Crocodiles like to lurk in the shallows, preparing to pounce. They are not, as a general rule, strong enough swimmers to go on extended ocean cruises whenever they feel like it. Despite this, these creatures managed to reach islands across the South Pacific. How?

Surfing.

A group of scientists led by Craig Franklin, and including the late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, studied saltwater crocs from the Kennedy River area of Northeastern Australia for about a year for a study forthcoming in the Journal of Animal Ecology. The team tagged 20 animals with receivers to give both their position and body temperature.

They found that eight crocodiles undertook a total of 42 long-distance journeys of more than 10 kilometres [6.2 miles] per day. In 96% of these trips, the reptiles traveled with the current flow. In contrast, the crocodiles were equally likely to travel with and against the current flow when making short journeys [Nature].

The body temperature reading gave the scientists another way to verify this, besides matching croc travel habits to changing ocean currents. When the tide went against the crocs, they just hung out on the beach and their body temperature rose to 90 degrees F as they soaked up the sun. However, when the current became favorable and they went traveling, their temperatures descended to more like 77 degrees.

These researchers weren’t even interested in crocodile migration patterns when they started out. But they couldn’t ignore what they found about the creature’s ability to read the flow of the ocean and travel only when it would be most efficient for them. So they looked at some historical data of tagged crocs swimming in the open sea.

One satellite-tagged crocodile, 12.6-foot-long male (3.8 meters) — left the Kennedy River and travelled 366 miles (590 km) over 25 days, timing its journey to coincide with a seasonal current system that develops in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Another croc — a 15.8-foot-long male (4.8 meters) — traveled more than 255 miles (411 km) in only 20 days through the Torres Straits, which are notorious for strong water currents [MSNBC].

According to the University of Queensland press release: “The late Steve Irwin, the original Crocodile Hunter, developed innovative capture techniques of crocodiles to ensure the Australia Zoo team were 100 percent safe. Steve was instrumental in the strategies developed to minimize stress on crocodiles throughout the research and he was integral to the success of the research project.”

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Image: Australia Zoo

Here’s a local issue that reflects a very common set of problems: the Los Angeles subway system. Such as it is. Namely, embarrassingly inadequate. Our aspirations to be considered a world-class city on the level of New York, Paris, Tokyo or London are severely restricted by the difficulties people face in getting around without a car. Or with a car, for that matter, given the traffic.

But there’s no reason it has to be like this. At any given moment, some concerned group of citizens will be agitating to improve the situation. Right now such a group is Get L.A. Moving. They’ve put together an amazing proposal for a serious subway network that would utterly transform the city, while respecting the natural contours of the existing urban environment. Click for bigger versions.

Looking at a map like this is a bittersweet experience — comparing what could be to what is. Of course it would be very expensive; they estimate about $35 billion, which doesn’t sound so crazy when spread over a number of years. Times are tough — but that’s exactly the reason why pie-in-the-sky plans like this should be taken seriously right now. There’s no better way to stimulate the economy than to pour massive amounts of money into legitimate infrastructure projects; you create jobs, but you also create value that lasts for many decades to come. Not to mention decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels, which hopefully doesn’t need to be justified.

Also — how cool would it be to have one of these babies crawling along underneath Sunset Boulevard?

In the back of my mind, the real obstacle to building a subway system in a mature city was that you couldn’t really imagine shutting down long stretches of busy streets for months or years at a time. But you don’t have to; modern tunnel-boring technology does it all underground.

Some will object that LA just isn’t dense enough to support a subway system; our attractions are spread out rather than localized to squares. That’s an utterly backwards attitude; build the subway, the density will come. With nice weather 340+ days a year, this is the perfect city in the world to have a mass transit system connecting a bunch of pedestrian-friendly outdoor plazas.

Of course, then everyone would want to come live here. So maybe it wouldn’t be ideal. But it would still be a good idea for the economy and the environment; so I’m willing to sacrifice.

Now here’s a view you don’t always get:

Wow! Click that to most cromulently embiggen!

An Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle patroled the launch area as the Space Shuttle Atlantis roared into space on its final flight in May. Check out the shadow of the plume on the ground!

The full caption reads:

Lt. Col. Gabriel Green and Capt. Zachary Bartoe patrol the airspace in an F-15E Strike Eagle as the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches May 14, 2010, at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Colonel Green is the 333rd Fighter Squadron commander and Captain Bartoe is a 333rd FS weapons system officer. Both aircrew members are assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C. (U.S. Air Force photo/Capt. John Peltier)

Thanks, gentlemen, for seeing off Atlantis in style.

Tip o’ the left wing to Reddit. Image credit: U.S. Air Force/Capt. John Peltier.

On Friday evening, in the midst of the upscale boutiques and trendy cafes of Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, a crowd filled the Galapagos Art Space for a sold-out show titled “The Science of Star Trek,” organized as part of the World Science Festival.

The crowd—scarf-wrapped, martini-sipping, not a single costumed fan in sight—was far from what one might expect at a Star Trek themed event (”closeted fans,” remarked one audience member after the show). Nonetheless, the packed space burst into applause as the night’s speakers were introduced: There was Laurence Krauss, a physicist from Arizona State; Seth Shostak, an astronomer with SETI; and Eric Horvitz, a researcher at Microsoft.

Moderating the discussion was the peppy Faith Salie, a regular on public radio but better known to Star Trek fans as the beautiful, genetically enhanced, Serena Douglas on the series spinoff Deep Space Nine.

Salie first steered the speakers into a conversation about whether the star ship Enterprise’s main means of navigating the galaxy—Warp Drive—is physically possible.

“We can’t travel through space at faster than the speed of light,” said Krauss the physicist, “but space can do whatever the heck it wants.” To illustrate his point, Krauss held up an inflated condom and proceeded to pull one end of the giant balloon towards the other in a rather Freudian demonstration of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Space, he continued as he carefully avoided touching the reservoir tip, can be warped to make two points come closer together.

Salie then questioned the panel on whether intelligent aliens— such as Romulans, Klingons and Vulcans—might exist somewhere in the universe. Shostak, the SETI astronomer, was, of course, positive that there was life beyond earth, although he couldn’t say exactly what form it might take. The other two panelists seemed far less certain. The astronomer was vindicated, however, when an audience poll revealed that everyone in the crowd (with the exception of one timid man who raised his hand in protest and then quickly lowered it) believed that intelligent life existed somewhere else in the universe.

But if aliens do exist, probed Salie, will they harm us? “That’s alien sociology,” replied Shostak, “and the data set for alien sociology is sparse.”

– by Daniel Lametti

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: The Science and the Fiction (the best and worst science in the movies)

Image: Wikipedia

There has been a bit of an uproar the past day or so that scientists have found evidence of life on Saturn’s giant moon Titan. As soon as I saw the press release I knew this was going to be a problem. So let’s be clear:

First, have we found life on Titan? No.

Have we found evidence that there might be life on Titan? Sorta. The results are preliminary and not yet confirmed; in fact, some of the evidence is from computer modeling and has not been directly observed.

Bear in mind as well that evidence is not proof. Evidence just means an observation was made that is consistent with life on the moon, but doesn’t say much else. There are non-biological explanations for the observations as well.

Of course, speculation is running rampant, so much so that Chris McKay, an exobiologist who studies Titan, has released an article clearing things up.

First, a little background. Titan is a monster, the second biggest moon in the solar system at 5150 km (3200 miles) in diameter. If it weren’t orbiting Saturn, it would probably be considered a planet in its own right: it’s bigger than Mercury and Pluto. It has a thick atmosphere, made up of nitrogen, methane, and other molecules. It’s very cold, but it’s known that lakes, probably of liquid methane, exist on the surface.

Five years ago, McKay and other scientists pointed out that if methane-based life existed on Titan, it might be detectable through a surface depletion of ethane, hydrogen, and acetylene. New observations show that this is the case; there are lower amounts of these substances than the chemistry of Titan would indicate.

As McKay points out, "This is a still a long way from ‘evidence of life’. However, it is extremely interesting."

Those are the basics. Go read McKay’s article for details. The point he makes is that the results are preliminary, may yet turn out to be wrong, if they’re right may have non-biological explanations, and we should not conclude biology is involved until we get a lot more evidence.

As far as the media goes, headlines get eyeballs and sell advertisements, of course. But in cases where the news is like this, news outlets should be particularly careful how they phrase things. They know how the public will react to certain phrases, and the phrase "evidence of life" is substantially less accurate and more likely to incite chatter than "evidence for possible life" — and the Telegraph’s technically accurate but seriously misleading "evidence ‘that alien life exists on Saturn’s moon’" is just asking for trouble.

The point is, when it comes to media outlets and big news like this, the phrase going through your head should be a variant of an old one, updated for this modern age:

"Don’t trust, and verify".

The European Southern Observatory just posted this lovely picture of the moon setting behind the Very Large Telescope observatory in Chile:

[Click to embiggen.]

Photographer Gordon Gillet was 14 km (8.5 miles) away from the observatory when he caught the full Moon behind it. The sky is pink because behind him, the Sun was rising — as it must be when the full Moon is setting.

But I had to chuckle when I read the description:

Contrary to what one may think, this picture is no montage. The Moon appears large because it is seen close to the horizon and our perception is deceived by the proximity of references on the ground. In order to get this spectacular close view, a 500-mm lens was necessary. The very long focal length reduces the depth of field making the objects in focus appear as if they were at the same distance. This effect, combined with the extraordinary quality of this picture, gives the impression that the Moon lies on the VLT platform, just behind the telescopes, even though it is in fact about 30 000 times further away.

The part about the long lens collapsing the perspective is absolutely correct. That effect has been used for decades in the film industry to make far away things look as close as things much nearer (like, say, people running along train tracks to escape an oncoming train).

When I first read the description, though, I thought they were referencing the Moon Illusion, where the Moon looks huge on the horizon. Reading it again, I see they aren’t (though it would be easy to think they are). And that’s good, because the Moon Illusion isn’t playing into this at all. I explain how it works in more detail elsewhere; it’s an illusion caused by the shape of the sky and the way our brains perceive it. Also, the Moon Illusion is an effect that only happens when we can see large parts of the sky and get a sense of perspective on it; so it can’t be photographed (or at least I’ve never seen it done, and don’t see how it could be). In the case of this picture, it’s all due to the magnification of the lens used.

And it’s a beautiful shot. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow the ESO and get notified when they post another gorgeous image like this one. This is part of their Image of the Week series, which is updated every Monday.

Image credit: G.Gillet/ESO

Remember the kerfuffle over “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The 2008 cover story in The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr contended that the barrage of information available on the Web is changing our brains, making us all shallow and deficient in our attention span. It also raised a ruckus across the blogosphere with Web users who didn’t like to be called “stupid.” Now, as if to challenge our cultural ADD, Carr has expanded that article into a book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

In book reviewers, Carr finds a friendlier audience to his “more books and less Internet” thesis. The Boston Globe is impressed with the argument, if unimpressed with drawing out the argument to such a great length:

Carr’s argument rests on just three chapters (out of ten). He lays out, first, what we now know about the adult brain’s malleability, or “plasticity,’’ and then draws on a slew of recent studies to make the startling case that our increasingly heavy use of digital media is actually changing us physiologically — rewiring our neural pathways. And not necessarily for the better. “The possibility of intellectual decay,’’ Carr notes, “is inherent in the malleability of our brains.’’

Carr, promoting his book with a CNN essay, grabs neuroscience studies to bolster several claims: That people who multitask while online struggle to concentrate when they’re offline, that spending a lot of time on electronic devices hinders creative and critical thinking, and that students who surfed the Web during a lecture retained less information than those who listened with laptops closed. (That last one is kind of a “duh”—people who fill out Sudokus or read “Twilight” books during class probably don’t retain much, either.)

But neuroscience author and blogger Jonah Lehrer is unimpressed with Carr’s scientific rigor, and with his respect for the brain. Sure, Lehrer says in his New York Times review of the book, we bounce around the Internet, distracted at every turn:

But this isn’t really the fault of the Internet. The online world has merely exposed the feebleness of human attention, which is so weak that even the most minor temptations are all but impossible to resist. Carr extends these anecdotal observations by linking them to the plasticity of the brain, which is constantly being shaped by experience. While plasticity is generally seen as a positive feature — it keeps the cortex supple — Carr is interested in its dark side.

In addition, Lehrer says, Carr may have cherry-picked studies to support his argument, but the science is not nearly so one-sided:

What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. This surprising result led the scientists to propose that even simple computer games like Tetris can lead to “marked increases in the speed of information processing.”

The key to the Carr argument, then, is not so much scientific rigor as it is an appeal to an extremely enticing romantic appeal. Even among the many Web-savvy people who responded with derision toward what feels like a reactionary attack on the modern way of life, there is the basic longing to disconnect now and then. The Wall Street Journal’s John Horgan says even those who grew up never knowing the absence of the Internet, like his teenage kids, feel it:

Like most American kids, they commune with friends via text messages and Facebook updates (email is so passé), and they spend endless hours trolling the Web for odd videos and cool music. But rather than dismissing Mr. Carr’s thesis as old-fogeyish, as I expected, they confessed that their dependence on the Internet sometimes worries them. My son would like to cut back on his online time, but he fears isolation from his friends.

But the fact that we know too much Web time could have negative side effects, and that we have doubts about the thing that made our lives so much more connected, doesn’t mean it’s making us stupid. As many reviews have noted, it’s hard not to see The Shallows as little more than the latest in a millennia-long line of nostalgia-driven scares brought on by technological revolutions, especially ones in information and media.

For more on this, check out DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer’s rebuttal to the initial Carr article, “How Google Is Making Us Smarter,” as well as Vaughan Bell’s Slate article on the history of technology scares. And remember, the power of the Internet allows you to use your brain how you wish. As the San Francisco Chronicle concludes:

Perhaps, way down deep we are becoming superficial. Yet at least this information will be available to everyone, and even with the shallowest of readings, exposure to new information will create its own new and illuminating associations. Internet access is like having the keys to the world’s greatest library. Provided that we do not become slaves to this technology, how we use this library remains our choice.

Hey, look at you, Internet user—you made it all the way to the end.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: How Google Is Making Us Smarter
DISCOVER: You Know Too Much
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Discoblog: And the Survey Says: Google Is Not Making You Stupid

Image: W.W. Norton

Last month, Costa Rica’s health ministry halted treatments at the country’s largest stem cell clinic, arguing that the treatments are unproven and possibly unsafe.

Though the Obama administration has expanded federal funding of stem cell research and there are ongoing clinical trials, there are currently no FDA-approved stem cell treatments. So some Americans, suffering from conditions ranging from cancer to spinal injuries, have looked elsewhere for experimental stem cell-based remedies, and clinics in countries such as Costa Rica, China, India, and Mexico have grown into stem cell tourist destinations.

Costa Rica’s largest clinic, the Institute of Cellular Medicine in San Jose, was operated by American entrepreneur Neil Riordan; it attracted about 400 patients for these treatments. The clinic used adult stem cells, which Costa Rica’s government had allowed the clinic to take from patients’ fat and bone marrow. The government had not authorized the clinic to use these cells for treatment.

“If (stem cell treatment’s) efficiency and safety has not been proven, we don’t believe it should be used,” said Dr. Ileana Herrera, chief of the ministry’s research council. “As a health ministry, we must always protect the human being.” [Reuters]

Researchers argue that such clinics neither provide reliable treatment nor advance research since they use anecdotal evidence for a treatment’s efficacy and don’t safeguard against other variables in their testing. Given the dire conditions of many patients seeking these clinics, many worry that desperate patients make easy targets.

The International Society of Stem Cell research has cautioned against so-called stem cell tourism. “The (U.S.) clinical trials are ambiguous at the moment,” said Dr. David Scadden, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston. “When these kinds of treatments are proposed, they’re being essentially marketed by virtue of the anecdotal report. I feel the danger of exploitation is extremely high.” [Reuters]

Despite Costa Rica’s halt on treatments, other countries continue to host stem cell tourists. Clinics in China mostly use fetal stem cells from miscarriages–which are neither adult stem cells nor the more controversial embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any type of tissue, have the potential to more easily treat a variety of conditions, but given the ease with which they grow and replicate they may also cause tumors.

Cheng Bo, deputy director of the [Wu Stem Cells Medical Center in China], said doctors there offer potential patients realistic assessments of the risks and benefits. “We tell them it’s impossible to cure patients completely,” he said. “Our goal is to improve the quality of their life or to extend their life.” Many patients–about a third are children–come from developed countries where medical treatment is in general considered superior to China’s, although they may lag behind China in stem cell research. [Washington Post]

But many experts argue that there is currently no way to realistically assess such risks, given that clinical trials are ongoing. As Costa Rica Health Minister Maria Luisa Avila said while discussing the shut-down of the Costa Rica clinic:

“This isn’t allowed in any serious country in the world.” [Reuters]

Related content:
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80beats: FDA Approves the First Clinical Trials Using Embryonic Stem Cells
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DISCOVER: Stem Cell Science Takes Off

Image: flickr / Armando Maynez

Serious scientists may disdain anecdotal evidence, but we have evidence that some of them are pretty good with an anecdote.

Last Thursday, the World Science Festival brought a collection of science geeks to The Moth, where the brave souls took the stage not to explain their work, but to tell stories of their lives in science. The evening’s biggest scientific celebrity was theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, winner of a 2004 Nobel Prize in physics. His story began with a phone call.

The editors of Scientific American were hoping he would write a rebuttal to a letter they’d just received. “The letter was from a man who I later learned was a banana farmer in Hawaii,” Wilczek recalled. “He was worried about black holes. He was worried about a particle accelerator that was being built on Long Island that could produce black holes, and he was worried that the black holes would swallow up Long Island and then the world.”

Wilczek happily wrote a response to defend the honor of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab. He noted that even if RHIC did create black holes, they’d be smaller than atomic nuclei and therefore would have such feeble gravity that “they wouldn’t be good at swallowing up anything.” He also explained that the type of particle collisions that would take place at RHIC occur naturally on Earth when cosmic rays bombard our planet–and we’re still here.

But Wilczek felt that his response was boring, and decided to spice it up a bit by mentioning “strangelets,” hypothetical particles that he said could be produced by the RHIC, and which could pose more of a threat to life, the universe, and everything. Imagine strangelets as the ice-nine from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, Wilczek said; crystals of that fictional substance turned all liquid water they came into contact with into solid ice-nine, creating a chain reaction. Strangelets could have a similar warping effect on “all nuclear matter,” said Wilczek, “which would not be good.” However, Wilczek finished his response by explaining why the doomsday strangelet scenario was “not plausible,” and happily went off on vacation.

He thought no more of it until his brother-in-law arrived at Wilczek’s isolated vacation home bearing tales of a worldwide media panic over RHIC. One article from The Sunday Times of London ran under the banner headline, “Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth,” and prominently asked in a caption whether the RHIC would be “The Final Experiment?”

At least the story had a happy ending. Wilczek spent the next two weeks trekking to a payphone near his vacation home to explain to journalists why RHIC wouldn’t kill us all. The particle collider was completed and turned on, and its findings helped Wilczek win that Nobel. And most importantly, the nuclear matter that makes up my body is feeling no stranger than usual.

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DISCOVER: The Glue That Holds the World Together
80beats: Physics Experiment Won’t Destroy Earth

Image: Wikipedia

It has been a time of much moving, lately. The MIT Knight Fellowship is over, and I'm currently in the other Cambridge (the one in England) for the briefer Templeton Fellowship. Not surprisingly, the controversy over this fellowship has sparked plenty of conversation over here among my fellow journalists/fellows. Now, with the first week of the fellowship over, I am prepared to say more about that. So far--and this is, to me, the most important point--I can honestly say that I have found the lectures and presentations that we've heard here to be serious and stimulating. The same goes for the discussions that have followed them. To be sure, we hear a fair amount about theological thought here--and I have my difficulties with theology as a field, simply because of my personal identity if nothing else. Being an atheist, it is pretty hard to relate to a theological perspective on something like, say, the meaning of the doctrine of creation. Why would something like that speak to me, resonate for me, or even make sense to me? But the details of various theologies are hardly the dominant aspect of what we're hearing about. And even when it comes to theology, I still see ...

If there were life on the Saturnian moon of Titan, the thinking goes, it would have to inhabit pools of methane or ethane at a cool -300 degrees Fahrenheit, and without the aid of water. While scientists don’t know just what that life would look like, they can predict what effects such tiny microbes would have on Titan’s atmosphere. That’s why researchers from the Cassini mission are excited now: They’ve found signatures that match those expectations. It’s far from proof of life on Titan, but it leaves the door wide open to the possibility.

In 2005, NASA’s Chris McKay put forth a possible scenario for life there: Critters could breathe the hydrogen gas that’s abundant on Titan, and consume a hydrocarbon called acetylene for energy. The first of two studies out recently, published in the journal Icarus, found that something—maybe life, but maybe something else—is using up the hydrogen that descends from Titan’s atmosphere to its surface:

“It’s as if you have a hose and you’re squirting hydrogen onto the ground, but it’s disappearing,” says Darrell Strobel, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who authored a paper published in the journal Icarus [Popular Science].

Erring on the side of caution, the scientists suggest that life is but one explanation for this chemical oddity. Perhaps some unknown mineral on Titan acts as a catalyst to speed up the reaction of hydrogen and carbon to form methane, and that’s what accounts for the vanishing hydrogen. (Normally, the two wouldn’t combine fast enough under the cold conditions on Titan to account for the anomaly.) That would be pretty cool, though not as much of a jolt as Titanic life.

The second paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Geophysical Research, addresses the second part in McKay’s equation: acetylene, the would-be food for Titan microbes. In November of last year, Cassini scientists predicted a high level of acetylene in Titans’ lakes, as high as 1 percent by volume. But this study, using the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) aboard Cassini, did not find that:

Models of Titan’s upper atmosphere suggest that significant amounts of acetylene should be produced by the reactions there, and this would provide an excellent source of carbon to any hypothetical metabolisms. The surprise of the second paper is that there’s very little acetylene to be found on Titan’s surface [Ars Technica].

Again, life is not required to account for the lower-than-expected level of acetylene. The team did find the molecule benzene, and there are possible chemical reactions that could make acetylene into benzene. But, as is the case with the hydrogen paper, scientists’ knowledge of chemistry would suggest that you’d need a catalyst or something more to speed up the reactions and burn through all that acetylene.

So something weird is going on down there. The big question—the life question—will wait for future data and probably future missions that allow researchers to unpack the peculiar chemistry of this massive moon. But we can’t rule it out.

Note: Chris McKay has published his own post on the new finds; check it out here.

Related Content:
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80beats: On Saturn’s Moon Titan, It’s Raining Methane

Image: NASA

Superstitions run rampant in our daily lives. Sportsmen wear lucky clothes that they refuse to wash during tournaments. Actors refer to Shakespeare’s Macbeth as “The Scottish Play” within the confines of a theatre, because the name is said to be cursed. Everywhere, people knock on wood, cross their fingers and carry lucky mascots.

It’s easy enough to dismiss these beliefs as the silly by-products of irrational minds, but Lysann Damisch from the University of Cologne has found an upside to superstition – they can improve our performance in a variety of tasks, from physical challenges to memory games. It’s all to do with self-confidence. Pandering to luck-related superstitions, by crossing your fingers in hope or saying “break a leg”, can boost a person’s faith in their own abilities, giving them the edge they need to excel.

First, Damisch asked 51 students to complete a dexterity challenge: get 36 ball bearings into a grid of 36 holes as quickly as possible, by tilting the cube they sat in. If she told them to start by saying either “On ‘go’, you go” or “I press the watch for you”, they took between 5 and 6 minutes to finish. But if she said “I press the thumb for you” (the German equivalent of crossing your fingers), they took around 3 minutes.

In another study, Jamisch asked 41 students to come with a lucky charm, which she took away to photograph. In some cases, she brought it back and in others, she left it in the other room, citing problems with the camera. The students then completed a seemingly unrelated memory game, where they had to match 18 pairs of face-down cards by turning over two at a time. The volunteers who had their lucky charms did much better than those who were bereft of theirs.

Before they started on the game, the recruits all completed a questionnaire. Their answers later revealed that those who were given back their charms didn’t feel any less anxious about the game. But they did feel more confident and their degree of extra optimism accounted for much of their extra success at the memory game.

In a final experiment, Jamisch repeated the lucky charm set-up with a couple of tweaked details. This time they had to make as many words as possible from a set of 8 letters and, crucially, they had to set themselves a goal to aim for. As before, those who held their lucky charms felt more confident and scored better, identifying an average of 46 words compared to the mere 31 deciphered by their mascot-less peers. Their goals revealed why – not only did they set themselves loftier targets, but they stuck at the problem for much longer.

These experiments are remarkably consistent in showing that a variety of superstitious beliefs have a positive effect on a variety of tasks, both physical and mental. They work whether the superstition is activated by someone else (as in the case of the crossed fingers) or if it’s something unique to the individual (as in the case of the lucky charms). And they work because superstitions, by prompting feelings of good luck, can make people more confident in themselves, prompting them to try harder and aim higher at the things they do.

The fact that superstitions can lead to tangible improvements in physical and mental performance could help to explain why they’re so commonplace and closely held. But before we conclude that they are a force for good (and I can sense the bristling from the skeptic community already), it is worth discussing the study’s narrow scope.

Jamisch certainly does that – she acknowledges that she deliberately focused on positive superstitions associated with good luck, because these are far more common. She might find a different effect altogether if she considered events linked to misfortune, like crossing the path of a wrongly coloured cat, doing the same tasks on Friday 13^th, or stepping under an open ladder.

Nor did Jamisch study the negative side of superstitions, the psychological drawbacks that could hinder performance rather than help it. Previously on this blog, I’ve written about how people tend to spot false connections in unrelated events and accept superstitious rituals in the first place if they lack a sense of control in their lives.

As I noted then, the big worry is that superstitions, while potentially providing temporary benefits, could prevent people from taking responsibility for changing their own fates or even form the basis of catastrophic decisions. Clearly, the effects described by Jamisch’s study need to be considered as part of a bigger psychological canvas. The effects of crossed fingers on anagram tasks is one thing, but the effects of conspiracy theories or religious traditions on our ability to understand the world around us and to make decisions in our lives is another matter entirely.

Reference: Psychological Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797610372631 or http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/05/27/0956797610372631

Image by Phyzome

More on superstition:

• Lacking control drives false conclusions, conspiracy theories and superstitions
• Creating God in one’s own image

Do you see a hovering white triangle in this picture?

This optical illusion employs “illusory contours”–pieces of an image purposefully arranged to trick your brain into seeing the whole thing. Neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha says that we play similar tricks with our ears: “The brain is basically a pattern-recognition machine. We are desperate to find patterns.”

Bharucha spoke on a seven-person panel last Thursday at “Good Vibrations: The Sound of Science,” a World Science Festival event in New York.

Bharucha asked a crowded auditorium at Hunter College to identify a sound. Shouts of “birds” rang out. One person yelled, “R2D2.” Bharucha followed the clip with a similar sounding song, and then another. After playing a combination of the three, whispers rose from the audience. From disparate bird noises came recognizable speech: “Where were you a year ago?” Some applauded.

To make this aural illusion, Bharucha first looked at a spectrogram of the spoken question. By picking out only three of the most energetic pieces–harmonics–of the speech, he could use a synthesizer to create the three bird-song cues. Like the dark portions of the optical illusion above, these sounds are incomplete pieces of the whole, but important triggers. Looking for a message in these songs–especially when nudged to look for speech–we can find it as the crowd did. “Suddenly, whoa, you hear it,” Bharucha said.

We learn to search for the patterns in our native language even in the womb, Bharucha says. He cites studies showing that eight-day-old infants have a preference for their mother’s language, clearly before they have developed spoken-language skills, and even when that language is spoken by someone other than the child’s mother.

Other patterns emerged in the other panelists’ works. Moderated by WNYC’s John Schaefer, the discussion also included biophysicist Christopher Shera, astrophysicist Mark Whittle, and composer Jacob Kirkegaard. Shera described otoacoustic emissions–when the mechanical workings of our inner ears echo into something we can record and listen to. He records these emissions in humans and animals, including anesthetized tigers. “It’s very useful,” he joked, “that the ear is is not immediately adjacent to the teeth.” Kirkegaard uses tones in his music to incite these emissions, so that our own hearing contributes to his melodies.

Whittle ended the talk with the “sounds” of the Big Bang, a mapping of background radiation from the universe’s creation onto frequencies we can hear. He described the early universe as a pipe organ with pipes 400,000 light years across, and said that if we had actually been there to listen, we wouldn’t have heard anything, since the pitch was too low and the melody would have taken too long to sound. In fact, too long doesn’t mean much, since he says we would have died instantly.

Related content:
Discoblog: “Seeing” Sounds and “Hearing” Food: The Science of Synesthesia
80beats: Forget the Hearing Aid: Why Not Regrow Inner Ear Cells?
Not Exactly Rocket Science: How our skin helps us to listen
DISCOVER: Dog Eared

Image: Wikimedia / Fibonacci

I'm glad to finally be able to announce that today I begin my new position at The University of Texas at Austin. I'm joining the Webber Energy Group as a research scientist at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy. Here at The Intersection, I'll be exploring a myriad of related topics from renewables to fossil fuels (including oil spills) to thermodynamics, and so much more. I'm really looking forward to the discussions that will ensue. As I wrote last week, if we want to establish better energy institutions, it’s up to us to make it so. Given the enormous challenges we face, improving public understanding of related issues is a big part of the solution and more important than ever. Some readers have already requested energy topics in a previous thread and I continue to be very interested in your questions. Also, if there are specific subjects you'd like to see covered, leave ideas in comments below. With that, I'm off to work... Hook 'Em Horns!