kcontreary | October 14, 2007Ask anyone who's spent any time in a strip club, and one of the things he will almost certainly not mention is the ovulatory state of his favorite gal. But, according to a recent paper by Geoffrey Miller et. al., how much money he spent on her may have more to do with where she is in her cycle than he'd comfortably acknowledge.
Miller and his co-authors set out to see if they could find any economic evidence for human estrus, a period of increased sexual attractiveness, receptivity and proceptivity occuring around the time of peak fertility. The prevailing consensus is that human estrus has…
purepedantry | October 11, 2007Erez Lieberman et al. at Harvard are looking at the rate of change in words to see if words evolve:
Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in '-ed', as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got.
Researchers suppose that this is because often-used irregulars are easy to remember and get right. Seldom-used irregulars, on the other hand, are more likely to be…
purepedantry | October 10, 2007I don't remember the last time I found two Onion articles funny in the same calendar year.
Here is another one:
"If you're looking for some button-down traditionalist who relies on so-called induction, conventional logic, and verification to arrive at what the scientific community calls 'proof,' then I'm afraid you've got the wrong guy," said the intrepid 44-year-old rebel, who last month unveiled a revolutionary new model of atomic structure that contradicted 300 years of precedent. "But if you want your results fast and with some flair, then come with me and I'll prove that the boiling…
purepedantry | October 10, 2007University of Washington researchers have developed a vocal mouse that moves the cursor around the screen with clicks and phonemes:
The Internet offers wide appeal to people with disabilities. But many of those same people find it frustrating or impossible to use a handheld mouse. Software developed at the University of Washington provides an alternative using the oldest and most versatile mode of communication: the human voice.
"There are many people who have perfect use of their voice who don't have use of their hands and arms," said Jeffrey Bilmes, a UW associate professor of electrical…
purepedantry | October 9, 2007The illustrious Shelley Batts, fellow ScienceBlogger and author of Retrospectacle, has been nominated for a blogging scholarship for yet another year -- she won some money last year as a runner -up.
Shelley is an excellent blogger and a truly fun chick, so if you have a free moment please go here to and cast a vote for her. Last year the political bloggers stole the whole thing, but I am certain that if we rally the science bloggers can take it this year.
purepedantry | October 8, 2007Ouch:
A Chicago woman who became enraged after discovering her longtime boyfriend's stash of pornography shot and killed him in their South Side home over the weekend, prosecutors said.
Jeanette Strowder, 58, is facing a first-degree murder charge in the Sunday shooting of Jesse Martin, 54, her boyfriend of about 15 years, police said.
Surely she knew before. I mean she had been dating him for 15 years.
Anyway, word to the wise: hide your porn better or get a more accepting significant other.
purepedantry | October 8, 2007Functional MRI (fMRI) is a very useful technique, but it lacks in resolution making some systems difficult to study. Adams et al. show in a study of ocular dominance columns in humans why good old staining is still useful when we reach the limits of imaging.
Ocular Dominance Columns
Ocular dominance columns are areas in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mammals that show a preference in activity to one eye over the other. (I think this applies to reptiles and amphibians as well, but I don't know that for sure).
Here is a brief schematic of the visual system. The primary visual cortex is…
purepedantry | October 3, 2007Check out this must-read long post on heritability and IQ:
One of the sound tenets of a lot of conservative social and political thought is an insistence on the importance of tradition and tacit knowledge, its transmission through families and communities, and the difficulty of making up for the absence of early immersion in a tradition with later explicit instruction. The fact is, however, that if I studied anything which is transmitted via tradition in the way people estimate IQ's heritability, I'd conclude that it had a genetic component. If, in particular, there are traditions which…
purepedantry | October 3, 2007Check out this useful piece of freeware -- Publish or Perish -- that calculates the impact factors of particular individuals, journals, or articles based on info from Google Scholar. Since it is Google Scholar rather than PubMed it should work just as well for social sciences people as natural sciences people.
Hat-tip: Crooked Timber
purepedantry | October 2, 2007I had not thought that water was a poorly understood substance. Here are two interesting water articles that show that there is still more to learn. Who knew.
First, if you put water in a high DC current it can form a bridge between two beakers:
When exposed to a high-voltage electric field, water in two beakers climbs out of the beakers and crosses empty space to meet, forming the water bridge. The liquid bridge, hovering in space, appears to the human eye to defy gravity.
Upon investigating the phenomenon, the scientists found that water was being transported from one beaker to another…
purepedantry | October 1, 2007Possibly in response to Kara's earlier post, sales of Belgian flags have skyrocketed. They are selling like they are going out of style...and they may well do so:
A growing debate about the potential division of Belgium has led to a surge in sales of Belgian flags as opponents of separatism seek to display their patriotism.
Belgians are accustomed to flying the black-yellow-red tricolor on the king's birthday, July 21, but in recent weeks far more flags have been hung from windows and balconies, particularly in the capital, Brussels.
"In the last couple of weeks sales have tripled. I'd say…
purepedantry | October 1, 2007An anonymous medical blogger in Texas is being sued by a hospital for defamation and for releasing patient information:
An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490, where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a critical anonymous blogger is testing the bounds of Internet privacy, First Amendment freedom of speech and whistle-blower rights.
A state district judge has told lawyers for the hospital and the blogger that he plans within a week to order a Dallas Internet service provider to release the blogger's name. The blogger's lawyer, James Rodgers of…
purepedantry | September 28, 2007I don't catch the Onion much anymore, but this is just priceless:
Top physicists from several major American universities appeared before a Congressional committee Monday to request $50 billion for a science thing that would further U.S. advancement science-wise and broaden human knowing.
The scientists spoke for approximately three hours about the complicated science machine, which is expensive, and large, telling members of the House Committee on Science and Technology that the tubular, gamma-ray-using mechanism is vital in some big way. Yet the high price tag of the thing, which would be…
kcontreary | September 28, 2007Socrates gave us the foundation of modern philosophy when he claimed that his only wisdom was in knowing his own ignorance. By implication, of course, everyone else was even stupider than he and just didn't know it, believing they were thinking/acting with all the information available and all the mental faculties necessary to put that information to good use, when in fact they were hopelessly crippled by their unrecognized obtuseness. Admit it, you'd have made him drink hemlock too.
According to an article by Chugh and Bazerman, entitled "Bounded Awareness: what you fail to see can hurt…
purepedantry | September 28, 2007The Scientist has a wonderful article about complimentarity in biology. Complimentarity is the application of two or more different theoretical approaches to a single problem:
"Light and Life" is perhaps best known for its focus on Bohr's concept of complementarity. According to this concept, some natural phenomena can only be completely understood by combining two or more experimental approaches that cannot be simultaneously implemented. More generally, complementarity asserts that apparently incompatible ideas or perspectives can both be necessary to achieve a fuller understanding of an…
purepedantry | September 26, 2007Here's a quote of the day for you by Katie Glasrud, writing at Pharyngula:
That fumble in the fourth quarter? You just dropped it didn't you. It looks like you've had a lot of testosterone-dropping moments this season, and I have to warn you: If you continue on this painful trajectory, you could wake up one morning to find you've developed female secondary characteristics. (Emphasis mine.)
Read the whole thing.
purepedantry | September 26, 2007Castro's Cuba has seen a precipitous drop in obesity rates and in the deaths associated with cardiovascular risk:
Cuba's economic crisis of 1989-2000 resulted in reduced energy intake, increased physical activity, and sustained population-wide weight loss. The authors evaluated the possible association of these factors with mortality trends. Data on per capita daily energy intake, physical activity, weight loss, and smoking were systematically retrieved from national and local surveys. National vital statistics from 1980-2005 were used to assess trends in mortality from diabetes, coronary…
purepedantry | September 24, 2007Encephalon 32 is up at Living the Scientific Life.
The Chernobyl reactor will be encased in a huge steel arch.
This business sounds suspiciously similar to the Simpsons movie.
Larry Summers is not allowed to talk at UC-Davis:
What's more, academic freedom depends on reactions like the response to Summers's 2005 comments. Knowledgeable scholars including the sociologist (and my colleague) Kim Shauman explained that there was actually a great deal more research into, and knowledge of, the ways women founder in scientific careers than Summers had originally suggested. Summers, Shauman said, was…
purepedantry | September 24, 2007The US government spends millions domestically and billions internationally on abstinence-only education with the intent of lowering the transmission of STIs such as HIV and limiting unwanted pregnancies. Yet abstinence-only education is demonstrably ineffective. The alternative called abstinence-plus education clearly does not make the situation worse -- as some critics have argued -- but it doesn't appear to work that well either. What's a person concerned with public health to do?
Two reviews this year Underhill et al. look at the effectiveness of abstinence-only and abstinence-plus…
purepedantry | September 21, 2007Video games of late have gotten crazy complicated. Making life-like characters and realistic worlds is an incredible computational challenge. Popular Science lists the 10 Biggest Challenges in video game production, and number 4 struck my eye:
4. Artificial Intelligence
Like teaching 1,000 kids to think for themselves overnight
Problem: Once upon a time, the bad guys in videogames wandered around mindlessly, shooting at you while they waited to die. That doesn't cut it anymore. Players demand sophisticated enemies to fight and reliable in-game allies with which to fight them. Thing is, it's…