list of leading evolutionary explanations for homosexuality. On this subject, PZ is an ardent non-adaptationist:
There are really just two classes of explanation [for homosexuality], the adaptationist strategy of trying to find a necessary enhancement to fitness, and the correct strategy of recognizing that not all attributes of an individual organism are going to be optimal for that individual's reproduction, so don't even try. Love isn't hardwired by biology, and it can go in all kinds of different directions.
PZ's point is well taken, and if humans were the…
cortex | July 12, 2007David Dobbs has a wonderful article in the most recent Times Magazine on Williams syndrome, a development disorder that results in a bizarre mixture of cognitive strengths and deficits:
Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA's double helix is divided into two separate strands, each strand then becoming the genetic material in egg or sperm. Normally the two strands part cleanly, like a zipper's two halves. But in Williams, about 25 teeth in one of the zippers -- 25 genes out of 30,000 in egg or sperm -- are torn loose during this parting. When that strand…
cortex | July 12, 2007From the latest National Geographic cover story on malaria:
"Some scientists estimate that one out of every two people who have ever lived have died of malaria."
From the Times:
"Last year, UPS cut 28 million miles from truck routes - saving roughly three million gallons of fuel - in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns."
cortex | July 11, 2007It's easy to forget just how nasty kids can be. They might look cute, but they are such assholes. They prey on differences and disabilities, using taunts to generate solidarity. Middle school really is a terrible time. But I was pretty surprised to learn that American kids have a strong bias against overweight kids, and that this bias doesn't seem particularly sensitive to the obesity epidemic. You'd think that having more overweight kids in the classroom would somehow lessen the stigma of being overweight, but it doesn't:
A 1961 study, replicated 42 years later, asked 10- and 11-year-olds to…
cortex | July 10, 2007By now, just about everybody knows about the two competing hypotheses that attempt to explain the drop in crime in the late 1990's. There's the "broken windows" theory, which assumes that crime is contextual, and that cracking down on the small misdemeanors (like public drunkenness, loitering and graffiti) eliminates the conditions that encourage felonies. And then there's the Freakonomics theory, which is that the legalization of abortion in 1973 reduced the number of unwanted births, which led, a generation later, to a reduction in the number of criminals roaming the streets.
But now there…
cortex | July 9, 2007Here's your depressing determinist paper for the day:
Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimated directly from data, as well as heterogeneity in ability to learn, initial human capital, and initial wealth -- features which are chosen to match observed properties of earnings dynamics by cohorts. We find that as of age 20, differences in initial conditions account for more of the…
cortex | July 9, 2007So I finally sat down and watched Planet Earth on my new television. It's even better than everybody says: endless hours of the most extravagant nature porn ever put on film. But the show also got me thinking about evolution, and why it's so difficult for most Americans to believe in Darwinian theory.
Watching Planet Earth, I was stuck by the sheer difficulty of life. You can't help but feel for these animals, as they are forced to scrounge out a miserable existence in their ecological niche. I'm thinking of the desert kangaroos, who have to lick their paws to keep from overheating in 140…
cortex | July 6, 2007When I first heard that Al Gore III was caught going 105 mph in a Prius, I was most impressed by the fact that a Prius can actually go that fast. You must really have to floor the Prius engine - all 110 horsepower of it - in order to get the car into triple digits. But it turns out there are other factors at work: speeding isn't just about the size of the engine. Dan Neil explains:
The question remains, why is the Prius such a screaming hot rod?
In part, it's a reflection of the state of the automotive technology, which, as it has raised benchmarks for handling, safety and comfort, has also…
cortex | July 3, 2007Barry Schwartz has a very interesting op-ed in the Times. It's about the psychology of incentives, and the mistaken assumptions of economic theory. Simply put, economists assume that people are selfishly rational agents, which means that we should be extremely responsive to external incentives (like cash rewards). But such assumptions are dangerously oversimplified:
New York City has decided to offer cash rewards to some students based on their attendance records and exam performance. Diligent, high-achieving seventh graders will be able to earn up to $500 in a year. The plan is the…
cortex | July 3, 2007I just got back from spending a few days with a neuroscientist friend who recently became a PI, in charge of his own lab. On one of the walls in his lab, there was a map of the world with little pins marking the birthplace of each lab member. (My friend is originally from Calcutta.) Needless to say, the world was well represented. One post-doc was from interior China, another was from Jamaica. India, Japan, Korea and, yes, America, were also represented.
This astonishing diversity is one of the reasons I love science. Although a few of the globalized post-docs had trouble expressing…
cortex | June 29, 2007A comic discussion on the origins of life, the moral status of sperm, abortion and a few other not-safe-for-work topics. (It's a deleted scene from Knocked Up, which everybody should see, right after they see Ratatouille.) Judd Apatow, by the way, is a genius.
Update: the embedded video link was causing some problems, so watch the video here instead.
cortex | June 29, 2007I've got an article in the latest Seed on some research that applies metabolic theory to the metropolis:
Cities have always been compared to organisms - Plato talked about the city as a corporeal body - but being underneath the street makes the metaphor literal. These are the guts of the city, the metal intestines that allow the suburbs to sprawl and the skyscrapers to rise. The fiber optic cables are nerves, and the subway tunnels are thick jugular veins. Energy is being distributed and waste is being digested. All this work generates a sort of carnal heat, which escapes from the grates in…
cortex | June 28, 2007This is glass:
If you've never been to the glass flowers exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History then you are missing out on a truly spectacular fusion of art and science. Here's NPR:
Back in the late 19th century, botanical teaching models were mostly made of wax or papier maché. Or they were actual plants that had been dried and pressed.
But the replicas were inexact, the pressed specimens faded and flat. So professor Goodale asked the Blaschkas [a father-son team of glass blowers from Dresden] to make glass plants. Fifty years later, after Rudolph retired (and after Leopold had…
cortex | June 28, 2007This interview with the novelist from The Believer is a few months old, but it's well worth a read:
Something truly interesting is happening in many basic sciences, a real revolution in human knowing. For a long time--centuries--empiricism has tried to understand the whole in terms of its isolated parts, and then to write out precise and simple rules about the controlled behavior of those parts in isolation. In recent decades, with the explosion of the life sciences and with a new appreciation in physics and chemistry of emergent and complex systems, a new kind of holism has emerged.…
cortex | June 27, 2007An intriguing hypothesis:
Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious than adults. Her argument for this view begins with the idea that people in general -- adults, that is -- have more conscious experience of what they attend to than of what they disregard. We have either no experience, or limited experience, of the hum of the refrigerator in the background or the feeling of the shoes on our feet, until we stop to think about it. In contrast, when we expertly and automatically do something routine (such as driving to work on the usual route) we are often barely…
cortex | June 27, 2007Yesterday, Chris had an interesting post describing an experimental situation in which selective brain damage leads to improved performance. It's an cool paradigm, since it helps to illuminate the innate constraints of the (intact) brain.
Look, for example, at this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, Antonio Damasio and George Loewenstein. The scientists invented a simple investing game. In each round, experimental subjects had to decide between two options: invest $1 or invest nothing. If the participant decided not to invest, he or she would keep the dollar, and the task would advance to the…
cortex | June 26, 2007According to a new study, conservative Muslim dress codes might be causing serious health problems for Muslim women:
In certain Middle Eastern and other countries where conservative dress curtails exposure to sunlight, high levels of vitamin D supplementation may be needed to raise serum levels sufficiently in women, investigators report.
"When sunlight exposure -- the main source for vitamin D in humans -- is limited," Dr. Hussein F. Saadi said, "much higher dietary intake of vitamin D is needed than currently recommended," especially for women who are breast-feeding.
As reported in the June…