retrospectacle | November 1, 2007Its been a bad year for animal communication. First Alex the Grey Parrot suddenly dies, now the famous sign-language-using chimp Washoe has also died Tuesday night of the flu.
Washoe, who first learned a bit of American Sign Language in a research project in Nevada, had been living on Central Washington University's Ellensburg campus since 1980. She had a vocabulary of about 250 words.
Washoe also taught sign language to three younger chimps who remain at the institute, Central Washington spokeswoman Becky Watson said. They are Tatu, 31, Loulis, 29, and Dar, 31.
Washoe was the only chimpanzee…
retrospectacle | October 30, 2007Bush says "Congress worst in 20 years." All irony meters simultaneously explode. I just imagine Bush and Congress embroiled in a "No, you are!" "Noooo, you are!" "Nooooo you are times 10!" "You are times infinity!" - type battle of (COUGH) wits. That lasts about 10 minutes and they settle the fight with an emotional game of rock, paper, scissors, after which it is never spoken of again.
Cradle of humanity finally to teach evolution! The South African president finally decided to make teaching evolution a priority in schools. "Well, someone finally told me that what this theory is, and…
retrospectacle | October 29, 2007Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, recently gave this excellent speech at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) Conference. In addition to being an engaging speaker, he may also be one of the only scientists I've even seen pull off a leather jacket so well. The talk covers phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, which is when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters. This rare…
retrospectacle | October 28, 2007To the West, the idea of a modern, gender-equal, progressive sort of academic environment seems incongruous with Saudi Arabia's religious establishment. However, the current ruler, King Abdullah, is investing $12.5 billion in creating just such an environment--a graduate research institution where religious police will be barred and women and men will conduct research in collaboration. Currently, women's career options in other areas are severely limited, and co-ed institutions required men and women to enter through separate doors, and remain behind partitions.
The campus will be built, and…
retrospectacle | October 27, 2007I'm a huge fan of artistic expressions which gets inspiration from the natural world, which is why I was absolutely floored by these beautiful clockwork insects created at Insect Lab by Mike Libby. These clocks are made from actual dead bugs; tiny clockwork gears and spings are worked around the shiny carapaces of beetles, the furry exoskeletons of tarantulae, and the delicate wings of butterflies.
The inspiration for creating these tiny frankenbugs came when Mike found a dead intact beetle one day. After locating an old wristwatch, and thinking about the simplistic, precise movements of…
retrospectacle | October 26, 2007The Society for Neuroscience meeting is coming up, taking place in San Diego in the midst of all the furor and flames. While I'm not going to the meeting, I was reminded of a funny fake science poster I saw at SFN back in 2004: "Joint Encoding of Motion and Music in a Neuron in the Sea Monkey Artemia Salina - An Evolutionary Antecedent of Trouba Du?" (PDF here) by Kai Schreiber.
Figure 1
Why is this an awesome poster? Check out the abstract:
When we see an unfamiliar person in a parking lot, sporting a guitar and dressed in quaint clothing, we instantly are overcome with an intense feeling…
retrospectacle | October 25, 2007I got back into Detroit last night after a long flight from Charles de Gaulle, after spending a week and a half traveling from Amsterdam to Antwerp to Paris. Hopefully you all enjoyed the chemistry-related blogging of Wired blogger Aaron Rowe in my absence, looks like he's kept things busy here (thanks Aaron!).
There were a few things going on in Paris while I was there: one-- the French President, Nicholas Sarkozy and his wife Cecilia have just divorced. In fact, his wife was on the cover of Elle magazine this month with the headline "Divorcee!" across it. An interesting fact that in…
aaronrowe | October 23, 2007I have heard a lot of stories about the aggressive behavior of people on angel dust, but this video is the first time that I have seen just how dramatic it can be. The guy is completely naked and smashes straight through a fence then tries to climb through the hole in order to evade police. It seems almost like the behavior of a comic book villain or the incredible hulk.
If you know of any similar footage, I would love to see it.
Don't forget to vote for Shelley!
aaronrowe | October 22, 2007
As our civil liberties are eroded under the guise a war on terror and men without rights are kept in secret prisons and sent to foreign jails for abuse, I worry that truth serums will once again become a staple of law enforcement and intelligence. They do not allow interrogators to extract reliable information, but neither does torture -- and yet the current administration is not opposed to those brutal methods.
I am not alone. Last year, The Washington Post published a fantastic article on this alarming topic. Even better, Alison Winter wrote a comprehensive history of truth serums that…
aaronrowe | October 22, 2007
According to the Indianapolis News a man and his son were awakened by their pet bird as their home caught fire. Their Amazon parrot, Peanut, began making a smoke detector noise while a real smoke detector was going off. The father credits his avian friend with making enough noise to alert him.
I tend to write off stories about animals saving people as wishful thinking on the part of reporters and pet lovers. But in this case, I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that a parrot is considerably louder than a fire alarm.
Don't forget to vote for Shelley!
aaronrowe | October 21, 2007This video shows British Soldiers under the effects of LSD during a military exercise. I absolutely love the wry narration. Thank you to Boosterz for mentioning the video in a comment thread on the post How Much LSD Does it Take to Kill an Elephant? While looking for this footage on YouTube, I was surprised to see just how many videos of people on acid are available to the general public. If you can suggest any particularly good ones, please let me know and I will embed them after the jump.
Don't forget to vote for Shelley!
This video reveals some additional data from a NASA study of the…
aaronrowe | October 20, 2007In comparison to other science shows, Brainiac is quite effective at appealing to the visceral compulsion to play with fire. In this case, they pitted scorching hot thermite against molten metal. What could be better than a battle between two of the most enjoyable science demonstration tools of all time?
Thermite is a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum. When ignited, the aluminum is oxidized and the iron oxide is reduced. If you put it in a terracotta flower pot with a sheet of metal covering the hole at the bottom, the thin strip will melt just as the reaction has completed and allow a…
aaronrowe | October 18, 2007The October issue of Popular Science has several excellent articles about the mind. My favorite is a collection of five explanations of unusual or creepy sensations that are caused by neurological glitches.
Reporter Veronique Greenwood included short summaries of academic research about each of the mental malfunctions. I was pleased to see that she included the names and affiliatons of the researchers, but disappointed that she only identified one of the journals in which the research that she described appears.
After reading dense blurbs like these, I often want to know more.
It always…
aaronrowe | October 17, 2007
Since losing his hearing, Michael Chorost has volunteered himself as a guinea-pig for a number of experiments with the software that controls his cochlear implant. He has written extensively about those experiences.
This week, I stumbled upon one of his stories in The Best American Science Writing 2006 and thoroughly enjoyed it. My Bionic Quest for Bolero tells the tale of his quest to hear every nuance of his favorite song by traveling across the country and allowing a host of scientists to tweak the settings of his digital ear. I was fascinated to learn that researchers were able to…
aaronrowe | October 17, 2007
In recent years, pharmacutical companies have re-released several of their blockbuster drugs with a new twist. By carefully controlling the spatial arrangement of each atom in the active ingredient, chemists can increase the effectiveness of medications and sometimes prevent unwanted or horrible side effects.
Modafinil (provigil) is a treatment for narcolepsy. It also allows healthy people to stay awake for extended periods of time. Armodafinil (neuvigil) is a newer product that contains only one isomer of the drug.
Methylphenidate (ritalin) is a treatment for attention deficit…
aaronrowe | October 15, 2007
This past Saturday, dozens of computer programmers descended upon a mansion in Cupertino, California to enjoy massive troughs of Indian food, camaraderie, and 12 hours of working on a diverse array of projects alongside one another.
I visited the event, called SuperHappyDevHouse 20, as an observer. It made me wonder: What if all scientists worked this way?
Granted, it would be immensely difficult, and possibly dangerous, for a hundred chemists or biologists to bring all of their instruments to a suburban home and set up shop for the weekend. All scientists have conferences that they can…
retrospectacle | October 15, 2007In but a few hours I'll be on a jet plane to Amsterdam, to give an academic talk at a meeting. Today has been a mix of stress (blogging scholarship, practice talks) and exhilaration (my friend's thesis defense is today and I'm gonna be in Europe soon!) exacerbated by more caffeine and less sleep than any normal person should function on.
While I'm gone (I get back on the 24th), I am pleased to announce that I will have a guest blogger filling in to keep the ball rolling here at Retrospectacle. That person is my friend Aaron Rowe, blogger at Wired Science Blog and PhD student in Biochemistry…
retrospectacle | October 15, 2007
As I mentioned in a previous thread, I'm responsible for inviting three speakers to the 2008 Neuroscience Spring Symposium. Its an incredible opportunity to meet scientists from around the US, and I've already had the pleasure of being turned down by both Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. However, one person whom I'm most excited to hear back from hasn't answered my emails. That person is the elusive Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, who in fact, had his own blog.
Shulgin is a Harvard and Berkely-educated chemist, famous for writing the books PiHKAL and TiHKAL (both on the topics of psychoactive…
retrospectacle | October 14, 2007There's a new viral film breezing through the internet, demonstrating what appears to be a way to make ordinary soda glow. Only one problem, its a big fake.
The video claims that just adding baking soda and some hydrogen peroxide to Mountain Dew will result in the over-caffinated beverage achieving an eerie glow. However, closely watching the video, which is available on YouTube, shows that in addition to these ingredients, theres another item added to the Dew-- the contents of a glowstick. The glow fluid goes into the soda, using sleight of hand, and the hydrogen peroxide activates the…
retrospectacle | October 13, 2007Some say nothing quite says "I love you" like a diamond ring, but *I* say nothing quite says "I'm a huge geek" like these rings.
You know, there's so many times I've wished I'd been able to generate random numbers between 1 and 20. Wait! Now I can with this cool D20 ring, *and* look fashionable. Righteous.
Are you the type that needs to know your Google vanity score at all times, have it updated on a daily basis, and use it as mad digital bling? Then this Google Vanity Ring is for you.
It must be the only ring that come with a docking station.
(More geeky rings below the fold...)
These…