Batcopter flying in bat swarm (half-speed) from Kenn Sebesta on Vimeo.

When DIY robotics and the single-minded persistence of scientists intersect, you get things like the Batcopter. This four-propellered hovering boxspring was designed by Boston University researchers to infiltrate flocks of millions of bats as they bob and weave, recording data about how they manage to avoid colliding while simultaneously (we are confident) scaring the bejeezus out of them.

Built from chromed Home Depot towel racks, the first Batcopter was too heavy to fly correctly when the team got down to their research site in Texas, where millions of Brazilian free-tailed bats wing out each night.

But the local ammunition and hardware stores were happy to help.

The second Batcopter was rigged from carbon-fiber hunting arrows, packing foam, and twine, and the four props were surrounded with netting to keep the bats from getting sucked in. The real star of the flyer, the team says, was Open Pilot’s CopterControl, a self-stabilizing, easy-to-use control system for home-built unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).

The team got some good recordings from one airborne camera and three on the ground before the Batcopter’s electronics started to burn out in the Texas heat. The craft took flight once more, to demonstrate its control mechanism for the camera, but took a fatal, spine-snapping dive when a ...

The concave-eared torrent frog.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hear each other over the low-frequency roar of jetliners and subway trains? For some rodents, bats, and marine mammals, environmental noise doesn’t normally pose a problem, as they can communicate at ultrasonic frequencies (greater than 20 kHz, just above our maximum hearing range). There are also a couple of amphibians that exhibit this trait, but in an odd twist, researchers have now learned that female concave-eared torrent frogs are deaf to the ultrasonic components of the males’ calls.

The concave-eared frog is a tree-loving native of the Huangshan Mountains in China. In choosing this woodsy area, the nocturnal amphibians must put up with one minor annoyance: streams that produce constant ambient noise. In 2006, Jun-Xian Shen, a biophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, and his research team discovered that the frogs get around this sonic clutter by adding ultrasonic frequencies to their normal calls (pdf). The frogs were the first non-mammalian vertebrate found to do this, and scientists have since learned that Borneo’s hole-in-the-head frogs (yes, that’s the actual name) also chirp in ultrasonic frequencies. After finding these ultrasonic noises, ...

Mars Express is a European Space Agency probe that’s been orbiting the Red Planet since 2003, returning vast amount of data. Lately it’s been taking some amazing images and video of the tiny Martian moon Phobos, and the ESA just released this amazing footage of the lumpy potato moon passing by Jupiter as seen from the orbiting craft:

How cool is that? Engineers saw this viewing opportunity and actually changed the orbit of Mars Express to be able to see it. Phobos passed a mere 11,400 km (6800 miles) away when these shots were taken, but Jupiter was 530 million km (320 million miles) in the background. That’s why a moon only 27 km (16 miles) across can appear to dwarf a planet 140,000 km (86,000 miles) across! In the diagram here, the relative positions of all four players is shown; click to enbarsoomenate.

The animation consists of 104 frames taken over a period of just over one minute. It’s useful, too. By knowing the position of the spacecraft and Jupiter, the orbit of Phobos itself can be better determined. Phobos is weird: it orbits so close to Mars ...

What’s the News: As human societies adopted agriculture, their people became shorter and less healthy, according to a new review of studies focused on the health impacts of early farming. Societies around the world—in Britain and Bahrain, Thailand and Tennessee—experienced this trend regardless of when they started farming or what stapled crops they farmed, the researchers found.

This finding runs contrary to the idea that a stable source of food makes people grow bigger and healthier. The data suggest, in fact, that poor nutrition, increased disease, and other problems that plagued early farming peoples more than their hunter-gatherer predecessors outweighed any benefits from stability.

How the Heck:

The researchers dug through data from more than 20 studies that collected clues to stature and overall health—everything from dental cavities to bone strength—from ancient skeletons. These studies focused on a wide range of cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas as they transitioned from foragers to farmers.
The team saw that across the board, people’s height decreased and health worsened as they traded hunting and gathering for the garden and the herd.
What accounts for the decline? While we tend to think that growing our food rather than ...

What’s the News: You might think that identical twins have an advantage when it comes to crime—with the same DNA, who could tell them apart? But new research with a squad of scent-trained Czech police dogs reveals that even identical twins have their own individual smells, even if they live in the same house and eat the same food.

How the Heck:

Scent line-ups for identifying suspects are regularly used in the Czech Republic, Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and several other European countries. Trained dogs are provided with a scent from the scene of a crime and then sniff out the matching scent from sweat samples taken from suspects.
The researchers took sweat samples from two sets of identical twins and two sets of fraternal twins (whose status they verified with DNA testing), as well as plenty of samples from unrelated children. All the samples were taken in the same room and with the same scientist present, so background odors wold cancel out.
Then, 10 trained German Shepherds, police dogs used solely for identifying suspects by scent, were put through a total of 120 scent line-ups by police officers who had no knowledge of which pads were which. In every single trial, the dogs correctly identified the individuals they were seeking, even when an ...

Good news, everyone!

I’ve written a new article for Blastr, the news and opinion web portal for the SyFy channel. This one is "7 TV scientists that even real scientists approve of", and is essentially my Top 6 (with a tie for second place, bringing it to 7) favorite fictional scientists on TV. The picture here may be something of a spoiler for one of them. Whaaaa?

I originally wrote the article as my favorite astronomers on TV, but decided to expand it to all scientists. That didn’t change my list much; it just made it easier to include a couple of folks. The problem with a list like this is, first, keeping it short — there are a lot of potential candidates. I got around that by adding an Honorable Mention at the bottom of each section.

Also, it’s hard to remember everyone! For example, several commenters on the article point out I didn’t include Walter Bishop from Fringe, and I have to cop to that one. I really like Walter, and to be honest the reason I ...

Whenever I speak, write, or blog (especially blog) about reasoning biases, there’s a common rejoinder. Can’t we use better education to teach people to see past their own blinders?

While I think some kinds of advanced training are indeed about bias control–good journalism, science–in general I’m skeptical that one can make much headway at this in the basic educational system. The reason is that the biases are activated automatically, pre-conscious thought. Indeed, there is published research showing that getting older and more educated doesn’t curtail reasoning biases, and also that we see contradictions and hypocrisy in those we disagree with, not those we agree with.

Yet the plea for better education still persists. Frankly, I chalk the resistance up to that old “Enlightenment ethic” (if only we could make people better educated and get them better information) that is very very hard to dislodge, even when one is citing science to dislodge it.

Now, I don’t know for sure that there is no way to educate away our biases. I’m simply skeptical of it. And I’m not the only one. Let me commit a logical fallacy of my own, the argument from authority. Here’s the University of Virginia’s Jonathan Haidt, who some think is pretty important on these matters, discussing the very point:

Why is the confirmation bias, in particular— this is the most damaging one of all—why is the confirmation bias so ineradicable? That is, why do people automatically search for evidence to support whatever they start off believing, and why is it impossible to train them to undo that? It’s almost impossible. Nobody’s found a way to teach critical thinking that gets people to automatically reflect on, well, what’s wrong with my position?

Could there be a way? Maybe. I imagine it would less involve teaching people about various logical fallacies and more involve teaching people to be cool and zen and not respond emotionally. I’m thinking more Jedi training than Bertrand Russell training. What do you think?

Pain is a paradox. It feels like the most real, objective experience we can have, and yet it can be weirdly malleable. It’s better to think of pain, like memory or vision, not as a simple reflection of the world, but as a strategy we’ve evolved to stay alive. Thinking this way can help make sense of the awful experience of chronic pain, when this urgent signal refers to nothing except a brain caught in its own feedback loops. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at the latest understanding of pain, and some promising research that uses these insights to search for a new, more rational pain-killer. Check it out.

[Image: Boy With A Rooster by Adriano Cecioni, 1868. Photo from Kate Eliot/Flickr via Creative Commons License]

I’m always on the lookout for questionable science coming from the left–and this Counterpunch article, entitled “Is the Dramatic Increase in Baby Deaths in the US a Result of Fukushima Fallout?”, certainly seems to qualify.

The authors report on an increase in infant mortality across 8 U.S. northwestern cities during April and May. And let’s give them their claim that this is not some fluke.

The authors then leap to the implication that radiation from Fukushima–wafting from 5,000 miles away–is the cause!

And yet no discussion is provided of how much radiation is actually arriving on the shores of the West Coast, or whether it is at dangerous levels; there is simply a recitation of the effects of Chernobyl on children–but Chernobyl created much more radiation, and it was, basically, in the middle of Europe. See my Point of Inquiry episode on this.

I’m sorry, but you can’t start speculating about dead babies without a much stronger basis than this. For a saner discussion of risks to the West Coast, see here, or here.

Goes to show that misuse of science can clearly occur on the left. Bad lefties!

Much ado was made over the recent news that the Sun’s magnetic activity may be cooling off over the next few years. Can this mean the Earth itself will literally cool off, slipping into an ice age? Some news sites are reporting it that way (of course, the execrable Daily Mail uses the headline "Earth facing a mini-Ice Age ‘within ten years’ due to rare drop in sunspot activity"; which isn’t even within a glancing blow of reality).

The answer — spoiler alert! — is almost certainly "no". I want to make sure that’s clear, because I will bet essentially any amount of money that some climate change denial sites will run with this story and claim that we don’t need to worry about global warming. That’s baloney, and what follows is why. The reasons take a minute to explain, but of course that’s where the cool stuff (haha!) is. So let’s take this one step at a time. And if you have the attention span of an E. coli bacterium, you can skip down to the conclusion section.

[Note: a lot of ...

If you walk by a European river on a summer’s day, you might get to hear the animal kingdom’s champion vocalist. His song sounds like a train of chirps, and from a metre away, it’s as loud as whirring power tools. The din is all the more incredible because it is produced by an insect just two millimetres in length – the lesser water boatman, Micronecta scholtzi

Micronecta means “small swimmer” and it is aptly named. It’s among the smallest of the several hundred species of water boatmen that row across the bottom of ponds and streams with paddle-shaped legs. The males are the ones that sing, and they often do so in large choruses to attract the silent females. These songs are famously loud. Even though the insect lives underwater, you can hear its call from the riverbank, several metres away.

Now, Jérôme Sueur from the Natural History Museum in Paris has measured Micronecta’s song using underwater microphones. He found that it the small swimmer is a record-breaker. On average, it reaches 79 decibels, about the level of a ringing phone or a cocktail party. But at its peak, ...

At The Intersection Chris Mooney points to new research which reiterates that 1) political ideology exhibits some heritability, 2) and, there are associations between political ideology and specific genes. I’ll set #2 aside for now, because this is a classic “more research needed” area at this point. But as I mentioned in the comments the heritability of political ideology is well known and robust. From what I can gather most people assume it’s mediated through personality traits. In the comments Chris asks:

That sounds sensible. What i find amazing is that if the heritability of politics is so robust–and I agree, it would happen via personality–why is this so widely ignored?

There are I think several issues at work. First, many people are not comfortable within imagining that beliefs which they attribute to their conscious rational choice are not only subject to social inculcation, but that may also have an element of genetic disposition. Second, most people have a poor grasp of what heritability implies. Take a look at some of Chris’ commenters. The response is generally in the “not even wrong” class. Finally, what’s the actionable component to this? In other words, what are people going to do ...

Update: John Hawks’ lab is working in the same area, and he disagrees with the specific results presented here. Always reminds you to be careful about sexy results presented at conference! (someone should do a study!)

So claimed Peter Parham at a Royal Society meeting last week, Human evolution, migration and history revealed by genetics, immunity and infection. You can actually listen to the talk by pulling down the mp3 file. To get the part about human evolution and introgression, jump to 24 minutes in.

Here is the general sketch: It looks like ~50 percent of the HLA Class I alleles in Europeans derive from Neandertals, ~70-80 percent of HLA Class I alleles in East Asians derive from Denisovans, and that and ~90-95 percent of HLA Class I alleles in Papuans derive from Denisovans. If you recall, ~2.5% of the total genome content of non-Africans seems to be Neandertal, while ~5% of the total genome content of Papuans seems to be Denisovan. The total genome content proportions are rough estimates, there may be some wiggle room in there. But you can see that the HLA allele admixture estimates from these ancient Eurasian lineages is greater by an order ...

by Jon Winsor

In Monday’s piece on Rush Limbaugh, Chris mentions Rush’s confidence—that Limbaugh has psychologically “seized and freezed” on “climategate”, using it for his go-to excuse to end all discussion on climate.

It’s true that Rush is nothing if not confident. But this is partly a matter of what Rush Limbaugh does all day, nearly every day. As Nate Silver pointed out, there are certain demands that the medium of talk radio makes. Uncertainty and shades of grey don’t play well to Rush’s audience, who are often mowing their lawns and channel surfing through stations. So Rush has developed certain professional skills and habits to give his audience what it wants, which isn’t trenchant analysis of a topic, isn’t a discussion informed by reliable sources–Rush is above all an entertainer, as he often reminds us. And it seems he doesn’t feel he owes his audience much more than that.

…Which has me thinking of the conservatives who didn’t think of themselves as entertainers, who probably served as Limbaugh’s inspirations, and who originally worked in the medium of the essay and op-ed, not radio. Recently, a number of columnists have been reflecting on the work of the late Irving Kristol (whose work will be published soon in a new collection of essays). Most of the columns I’ve read make the following two points: 1) that Kristol was immensely influential (and not just an essayist–the word impresario often crops up), and 2) that Kristol continually drew conclusions that oversimplified his subjects—but drew those conclusions in so confident a way, so unacknowledging of other views, that his work seemed designed to simply end productive discussion.

George Scialabba in The Nation is the most scathing on Kristol:

Matisse said he wanted his art to have the effect of a good armchair on a tired businessman. Irving Kristol seems to have wanted his writing to have the effect of a good martini on a beleaguered corporate executive. The executive’s prejudices, widely scorned among the young and the educated (in the 1960s and 70s, that is, when Kristol began offering this therapy), were eloquently reaffirmed; his feelings, wounded by impertinent criticism, were tenderly soothed; his conscience, feeble but occasionally troublesome, was expertly anaesthetized. The executive’s gratitude knew no bounds; in return, he and his foundations showered their faithful servant with the money and favors that made Kristol so prominent a figure in American intellectual life.

…Kristol’s breezy certainty… is a thing to be envied. His ideological comrade Joseph Epstein wrote wonderingly of Kristol’s “commanding tone, supremely confident about subjects that are elsewhere held to be still in the flux of controversy, assuming always that anyone who thinks differently is perverse or inept.”

Kristol’s readers were decidedly not mowing lawns. They were donating to the then-fledgeling conservative foundations. He was also inspiring the next generation of conservative figures (like Limbaugh). Schialabba calls Kristol, despite his shortcomings (or perhaps because of them), “one of the most influential minds of his generation.”

Of course, you could argue that the job of someone writing for the Nation is to polemicize, and perhaps even build up some straw men. But we can also quote Karl Rove:

Karl Rove… called Mr. Kristol an “intellectual entrepreneur who helped energize several generations of public policy thinkers.” Through editing, writing and speaking, Mr. Kristol “made it a moral imperative to rouse conservatism from mainstream Chamber of Commerce boosterism to a deep immersion in ideas,” said Rove.

Franklin Foer at the New Republic has a similar opinion of Kristol’s influence:

Kristol’s significance to the movement very nearly matches [William F.] Buckley’s. The latter re-launched American conservatism in the 1950s, bringing the disparate forces of reaction and libertarianism under one anti-communist, anti-statist banner. But under Buckley’s leadership the movement remained raw, disorganized, apocalyptic-minded, delusional about the prospects of repealing the New Deal, and poised perennially to suffer Barry Goldwater’s fate. Kristol did more—as an ideologist and an institution builder—to solve the engineering problems that plagued Buckley’s contraption, and to burrow the tunnel through which conservatism entered its triumphal era.

On the quality of Kristol’s work, Foer writes:

For better or for worse, he would make his case by issuing categorical judgments, without expending much effort to provide bolstering evidence. Nathan Glazer titled his contribution to one Festschrift “A Man Without Footnotes.” At his best, this liberated Kristol to render broad judgments about history, politics, and life—the timeless questions of philosophy, which genuinely animated him…

But he also played the part of the counter-establishment pundit, the ideological provocateur, and in that role his pronouncements feel significantly less monumental. As he assumed his place as the “godfather” of a movement, bromides increasingly displaced his fine judgments, and his essays lost the vitality that came with his struggle to define a new politics. His thinking calcified into aphorism, and the aphorisms were often caricatures of ideas designed to rally the troops. He felt comfortable quipping, “It is the selfimposed assignment of neoconservatism to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong.”

The part about “without footnotes” seems crucial (most of Glazer’s essay can be found here). Yuval Levin’s attack on Chris’s work a few years ago cried out for footnotes. Reading Levin’s essay I found myself asking something like, “He seems supremely confident. But strangely, there are absolutely no science references. Isn’t he even going to drop Bjorn Lomberg’s name?” Or with George Will’s disastrous op-ed, I found myself asking, “just what are those ‘20 Internet reference links’”? These kinds of referenceless assertions seem similar to Rush Limbaugh’s “exchange” with NH resident Michael Hillinger, where there was no good faith attempt to publicly justify a case, just a flat assertion and a cut to a commercial.

Of course, the phrase “without footnotes” is mostly figurative here. No one expects a newspaper columnist to literally use footnotes. But still, footnotes exist for a reason. They are like the grade school math teacher who requires her students to “show your work,” partly to make sure students aren’t just giving someone else’s answers, but partly because mistakes can be instructive. When you see how someone came to a wrong conclusion, there’s often something to learn.

Being “without footnotes,” or not being forthcoming with sources of information, can be a sign that you’re not playing the same good faith game as everyone else. You’re not willing to lay down your marker on the table and have it discussed. It seems to show a lack of respect for values that a country founded on Enlightenment principles should hold dear. And Kristol certainly wasn’t holding up those values when he at one point called talk-radio populism “the ‘last, best hope’ of contemporary conservatism.”

It’s Japan week on NCBI ROFL! All week long we will be featuring the funniest research related to the Land of the Rising Sun. Enjoy!

“The aim of the present study was to develop a preliminary version of the Food Craving Inventory for Japanese (FCI-J) and to investigate the phenomenon of food craving among Japanese females. One hundred and eighty-five female college students completed newly developed FCI-J. Factor analysis yielded conceptual factors that were interpreted as sweets, snacks, western foods, sushi, and rice. Test-retest and internal consistency analyses indicated a good reliability for both total score and score of subscales. In addition, results showed that the FCI-J has a good content, concurrent, construct, and discriminant validity. It is noteworthy that “rice craving” may be characteristic among Asian rice consuming countries, and that there are considerable “sushi cravers” in Japan. These findings suggested that the craving for some kind of food is influenced by the tradition of food products and cultures.”

Photo: flickr/ Kirti Poddar

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Garlic: a sensory pleasure or a social nuisance?
Discoblog:

Here’s the announcement:

And: Science journalist Chris Mooney explains the psychological factors behind science denial and how our pre-existing beliefs affect our capacity for logic. Author Benjamin Skinner speaks to us about his work exposing the world of modern-day slavery, and Jon Meacham delivers an “In Perspective” essay on the West Virginia coal mining disaster and the need for a national energy plan.

Check your local listings for details.

Update: Stephen Dubner emailed me, and pointed me to this much longer segment which has a lot of Bryan Caplan. So it seems like the omission that I perceived was more of an issue with the production and editing process and constraints of the Marketplace segment than anything else.

End Update

I play a lot of podcasts during the day as I go about my business on my iPod shuffle. One of them is Marketplace, which has a regular Freakonomics Radio segment, where Stephen Dubner “freaks” you out with incredible facts and analysis, often with a helping hand from Steven Levitt. With all due respect to Dubner and Levitt, this still has very pre-Lehman feel. Economics has “solved” the workings of the explicit market, so why not move on to other areas which are ripe for conquest by the “logic of life?”

In any case this week’s episode kind of ticked me off just a little. It started off with the observation that college educated women apparently put 22 hours weekly into childcare today, vs. 13 hours in the 1980s. I guess fewer latchkey kids and more “helicopter parents?” Dubner basically indicates that the reasoning ...

What’s the News: A number of recent studies have suggested that brain scans could be used to diagnose autism. Virginia Hughes investigated these claims in a report for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. While some researchers feel these tests could soon be ready for the clinic, she found, others feel that relying on the scans for diagnosis is at least premature, and perhaps entirely misguided. Some important points in her report:

How the Would-Be Autism Tests Work:

The studies have focused on a variety of possible indicators of autism and used several types of scans: measuring activation of brain regions as people do or experience particular things; examining neural anatomy; tracing connectivity between parts of the brain; and analyzing the electrical activity produced by neurons firing.
All the scans, however, have one central goal: picking out reliable, predictive differences between the brains of children with autism and unaffected children.

The Shortcomings:

For the scans to be useful in diagnosis, they have to be able to distinguish children with autism not only from healthy children but from children with other conditions who have similar symptoms, such as trouble with language ...

For every expectant father who’s ever wished they, too, could feel a fetus kicking their bladder, science now has an answer. Researchers in Japan have put together a suit packed with balloons, sensors, and warm water so you can feel what it’s like to be pregnant.

The suit, called Mommy Tummy, mimics kicking with a system of 45 balloons that inflate and deflate, and movement sensors and accelerometers pick up on the wearer’s activities, so the “fetus,” represented by a four-liter bag of warm water, can respond to exercise or sudden movements with redoubled kicking. Vibrating actuators produce the illusion of wiggling, as New Scientist describes:

When two vibrating sources placed a distance apart move at the same time, it triggers a sensation in between the two points. So by varying vibrating pairs over time, the simulated fetus seems to squirm.

And, in a cool but somewhat unrealistic move, the scientists have hooked the suit up to a screen, so you can watch a simulation of the fetus’ response while you stroke your stomach or walk around. For the thrill-seekers out there, a 9-month pregnancy can be recapitulated in two minutes, or it can be spread out over a longer period for a ...

One of the things I love about nearby galaxies is the incredible amount of detail we can get when we aim our best telescopes at them. For proof, I offer this amazingly intricate Hubble portrait of Centaurus A:

Isn’t that breathtaking? [Click to galactinate and see it in magnificent detail.]

Cen A (as those of us in the know call it) is pretty close by as galaxies go, a mere 11 million light years distant. For scale, our own galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and Andromeda, the closest big spiral galaxy, is a hair under 3 million light years away.

Cen A is a bit of a mess. It’s an elliptical galaxy, which are usually giant cotton balls in space. Calm, quiet, and sedate, they generally possess very little gas and dust and don’t form stars.

Obviously, Cen A hasn’t been keeping up with the neighborhood association rulebook.

In its defense, Cen A apparently suffered a recent collision with another galaxy, absorbing the intruder’s stars, gas, and dust. As you can see in the image here, the dust cuts across the bigger elliptical galaxy’s middle like a Texas cowboy’s belt, but ...