Research
terrasig | October 16, 2008We here at the Terra Sig World Headquarters have been inundated with traffic directed by search engines following our post the other day directing readers to the NPR story on Douglas Prasher. Prasher, as is now widely known, is the former Woods Hole science who cloned the cDNA for green fluorescent protein (GFP) that enabled the work leading to this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry to at least two of the three laureates. Prasher is currently driving a courtesy shuttle for Bill Penney Toyota in Huntsville, AL, for $10 (USD) per hour. Prasher had been working for NASA in Huntsville until his…
dmunger | October 14, 2008Yesterday we tried to replicate the effect that John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle observed -- that negative facial expressions distract us from even the simplest tasks more than positive facial expressions. Hundreds of our readers watched one of two videos and were charged with counting the number of "upturned arcs" or "downturned arcs." Here's a sample video:
In this video, the "faces" formed by the arcs are smiling, but in the other video they were frowning. Both clips showed the identical number of upturned and downturned arcs -- six. Yet we weren't able to replicate…
dmunger | October 13, 2008Here's a really interesting experiment that we may be able to replicate online. Take a look at this very short video. You'll be shown a set of 12 arcs. Some of the arcs will be upturned and some of them will be turned downward, as in the example below.
You'll have about 2.5 seconds to count the DOWNTURNED arcs -- just watch the video once!
How many did you see? Record your answer below.
How many downturned arcs did you see (second try) ( polls)
After you've answered the poll, read on for an explanation of what this all means.
Just to make sure your answer isn't spoiled, I'm going…
dmunger | October 9, 2008Take a look at this video:
You may have seen it before -- it's the work of a CGI animation studio that takes the motions of human actors and turns them into animated models, giving them the ability to put incredibly realistic figures in impossible situations, like on Mars, or swimming in lava, or whatever an animator can conceive of.
But the advent of realistic simulations such as this makes it clear that people need to be more aware than ever of the potential for digital fraud. We now have email spam, but in the future we might have similar computerized instant messaging spam, or even video…
dmunger | October 7, 2008When Sarah Palin was introduced to the country, most Americans had never heard of her -- but many people noticed that she looked very similar to the then-more-famous actor Tina Fey. Can you tell which is which?
Let's make this a poll:
Which one is Sarah Palin? ( polls)
We're amazingly good at recognizing the faces of friends and family members. We can even recognize people we know well by viewing point-light displays of them walking. But what about strangers? If we see the same person twice, do we remember them correctly? How accurate are we at determining whether a person matches the…
dmunger | October 2, 2008You're at a bar, club, or church social and you've just met an absolutely stunning member of the opposite sex. You're single and available, and you detect no signs of romantic commitment in your new conversation-partner. Could he/she be interested in you too?
Or you're walking down a poorly-lit street in an unfamiliar city. It's 11:30 p.m., you're alone, and there are no signs of activity other than the occasional passing car. Suddenly you notice a large man emerge from an alleyway ahead of you and stride purposely in your direction. Is he a threat?
In situations such as these, you'd probably…
dmunger | October 1, 2008When Jim was 12 or 13, he seemed to want to watch almost every R-rated movie that came out. PG-13 movies were okay, and PG and G-rated movies were beneath his dignity. Was he simply interested in these movies because they were forbidden (as we contended), or was he somehow more drawn to the content of movies that happened to carry an R rating (as he insisted)?
To further complicate matters, there are separate ratings systems for TV, movies, video games, music, and even web sites. With such an array of ratings systems, are parents actually aware of what each rating means?
There's been…
dmunger | September 29, 2008Thomas Levenson has written an interesting post about John McCain and his fascination with high-stakes gambling. While it's clear that his gambling habit isn't going to put McCain in any serious financial danger, it does raise questions about his personality. One of the most difficult things voters try to do in an election is to predict the candidate's future behavior. We know what the candidates have done in the past, but how they'll respond in future crises is what will matter most if they are elected.
If a new crisis emerges, will the new president take risks, or play it safe? One test…
dmunger | September 25, 2008Notwithstanding the cute pictures from yesterday's post, Jim is now nearly seventeen years old. He's taller than me, has a beard, and is much less interested in having his photo taken, so I don't have any recent pictures. He also plays a mean bass guitar, and he's in a band, which means -- you guessed it -- girls have started taking an interest in him.
Of course we've explained to him the basics of sex, including contraception and preventing sexually transmitted diseases, but we always wonder whether we've done enough. If you're a parent (or a son or daughter) who's had one of these…
sb admin | September 25, 2008by revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
Like a lot of other research scientists supported by NIH I got an email yesterday from NIH Director Elias Zerhouni announcing his intention to leave his position "to devote much of my attention to writing." At least it wasn't the hackneyed "to spend more time with my family." While Zerhouni won't actually leave until the end of next month, the federal health research establishment is essentially leaderless, awaiting the next administration. The main public health institute within the NIH system, the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences…
dmunger | September 24, 2008When Jimmy and Nora were toddlers, we bought them great little plastic scooters to ride around the house. They were the perfect size for a small child. Yet Jimmy preferred to ride around on a plastic garbage truck instead, despite the fact that there was no steering wheel and the "seat" wasn't nearly as comfortable, at least to our adult eyes:
We figured this behavior was just one of Jimmy's unique quirks. It didn't really bother us, except for the knowledge that we could have saved 20 bucks on the "real" scooter if we'd only known he would end up preferring the garbage truck.
In 2003,…
grrlscientist | September 24, 2008tags: x-ray crystallography, foot and mouth disease, research, viral research, streaming video
Below the fold is an utterly fascinating video that documents the current state of the research in one lab that is developing a drug that stops foot and mouth disease virus from replicating in the host cells. Even better, this beautfully executed video was created by the lab members themselves! I can hardly wait for more scientists and labs to document their research in real-people accessible videos such as these [6:03]
This lab has its own blog, so go there!
dmunger | September 17, 2008One of Jimmy's favorite toys as a toddler was a simple little bucket of blocks. There were three shapes: a rectangular prism, a triangular prism, and a cylinder. The bucket's lid had three holes: a square, a triangle, and a circle (The picture at right was the only one I could find online -- this sort of toy has gotten much fancier in recent years).
For an adult, it's a simple matter to properly sort the shapes by placing them into the corresponding holes, but for a toddler, it's a real challenge. It took months before Jim was able to put any of the blocks through the holes, despite…
dmunger | September 15, 2008It's now taken as a given that the musical score of a movie can have huge influence on our perception of the movie. From the pulsating terror achieved in films like Psycho and Jaws, to the triumphant victories in Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean, it's hard to think about a great film without also being influenced by that film's score. Music is such an important aspect of film that when a group of students was asked to rate the emotions evoked by music in six film excerpts, only a third of them noticed that all the film clips had no music. This was on a multiple choice test, where the…
dmunger | September 11, 2008One big problem with many of the studies of video game violence is that they compare different games. Sure, people might behave more aggressively after playing Carmaggeddon instead of Tetris -- they're completely different games! What would be more impressive is if we could simply remove some of the violence from a game and see if the violence itself -- rather than, say, the game's storyline -- is what's actually the root of the aggressive behavior.
Fortunately, the standard settings of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance allowed a team led by Christopher Barlett to do just that.
They had avid…
dmunger | September 8, 2008Take a look at these pictures.
Each picture depicts four shapes -- irregular vertical columns spanning the height of the picture. It's easy to tell which letter is on a column and which is not, right? If our readers are typical, over 90 percent would agree that a is on a column and b is not. But why? The space defined by the irregular vertical lines is equal in both cases. The only difference between the two figures is which direction the "pointy" curves face and which direction the convex, "smooth" curves face. Yet nearly everyone agrees that areas defined by the convex curves (like those…
terrasig | September 7, 2008I just received a lovely e-mail from Dr Chris Patil, blogger at Ouroboros and postdoc fellow in the lab of the well-known aging researcher, Dr Judith Campisi at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Chris dialed me up to submit one of my posts to Hourglass, a monthly blog carnival he launched in July that focuses on the field of biogerontology. Chris used the celebration of his second blogiversary to establish the carnival.
Hourglass goes up on the 2nd Tuesday of each month and the next installment will be hosted on 9 September by Alvaro Fernandez over at SharpBrains. I told Chris that I'd…
dmunger | September 3, 2008You may have heard of the idea that people can only remember seven things at a time -- a seven-digit phone number, a license-plate, etc. While the size of working memory actually varies from person to person (it usually ranges from 6 to 8 items), and while people can use strategies like "chunking" to remember more, this observation is basically true.
Except when it's not true. In the 1970s, researchers found that there are actually at least two different and distinct areas of working memory, each with its own separate capacity. One is called the "phonological loop" and is used for recall of…
dmunger | August 29, 2008I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have been in middle school), I was unimpressed. Obviously making a poem rhyme requires some serious skill, since not just one sound but a series of sounds must be repeated at the same point in the poem's meter. Alliteration, by contrast, only requires the repetition of a single consonant sound at the beginning of a few words. Clearly, creating clever combinations of consonant sounds wasn'…
terrasig | August 28, 2008A couple of colleagues turned me on the other morning to a press release by researchers at the University of Warwick who recently published in PNAS that their data apparently overturns the Meyer-Overton Rule regarding solubility of a compound in olive oil and its propensity for crossing biological membranes. I'm having trouble understanding exactly why their conclusions are earth-shattering.
At the turn of the last century, Meyer (1899) and Overton (1901) independently conducted experiments to demonstrate that the longer the carbon chain of a molecule, the better it partitioned into olive…