May 2012
3 posts
Extremely Slow and Incredibly Deep →
Scientists are interested in extremes. The biggest and smallest, slowest and fastest tend to tell us more about the ultimate rules and limitations that govern all of life than the middle-of-the-road. During a recent trip with the research vessel R/V Knorr, scientists found something remarkable. Drilling sediment cores from the bottom of the North Pacific Gyre, a huge system of currents between...
April 2012
1 post
WatchA computer simulation of what happens when two spiral galaxies collide. At various points, the simulation stops to show a comparison to pictures of actual galaxy pairs in the midst of this process, as seen from the Hubble telescope. In a few billion years, the Milky Way might undergo this process, merging with our largest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy.
March 2012
7 posts
How We Know →
Freeman Dyson on science and information:
Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest...
Fractal Dimensions
How long is the coast of Britain? The answer, surprisingly, depends on the size of your ruler. If you measure with a big stick, you will only pick up the rough features, but if you measure with a smaller one, your route will be longer. In 1967, Benoît B. Mandelbrot wrote a paper called How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. In it, he contends that,...
Not Explaining a Visual Illusion
This is the Hermann grid illusion. It’s a very well-known and simple optical illusion. When you look at the intersections of the white lines, you see illusory dark blobs.
The standard explanation for this has to do with retinal ganglion cells. These cells pool information from several rod and cone cells in the retina and transmit it to the brain. The area each ganglion cell collects...
February 2012
4 posts
The Higgs FAQ 1.0 →
If you’re reading this blog, you’ve most certainly heard of the Higgs particle, that elusive thing the Large Hadron Collider is trying to find. But do you have any understanding of what it is, other than a vague notion that it has something to do with particles having mass? I can’t say I really had, but here’s a helpful FAQ.
January 2012
11 posts
The Cost of Knowledge →
Science should be open. If you support that sentiment, this initiative is good news. It is a call for researchers to declare a boycott of Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of scientific journals in the world. Elsevier makes enormous profits off the free labor of scientists all over the world. Scientists do the research, write the papers, do the editing and peer-review, and then the paper...
Psychedelics Are Back
In the scientific limelight, that is. Sort of. In the 1950s and 60s, there was a great deal of optimism about the potential of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic use. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin, the active substance in magic mushrooms, were touted as the cure for everything from depression and unhappy relationships to serious crime. As the hippie era wound down and these drugs were made illegal,...
Why a classic psychology experiment isn’t what it... →
Priming is a psychological phenomenon in which being exposed to a word or a stereotype can make us more likely to later act according to the prior stimulus, even if we have no conscious recollection of it. For example, people are more likely to complete a word stem like “TH” with “think” if they were previously exposed to that word. One widely cited study published in 1996...
The Discovery of Vitamins
The concept of vitamins is a hundred years old this year.
During the late 19th century, there were outbreaks of fatal beriberi in East Asia. The study of this disease would lead to the discovery of vitamins. Kanehiro Takaki, a doctor in the Japanese navy, took a special interest in the disease. The navy was plagued by illness: between 1878 and 1881, in a sample of a thousand men, each man in the...
December 2011
4 posts
2011 Roundup
It’s that time of year again: for a few weeks, writers everywhere can get away summarizing what they’ve already said rather than writing anything new. As a reader, I appreciate it, because I don’t obsessively follow every magazine, every blog, so it’s likely I’ll have missed something in the roundups. Like last year, here is a collection of some of the more...
The Big Five Personality Traits →
Unfortunately, I feel the need to issue an all-out bullshit alert. The popular Myers-Briggs personality test is bullshit. The Big Five, however, are not, but we’ll get to that.
You’d think that a psychological test that is popular everywhere except in psychology would raise some eyebrows, but no matter. Normally rational, scientifically-minded people seem to fall as hard for this as...
Quantum Computing Promises New Insights →
Scott Aaronson writes in the New York Times:
In everyday life, it would be silly to speak of a “minus 30 percent chance of rain tomorrow,” much less a “square root of minus 1 percent chance.” However, quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which are closely related to probabilities but can also be negative (in fact, they are complex numbers). Crucially, if an event (say, a...
November 2011
9 posts
Feeling Pain and Being in Pain →
So memory isn’t so simple. You know what else turns out to be unexpectedly complex? Pain. Pain is unpleasant. When something hurts, we don’t like it. Right? Now, there exist cases of congenital analgesia, or hereditary inability to feel pain. And most of us have experienced the effects of local anesthetics, so it’s not entirely out there to imagine that someone could experience...
Why Do Woodpeckers Resist Head Impact Injury: A... →
Found via the PLoS impact explorer, a study of why woodpeckers don’t get headaches despite slamming their heads into wood all day:
The special macro/micro morphological structures in woodpecker’s head including the hyoid bone, the uneven plate-like spongy bones and unequal length of upper/lower beak were major factors to non-impact-injuries. The long hyoid bone has played a role of...
Science Behind the Factoid: We're All Made of Star...
We are all made of star stuff, Carl Sagan said. This isn’t so much a factoid as a plain fact, but it’s worth taking a look at exactly what this astonishing fact really means.
The modern theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, or the theory of how atomic nuclei are created inside stars, started with a very influential 1957 paper by Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler...
Mars500 ends today →
For 520 days, since June 2010, six would-be astronauts have been undergoing a simulated mission to Mars at an experimental facility in Russia. The project, which is a collaboration between the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to study the psychological and physiological effects of isolation beyond the six-month rotation of the International Space...
1 tag
October 2011
8 posts
Science Behind the Factoid: 93% Body Language
As we all know, 78.3 percent of statistics are made up, probably because exact, precise numbers seem very authoritative and neat. One such made up but commonly repeated statistic is this: 93 percent of communication is body language, or 93 percent of all human communication is nonverbal. The wording and exact percentage sometimes varies, but the essence remains the same: words mean almost nothing....
Russia restores its orbital GLONASS group →
GPS used to be the Global Positioning System. Meaning, the only system of its kind. Although free to use across the world, the system is operated and controlled by the US government. Naturally, this makes other countries uneasy. During the 2008 war in South Ossetia, when the US backed Georgia and Russia backed South Ossetian separatists, GPS was blacked out in the region. There are several...
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2011 Nobel Prizes →
The 2011 winners of the Nobel prizes in physics and physiology or medicine have been announced. The physics prize goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess for their research on a specific class of supernovae, which turned out to be unexpectedly dim, indicating that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. The prize in medicine was awarded to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A....
Why Is There Music? →
Music is present in all cultures. It’s a very basic thing that nearly all humans enjoy, but unlike, say, food or sex, we can’t connect it to any survival advantage. So why is there music, and what is it we enjoy about it? Those are some questions the Auditory Processing Laboratory at Montreal Neurological Institute is trying to investigate. In a series of papers, scientists from the...
September 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Évariste Galois →
With films like A Beautiful Mind, about the far less eventful life of John Nash, it’s a little surprising that no one’s run with the idea of a biopic about Évariste Galois, whose life ticks all the boxes in the “romanticized mathematician” schema. The real story is so good that it seems unnecessary to fictionalize it further, but there are more myths about Galois than about...
When Intense Belief Kills →
The Atlantic discusses a deadly culture-bound syndrome. When you’re dreaming, your body becomes paralyzed, so that you don’t act out your dreams in sleep. There are two ways this mechanism could fail: either you could not be paralyzed in sleep, in which case you might sleepwalk or worse. Alternatively, you could wake up while paralyzed, and this feeling, known as sleep paralysis, is...