It’s that time of year once again… The annual AAAS meeting is upon us. This is my favorite conference because I get to visit so many friends from different communities in media, policy, and science. In a few hours I’ll be flying up to Washington, DC and I’m particularly excited for 2011 because it’s been my first year serving on the Program Committee. There will be so many fantastic panels and discussions and I love the interdisciplinary nature of the meeting.

For more information, visit the website. This year’s theme is Science Without Borders, which:

integrates the practice of science, both in research and teaching, that uses multidisciplinary approaches to problem solving, crosses conventional borders, and takes into consideration the diversity of investigators and students. The program will feature sessions with strong scientific content across many science and engineering fields.

On Saturday at noon, I’ll be introducing topical speaker Samantha Joye who will discuss “Offshore Ocean Aspects of the Gulf Oil Well Blowout.”

You can browse the program here. With that, I’m off to the airport… See you in Cap City!

There’s a wonderful cartoon by Gary Larson where a penguin, standing amid a throng of virtually identical birds, sings, “I gotta be me! Oh, I just gotta be me…” As ever, Larson’s The Far Side captures the humorous side of a real natural dilemma. Social animals spend time in large groups, but they still have to tell the difference between individuals so they can recognise mates, young, leaders and rivals. As the groups get larger, so does the scope of this challenge, and some species meet it by evolving individuality. As groups get bigger, their members become more distinctive.

Kimberly Pollard and Daniel Blumstein from the University of California, Los Angeles studied different species of ground squirrels, each with a different social structure. They range from the black-tailed prairie dog or yellow-bellied marmot, which live in groups of around six individuals, to Belding’s ground squirrel, which lives in groups of ten or more.

Pollard and Blumstein found that the more sociable a squirrel is, the more distinctive their individual alarm calls. They recorded thousands of alarm calls from eight different species and for each one, they calculated “Beecher’s information statistic”. It’s a number that measures individuality, by looking at how much certainty a call provides about the identity of the caller. And as the squirrel groups got larger, so did this number. An animal like Belding’s ground squirrel has more “signature features” in its alarm calls than a black-tailed prairie dog.

In fact, group size was the biggest driving force behind individuality, explaining 88% of the variation in this important trait. Put another way: if you knew the size of a squirrel’s community was, you could make a fairly accurate stab at how unique its members’ calls were. As Pollard and Blumstein write, “The bigger the crowd, the more it takes to stand out.”

Michael Beecher (of Beecher’s information statistic fame) first proposed the idea that sociable species should be more individual in their messages back in 1982. Since then, several studies have supported his idea. Slender-billed gulls, whose nestlings gather in large communal crèches, have more personally distinctive calls than black-headed gulls, whose chicks stay in the nest. Carolina chickadees make more complex calls if they live in larger groups. And the calls of bat species get more complex as their colonies get larger.

Pollard and Blumstein think that the relationship is widespread but not universal. It will probably hold in other strongly sociable animals like dolphins, carnivores, or primates. It’s less likely to apply to groups that are more fluid or impersonal, such as fish schools or insect swarms. These congregations come together for sheer numbers; the ability to discern individuals isn’t very important. Likewise, for ants, bees or termites, it’s more important to recognise members of the same group rather than specific individuals.

Reference: Pollard & Blumstein. 2011. Social Group Size Predicts the Evolution of Individuality. Current Biology citation tbc.

More on squirrels

• Squirrels masturbate to avoid sexually transmitted infections
• Ground squirrels use infrared signals to fool heat-seeking rattlesnakes

This post is from Discoblog contributor LeeAundra Keany, a one-time Jeopardy Champion. After blowing all her winnings (a story for another blog post), she had to go back to work as an executive communications coach. In her spare time, LeeAundra has written written articles for Discover, including “Anatomy of a Brain Fart,” “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Death,” and “Can a Drunk Person Fly the Space Shuttle?“

I haven’t watched Jeopardy! in years. Prepping a little too intensely for my 2005 appearance soured me on the show. (Who brings almanacs, Shakespeare for Dummies, and the periodic table to Burning Man?) It was only Watson that brought me back into the fold. And it was an unsettling reunion to say the least. Watson was flabbergastingly good and I knew within the first few minutes of Monday’s inaugural match that he would’ve cleaned my clock. But now, even as the mighty Brad Rutter bows in defeat and heretofore unstoppable Ken Jennings “welcomes our new computer overlords” (he actually wrote that under his answer in Final Jeopardy after the last game), I for one am urging humanity to not give ...

It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.

It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.

The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.

And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.

Finally, the bot could take up that crutial task: manning a Twitter feed. The researchers note that NASA’s bot has a Twitter feed, but ...

After a long and occasionally difficult road to turning on, most people are just thrilled that the Large Hadron Collider is up and running smoothly. But already in its young life the LHC has collected enough data to yield impressive physics results. Unfortunately, those have mostly been of the form “we haven’t seen anything new yet.”

One new thing we would like to see is supersymmetry. The two big multi-purpose detectors at the LHC, named ATLAS and CMS, have both done searches for SUSY in the new data and come up empty-handed. That doesn’t mean it’s not there, actually; a “search for SUSY” is typically a search for a particular kind of signal, often in a particular kind of model. There is so much data already that it’s takes time and more than a bit of ingenuity to search through it effectively. But we could have seen evidence by now, and we haven’t.

Here is a paper from CMS, and a paper from ATLAS. There’s also a great blog post describing the results by Flip Tanedo at US/LHC Blogs. If you like your exclusion plots a bit sassier, check out Résonaances, where Jester reproduces a plot from Alessandro Strumia.

Here’s one way of thinking about the results, from the ATLAS paper (via Flip’s blog post). They look at collisions that produce a particular kind of signal — one lepton, jets (collimated collections of strongly-interacting particles produced by quark or gluon decay), and missing energy (indicating particles like neutrinos that aren’t measured by the experiment directly).

Supersymmetry predicts lots of particles and lots of parameters, so you can’t realistically explore the whole parameter space and put it on a single plot. Instead, you fix some parameters and set others to zero, leaving a two-dimensional space of possibilities. In this case, the horizontal axis is a scalar mass parameter, and the vertical axis is a fermion mass parameter, in terms of which everything else is determined (within this highly constrained and frankly unrealistic parameterization).

The solid-color regions are the places where previous experiments (the Tevatron and LEP) had already ruled them out. The dark black line is the new limit from CMS, and the dark red line is the new limit from ATLAS. Everything below those lines is ruled out.

So: the LHC has ruled out a lot of parameter space that was previously allowed for supersymmetry. Which is too bad. Except that it’s very difficult to quantify what one means by “a lot” in this case. There are many different ways to parameterize the theories, and many different searches one can do. Nature could be surprising us; it wouldn’t be the first time. Bottom line: it’s too bad we haven’t found SUSY yet, but there’s certainly no reason to declare it dead.

But supersymmetry might just be out of reach, or completely irrelevant. Theorists have to keep an open mind, and watch what happens as the experimenters push forward. My hope has always been that we’ll discover something that nobody thought of ahead of time — that possibility is very much open!

If you’re interested in language, computers, and human cognition, check out my brother Ben’s first piece for the Atlantic, in which he pops the hype balloon that has inflated around the Watson computer’s performance on “Jeopardy.” Suddenly, my stash of Simpsons trivia has become profound!

The scores (and the facial expressions of the beleaguered humans) say it all: Last night on Jeopardy, IBM’s Watson supercomputer completed its dominating victory over former champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The carbon-based life forms managed a few correct answers during the final game of the three-day match, but not nearly enough to overcome Watson’s smarts and speed.

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size IBM computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” he wrote on his video screen. [The New York Times]

Jennings, who spent much of the three-day extravaganza grimacing with frustration at not being able to buzz in ahead of Watson, wrote up his experiences for Slate today. Once the machine acquired the human skill of parsing Jeopardy questions, he writes, there was really no stopping it. If Watson knew the correct response, it was going to ring in first.

Jeopardy devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more ...

From Ed Yong:

Stock fantasy villains might like to drink from the skulls of their enemies, but the practice has its roots in historical reality. For thousands of years, humans have turned each others’ skulls into containers and drinking cups. Now, Silvia Bello from London’s Natural History Museum has found the oldest skull-cups ever recorded in a cave in Somerset, England.

…

These include three skull-cups that Bello recovered in excellent condition. Two belonged to adults and one to a 3-year-old child. All of them were made by the Magdelanian culture, a group of prehistoric people who lived in Western Europe. No one knows how they used the grisly cups, but it’s clear that they manufactured them with great control. They all bear a large series of dents and cut-marks that were precisely inflicted.

For plenty more on this gruesome find—including a step-by-step guide to crafting a skull cup of your own, if you’re so inclined—check out the rest of Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Via Peter Gleick, I come across this amazing story. Joe Read, a state legislator in Montana, has introduced a bill entitled “”AN ACT STATING MONTANA’S POSITION ON GLOBAL WARMING; AND PROVIDING AN IMMEDIATE EFFECTIVE DATE.” Here’s the text:

Section 1. Public policy concerning global warming. (1) The legislature finds that to ensure economic development in Montana and the appropriate management of Montana’s natural resources it is necessary to adopt a public policy regarding global warming.
(2) The legislature finds:
(a) global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana;
(b) reasonable amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere have no verifiable impacts on the environment; and
(c) global warming is a natural occurrence and human activity has not accelerated it.
(3) (a) For the purposes of this section, “global warming” relates to an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s surface.
(b) It does not include a one-time, catastrophic release of carbon dioxide.

So, as far as I’m concerned, this law would essentially repeal physics, because there is simply no doubt that carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere have an impact, and this is due to their basic radiative properties. Gleick agrees.

But drill down a bit, and the legislation becomes kind of interesting. Despite its incoherence, Read’s bill does suggest at points an awareness that carbon dioxide can be involved in climate change–but then offers this weird idea that “reasonable” amounts of carbon dioxide don’t matter, it’s only “a one time, catastrophic release” that matters.

Maybe it depends on what you mean by a “one time, catastrophic release.” From the perspective of the planet, the last 200 years are just the tiniest flicker in time. And there has been a catastrophic release.

I write about spiral galaxies here, and when I do it’s usually because they’re unusual. They’re really big, or small, or violent, or forming lots of stars.

So how about one that’s entirely normal? But don’t let that fool you: it’s still gorgeous. Take a gander at NGC 2841, a perfectly normal spiral galaxy as seen by Hubble:

Breathtaking, isn’t it? Click it to galactinate, or grab the super-dooper 3400 x 3000 pixel high-res version.

NGC 2841 is about 45 million light years way. That kinda sorta close, but not too far, keeping with our theme of averageness. It’s not particularly extraordinary in any way — assuming that any time you see an object tens of thousands of light years across and possessing a hundred billion stars, you’re seeing something ordinary. This type of galaxy is called flocculent: with lots of short arms instead of a two or three long, grand, majestic ones.

It’s forming stars, but not many. Those blue patches are where stars are being born, and they seem small, well-behaved, and scattered evenly across the galaxy’s disk. Everything about this galaxy is, well, polite. It doesn’t ...

We are both here in Washington, D.C. (or will be soon) for the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. Some of the stuff happening is here. First off, John Holdren speaks tomorrow night, so everybody will be expecting pointed words on the science budget.

Meanwhile, let me pull a few threads–sessions that sound very cool and where I think I’d learn something:

Comparing National Responses to Climate Change: Networks of Debate and Contention
Friday, 18 February 1:30PM-4:30PM
Organized by: Jeffrey P. Broadbent, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
SPEAKERS
Jeffrey P. Broadbent, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Comparing National Responses to Climate Change: Networks, Discourse, and Action
Dana R. Fisher, Columbia University, New York City
Understanding Political Discourse on Climate Change in U.S. Congressional Hearings
Sony Pellissery, Institute of Rural Management, Anand, India
Contestations on Climate Science in the Development Context: The Case of India
Sun-Jin Yun, Seoul National University, South Korea
Climate Change Media Debates in Korea
Jun Jin, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Role of Chinese Environmental NonGovernmental Organizations in International Talks
Koichi Hasegawa, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
Japan’s Climate Change Media and Politics: 2008–2009

Eugenie Scott has also organized a very cool session:

The Challenge of Teaching Evolution in the Islamic World
Friday, 18 February 3:00PM-4:30PM
Organized by: Eugenie C. Scott, National Center for Science Education, Oakland, CA
SPEAKERS
Taner Edis, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO
A Brief History of Islamic Creationism in Turkey
Jason R. Wiles, Syracuse University, NY
Teaching and Learning About Biological Evolution in the Muslim World
Salman Hameed, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
The Future of Acceptance of Evolution in the Muslim World

And then there’s a study of this emerging environmental issue, which has the distinction of being at 8 am on a Sunday morning:

Fractures Developing: The Science, Policy, and Perception of Shale Gas Development
Sunday, 20 February 8:00AM-9:30AM
Organized by: John P. Martin, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Albany; Michele L. Aldrich, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco
SPEAKERS
John P. Martin, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Albany
Gas Shales: Energy Rocks with Big Implications
Anthony W. Gorody, Universal Geoscience Consulting, Inc., Houston, TX
Addressing Environmental Angst: Baselines, Monitors, and Other Strategies
Abby Kinchy, Rensselaer Polytechnic University, Troy, NY
Fractious Citizens: Sociological Perspectives on the Hydraulic Fracturing Controversy

This is intellectual fare, but of course, AAAS is really a big party. Hope to see some folks there…

Do aggressive people play violent computer games in a more aggressive way? Individual difference and idiosyncratic game-playing experience.

“This study investigates whether individual difference influences idiosyncratic experience of game playing. In particular, we examine the relationship between the game player’s physical-aggressive personality and the aggressiveness of the player’s game playing in violence-oriented video games. Screen video stream of 40 individual participants’ game playing was captured and content analyzed. Participants’ physical aggression was measured before the game play. The results suggest that people with more physical-aggressive personality engage in a more aggressive style of playing, after controlling the differences of gender and previous gaming experience. Implications of these findings and direction for future studies are discussed.”

Photo: flickr/Rad Jose

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