Fossilized dinosaur embryos, found still in their eggshells, have claimed the title of the oldest vertebrate embryos ever seen–they were fossilized in the early Jurassic Period, around 190 million years ago, researchers say. The embryos are from the species Massospondylus, a prosauropod, the family of dinosaurs which gave rise to iconic sauropods like the Brachiosaurus.

Robert Reisz and his team found the embryos when analyzing a clutch of fossilized eggs collected in South America in 1976. The find was just published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“This project opens an exciting window into the early history and evolution of dinosaurs,” said Professor Reisz. “Prosauropods are the first dinosaurs to diversify extensively, and they quickly became the most widely spread group, so their biology is particularly interesting as they represent in many ways the dawn of the age of dinosaurs.” [BBC News]

The well-preserved embryos are about 8 inches long and are detailed enough to give researchers a good look at what the juvenile Massospondylus looked like. What they found wasn’t exactly elegant. The juveniles looked similar to adult sauropods like Brachiosaurus, with an oversized head and four-legged strut (unlike the adult Massospondylus, which walked on two legs).

To some extent, these dinosaurs then developed as humans do today. The infancy is “awkward,” as the researchers put it, and a more erect stance and evenly-proportioned body only comes later. Additionally, the embryos lack teeth. With the awkward body proportions, it’s then likely that the hatchlings would have required parental care. If that’s the case, these fossils also document the oldest record of parental care, according to the paleontologists. [Discovery]

Related content:
80beats: Stay-at-Home Dinosaur Dads May Have Hatched Eggs and Cared for Young
80beats: The Dilemma of the Dinosaur Stance: How Did They Hold Their Heads?
80beats: Dinosaur “Mummy” Reveals a Creature With Bird-Like Skin
80beats: How Dinosaur Feet Evolved Into Bird Wings: New Fossil Provides Clues
80beats: New Fossil Suggests Dinosaur World Domination Started in S. America
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Dramatic restructuring of dinosaur feathers revealed by two youngsters of same species

Images: Heidi Richter, Diane Scott

It’s been making headlines all week (”Twinkie diet helps man lose weight” and “Trying To Lose Weight… Try The Junk Food Diet” might be some of the worst health-related headlines I’ve seen in awhile) as the Ding-Dong Diet or the Twinkie Diet, but let’s just call it the worst diet ever for short.

The newsplosion came from an experiment by Mark Haub, an associate professor in the department of human nutrition at Kansas State University. In an effort to prove to his class the importance of calories in weight gain and loss, he decided to drastically change his eating habits.

He embarked from the shores of a balanced diet of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat (totaling about 2,600 calories per day) to a junk food diet consisting of Twinkies, Hostess and Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos–with sides of vitamin pills, protein shakes, and small portions of vegetables. He lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks. Why? Because he restricted his new diet to a total of 1,800 calories per day.

He expected to lose weight, but was unsure about the other health outcomes of the diet. Ten weeks later his blood tests showed that both his lipid levels and glucose had lowered, a fact that would put him in a healthier heart state, according to the American Heart Association’s guidelines. According to ABC News, Haub even felt better:

The thing is, he began to feel healthier. He had more energy, stopped snoring, and not only did he lose enough weight to drive down his overall cholesterol and body mass index (BMI), his good HDL cholesterol crept up two points and his blood glucose — despite all that cream filling — dropped 17 percent.

Discoblog was skeptical about the hype over Haub’s junk food binge, so we asked some nutritionists and doctors what they thought of it. We came back with several different takes, but one general message. In a loud and clear voice, these nutritionists are telling America that this diet is a bad idea, and pleading with people not to try it.

The experts did agree that the diet had one important lesson: It really showed just how much weight loss can improve your health. It also demonstrated that just cutting the number of calories you take in is enough to make you lose weight. But James Hill, the director of human nutrition at the University of Colorado, Denver told Discoblog that health-conscious people shouldn’t emulate Haub:

“This is not the diet you should be eating. The goal is to find a way you can eat forever and this isn’t a way to eat forever. This is a stunt, the stunt illustrates it doesn’t matter what you eat, if you take in less than you expend you will lose weight, but nobody should be promoting this as a way of eating.“

Our nutritionists all agreed: This kind of diet isn’t sustainable in the long run. “Health is not measured in your habits of days and weeks,” said Miriam Pappo, director of clinical nutrition at Montefiore Medical Center.

After the weight loss benefits from the caloric restriction kick in, the dangerous combination of fat and sugar in these processed foods will start to take their toll. Also, Haub’s diet is lacking in a variety of basic nutrients that will risk his health in the long run, according to Pappo:

“The effects of what he did showed the importance of weight loss and how immediately weight loss can effect our well being and our lab results. However, long term, his diet was one that was void of antioxidants, phytonutrients, and fiber, all of which have been associated with longevity, with cancer prevention, diabetes control, and mental acuity, among other things. So, he would probably not fare well in the long term.”

And while the weight loss benefits are showing in Haub’s blood tests now, it’s not certain that once he reaches his goal weight these benefits will be sustainable on a diet with such a high fat and sugar content. Hill doesn’t believe the he will be able to keep the weight off in the long run:

“Weight loss isn’t any long term benefit unless you keep it off. If you lose weight and regain it, you are right back where you started. And most diets, that’s what happens. And I’m sure it’s going to happen to this guy.”

“Man has the unique ability to take a very healthy food substance and to chemically alter it into something that is not healthy, ” said Pappo, who also made the point that even some foods labeled low-fat or low-sugar can have negative health consequences. Walter Willet, from the department of nutrition at Harvard University, agrees:

“Much confusion exists about the definition of junk vs healthy food. Many people still believe that a bagel with jelly is a healthy food because it is low in fat, but in reality almost nothing could be worse than this large dose of refined starch and sugar. In contrast, Doritos and most other chip are now trans fat free and made with unsaturated fats that reduce blood cholesterol and risk of heart disease. Thus, they will be healthier than most of the foods consumed by Americans, which is not to say that a Dorito diet is recommended.”

My takeaway from this this little nutrition experiment is strikingly similar to author Michael Pollan’s thesis in much of his writing on nutrition:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

Related content:
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80beats: Low-Calorie Diet Staves off Aging & Death in Monkeys
80beats: A Victory for the Atkins Diet? Not So Fast.
Not Exactly Rocket Science: You are what you eat – how your diet defines you in trillions of ways

Image: Flickr/franckdetheir and Prof Haub’s Diet Experiment Facebook Page

What does it take to make a wellspring of biodiversity like the Amazon rainforest? A huge mountain range, a blast of heat, and a little time.

A pair of studies in this week’s edition of Science attempt to sort through tropical natural history and reach the root causes of Amazonia’s embarrassment of biological riches. The first, led by palaeoecologist Carina Hoorn, points to the influence of the Andes Mountains, the spine of South America that runs up its western coast. Sometime between about 35 and 65 million years ago, colliding tectonic plates sent the Andes bulging up. According to the researchers, the birth of a mountain range set of an ecological chain reaction.

The rising mountains that resulted from the uplift blocked humid air from the Atlantic, eventually increasing rainfall along the eastern flank of what became the Andes that eroded nutrient-loaded soils off the mountains. The Andes also kept water from draining into the Pacific, helping form vast wetlands about 23 million years ago that were home to a wide range of mollusks and reptiles. [LiveScience]

About 7 million years ago those wetlands dried up. But they left behind a swath of fertile soil, the scientists say, perfect for a rainforest to colonize. A little later, about 3.5 million years ago, the Panama isthmus emerged, and that sliver of land provided a bridge for even more species to reach the Amazon.

And then there’s the heat. A little than 56 million years ago—during the window when the Andes commenced their ascent—a blast of sudden warming struck the Earth. The event is called the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), during which the temperature shot up by as much as 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) and the global thermostat stayed there for about 200,000 years. One might think that a temperature shock would suppress biodiversity, but that is not what the scientists found in the fossil record when they surveyed in Colombia and Venezuela.

“We were expecting to find rapid extinction, a total change in the forest,” says study leader Carlos Jaramillo, a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. “What we found was just the opposite — a very fast addition of many new species, and a huge spike in the diversity of tropical plants.” [Science News]

Indeed, this warm period invited some of the Amazon’s signature species, Jaramillo says.

The pollen fossil record shows that some important plant families, such as Myrtaceae, which includes eucalyptus, and Passifloraceae–the passion flowers–made their first appearance during the thermal maximum. The tropics have remained the most species-diverse area of the world ever since. [Scientific American]

On the surface, this burst of biodiversity during a warm spike might suggest plants actually could thrive if the planet suddenly heats up. But Jaramillo—admittedly wary that his study of the Earth 56 million years ago will be used as ammunition to argue that modern climate change doesn’t matter—warns that this connection is far from clear. First, 200,000 years is hasty on the geological time scale, but global warming is happening at a much faster pace. Furthermore, he says, Earth was wetter during the PETM that it’s likely to be in the near future, and deforestation has rendered the rainforest thinner today that it probably was then.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Black Gold of the Amazon
DISCOVER: On the Origin on (Amazonian) Species
80beats: Amazonians Turned Poor Land Into Great Farms—and Healthy Ecosystems
80beats: Chopping Down the Amazon Causes a Short-Term Boom, Long-Term Bust
80beats: Amazonian Mega-Storm Knocked Down Half a Billion Trees

Image: Wikimedia Commons

With a month and a half before The Science of Kissing’s debut, Ayana Byrd at Redbook interviewed me for a fun article in their December issue called The Kissing Project. The piece explores why we kiss and I’m quoted:

“Research suggests that men may have an unconscious tendency to swap lots of spit because they transfer testosterone (which raises libido over time) to their mate through saliva.”

“Whether a couple has been together for four months or 40 years, kissing promotes feelings of intimacy and security.”

Of course, that’s just a hint of what’s in the actual book: I spend a chapter exploring gender differences and several more on the hormones and neurotransmitters involved. While I don’t want to give too much away yet, it’s neat to see a nod to The Science of Kissing in print!

More will be revealed over the coming weeks…

I have a few pet objects in astronomy that fascinate me endlessly. One of these is brown dwarfs, objects that are bigger than planets, but too small to be bona fide stars. They are much cooler and fainter even than dinky red dwarfs, making them very difficult to find… unless you are WISE:

[Click to embiggen.]

See that pale green dot in the middle? That’s a brown dwarf! I know, it’s not brown, it’s green, but that’s kosher since brown dwarfs are really magenta.

OK, hang on a sec. I’ll explain that in a minute.

The important thing is that this image shows a very nearby brown dwarf, maybe 18 – 30 light years away (the distance is hard to determine, but observations taken over the next year or so should pin it down). That’s really close! The nearest known star, Proxima Centauri (a faint red dwarf) is 4.2 light years away, and only a few hundred stars are within 30 light years. That makes this brown dwarf, named WISEPC J045853.90+643451.9 (after its location in the sky), one of the closest stars known.

You’d think think we’d have a pretty good idea of all the stars near us, since they’d be among the brightest in the sky. But in fact brown dwarfs are so faint that to optical telescopes they can escape detection even if they’re our cosmic neighbors. WISE, however, looks in the infrared, where brown dwarfs glow considerably brighter.

And that brings me to the weird colorful adjectives we use for these objects.

The color of a star depends mostly on its temperature (and the way our eyes see the mixed colors from stars, which is complicated, and I will ignore here). Very hot stars are blue, middlin’ hot are white (like the Sun), cooler ones are orange, and very cool ones are red. Brown dwarfs are even milder than red dwarfs, and their spectrum actually peaks in the infrared.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Brown dwarfs are so cool that actual molecules can exist in their atmosphere, like water (well, steam), titanium oxide, ammonia, even hydrogen sulfide (which makes eggs smell rotten). These molecules absorb light at certain colors, and that absorption can really mess with a brown dwarf’s color. Sometimes, a cooler brown dwarf can actually be more blue than a warmer one, because those molecules absorb the redder light the object emits. It’s weird. So a lot of these brown dwarfs actually would appear to be magenta to the eye.

So why are they called brown dwarfs? Blame SETI’s Jill Tarter. She just wanted a name for the critters, and compromised on a color between red and black. Stars can’t be brown, really, but the name stuck.

Anyway, if they’re magenta and not brown, why does that one look green in the WISE picture? It’s because WISE look in the infrared, which our eyes can’t perceive. So when they make pictures form the data, astronomers use false colors; they let blue represent the shortest IR wavelength WISE sees, green the intermediate, and red the longest wavelength — this corresponds to visible light, with wavelength getting longer from blue to green to red. It’s a shorthand that astronomers use that makes images like this easier to interpret.

As it happens, brown dwarfs at a certain temperature emit very strongly in the infrared wavelength astronomers code as green in the WISE images. So finding brown dwarfs is actually not too hard: just look for green stars! Those are really the magenta brown dwarfs.

See?

Anyway, I for one welcome WISEPC J045853.90+643451.9 to our little clan of nearby stars, and hope we find more. For quite a long time I’ve wondered if Proxima Cen really is the closest object to the Sun, or if there might be a faint brown dwarf even closer. Since brown dwarfs aren’t considered stars, Proxima may yet hold on to the title of "nearest star". But if we ever do find something even closer, it would literally be very cool.

In Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race it is recounted that as American states were passing more robust anti-miscegenation laws and legally enshrining the concept of the one-drop-rule an exception was made in Virginia for those with 1/16^th or less Native American ancestry. The reason for this was practical: many of the aristocratic “First Families of Virginia” claimed descent from Pocahontas. Included within this set was Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia, who was 1/16th Native American, being a great-great-grandson of Pocahontas. This sort of background was probably not exceptional among the “Founding Stock” of Anglo-Americans whose ancestors were resident within the boundaries of the American republic at independence. Only around 1700 did the white population of the American British colonies exceed the indigenous, so no doubt some amalgamation did occur.

But from what I’ve seen the extent of admixture with the indigenous substrate was very marginal, especially in comparison to white populations in Argentina or Brazil. Or so I thought. In conversation a friend recently claimed that over 50% of American whites were 5% or more non-European in ancestry. I expressed skepticism, and he dug up the citation. Genetic ancestry: A new look at racial disparities in head and neck cancer:

The study included 358 patients; 37 percent were African American.

The researchers examined diagnosis (late versus early stage) and overall survival for African Americans with HNSCC based on self-reported race and genetic West African ancestry.

During the past decade, many groups have developed and characterized sets of single nucleotide polymorphism markers that can distinguish genetic ancestry among major ethnic groups such as Asian and West African, called ancestry information makers (AIMs).

For the study, genetic ancestry was based on a panel of 100 AIMs to estimate genetic background.

“Using these genetic markers gives you additional statistical power. It’s no longer two just categories – Black or White; it becomes a continuous variable. Race is not equal to genetics. Genetic markers don’t define specific races,” says Dr. Worsham.

Ultimately, the study found no correlation between West African genetic ancestry and HNSCC outcomes. Only self-reported race was associated with head and neck cancer stage.

Only 5 percent of self-reported African Americans had more than 95 percent West African ancestry, with 27 percent having less than 60 percent West African ancestry. By comparison, 48 percent who self-reported as Caucasian had more than 95 percent European American ancestry.

I’m not too worried about the number of markers. 100 should be sufficient on the scale of continents if well selected. But I’m curious about the representativeness of the sample. The African American one seems more European than others I’ve seen previously. And I really haven’t seen that much admixture with non-Europeans in the CEPH Utah white sample in the HapMap. But perhaps the Utah whites aren’t representative? Dienekes ran ADMIXTURE on the HapMap3 populations a few weeks ago, and I don’t see any elevated component of non-European ancestry in the Utah whites when compared to the Tuscans from Italy.

A factoid such as that less than 50% of white Americans are 95% or more European in ancestry can get traction quickly. But I think we should wait a bit and just get more samples. The results are from a presentation at a conference, not even a paper. Of course there’s a possibility that many people have more interesting backgrounds than multi-generational families which settled in Utah rather early. Time will tell.

Addendum: I believe that Native American admixture is going to be more common among the white Americans of the South than Yankees from New England. The reason I would give is that powerful and populous tribes and confederacies such as the Creek and Cherokee persisted in the Southern highlands far longer than in New England. The CEPH sample is going to be biased toward Yankees, as well as European converts from the British Isles and Scandinavia, so perhaps giving a somewhat lower result for non-European ancestry in American whites.

Addendum II: I thought about it more. Something went wrong in their analysis, or they had a very unrepresentative sample. Perhaps they had many Latinos and only coded their self-identified race and not ethnicity (50% of American Latinos identify as white). Maybe the AIMs aren’t good. I don’t know. But I do know that American genealogy buffs who assume Native American ancestry are often very disappointed. They seem to far outnumber those who find surprising non-white ancestry.

I LOVE this website! Enjoy…

At Genomes Unzipped Luke Jostins elaborates on how the genetic facts he now has about his paternal lineage change how he views his own personal history:

… my father’s father is Latvian, and the N1 haplogroup is not rare in the Baltic regions. In fact, the subgroup, N1c1, is more common in parts of Eastern Europe than it is in Asia.

Initially, this seemed to play nicely into a part of our ancient family history. There is a folk history, relayed to me be my Dad and my uncle Johnny, that Jostins blood may contain traces of Mongolian. The justification for this is that in around 1260, just before the civil war caused the Mongol Empire to die back in Europe, the Empire extended all the way to the Baltic States. It was at this point, my fellow N1c1-bearers hypothesise, that Mongolian DNA entered the Jostins line.

Unfortunately on closer inspection this tale is not really supported by the DNA evidence. The famous Mongol Expansion haplogroup is actually C3, which is the modal haplogroup of Mongolians. In contrast, N1c1 has existed in Europe for thousands of years, and is far to old and too wide-spread to represent a recent expansion.

To the left is a frequency map of the concentration of N1c1. Based on the current distribution, and the diversity being modal in the East Baltic, one has to be skeptical of a simple east-west model. Interestingly the frequency difference of this haplogroup between Finland and Sweden is very high. Also, branch of N1c1 seems to be found among the Rurikids of Russia. This was the ruling dynasty of the Rus, a people who originally seem to have been ethnic Scandinavians from Sweden. Eventually they ruled over a polyglot state of Finns, Slavs and Scandinavians, and submerged their own identity with that of the Slavic peasants. In this they followed the example of the Bulgars, who were ethnically distinctive from their Slavic subjects, but were totally absorbed excepting that their ethnonym persisted. There is some evidence that the Serbs are a similar case, an Iranian group which was eventually absorbed into the South Slav substrate.

Going back to northern Europe, let’s try to get some more perspective. Luke Jostins’ personal history is after all a slice of population history, and what we know about the background of the population impacts how Luke views his own personal history. To do that I thought I’d quickly poke around a few older papers on Baltic genetics which I had stashed away. It didn’t turn out to be so quick. But here are some figures. First, from Genome-Wide Analysis of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Uncovers Population Structure in Northern Europe:

From Genetic Structure of Europeans: A View from the North–East:

Finally, from Migration Waves to the Baltic Sea Region (N3 = N1c1):

Also see my recent posts on Northern European genetics, as well as the argument about agriculturalists vs. farmers. Ten years ago we have a few simple models, but now it gets more confusing and complicated. Confounders:

- Different reproductive skew parameters for males and females. In short, high fertility of “super-males” as well as dominance of patrilocality can produce different patterns in Y and mtDNA

- Selection on mtDNA. The “neutral” markers which we think of as neutral may not be neutral

- Poor correspondence between inferences of the past based on contemporary patterns of variation and what ancient DNA has discovered. Our assumptions are faulty, or we’re just too stupid to extract the real patterns

- Persistent problems with dating and typing some uniparental lineages. Consider the debate over the pan-Eurasian haplogroup R1a1a* (Dan MacArthur and I both carry this Y lineage, but what’s in a few letters?)

- Reality is complicated. This may be the most intractable issue over the long term

I have used the analogy of a palimpsest to describe the flow of genetic variation over time and space. I think that perhaps that that is misleading in some fundamental ways. Demographic patterns are characterized by different dynamics, persistent and long standing “flows,” as well as punctuated “explosions.” Rather than a palimpsest, a better analogy might be the layering of geological strata. Although there are long periods of gentle wearing and layering, volcanism and earthquakes periodically erupt to disrupt the smooth accumulations. Sequences of catastrophic events can produce inversions.

Consider three dynamics:

- Isolation-by-distance. This is the conventional band/village-to-band/village process of gene flow. This may be analogized to sedimentary accumulation (mutations) and erosion (drift)

- Demic diffusion. The rapid demographic expansion into virgin territory by a culture which introduces a more efficient mode of production. One of the most recent occurrences of this was the rapid multiplication of New England Puritans from ~30,000 circa 1640 to over 700,000 150 years later. Not only did these New Englanders “fill up” their home territory, in the early years of the republic they burst out of the northeast and populated many regions of the Great Lakes. Demic diffusion is like an earthquake, a rapid and ordered shift of the local geology

- The leap frog. The settlement of Europeans in the southern cone of Latin America, Australia, or Mongols in eastern Iran, are instances of leap frogs. We have clear textual of these leap frogs, but without that we wouldn’t know what to make of them. Leap frogs are like volcanic eruptions, reordering the layers beneath and also deposition from above

At least with Luke’s hypothesis about descent from Rurik he can test his own N1c1 profile against other Rurikids. Presumably the modal haplotype and its near relations are those of the original Rurik.

Effect of masticating chewing gum on postural stability during upright standing.

“The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of masticating chewing gum on postural stability during upright standing. To address this issue, 12 healthy subjects performed quiet standing on a force platform for the posturography study. The subjects were instructed to stand as stable as possible on the force platform in order to record the trajectory of the center-of-pressure (COP). After measuring the postural sway in the initial condition (pre-condition), the subjects were asked to stand while masticating chewing gum (gum-condition). Following the gum-condition, quiet standing without mastication was evaluated (post-condition) to ensure the effect of masticating chewing gum on postural stability. The trajectory and velocity of the COP were analyzed for each condition. We found that the postural stability tended to enhance during mastication of chewing gum. The rectangle area of the COP trajectory significantly diminished in the gum-condition and significantly enlarged in the post-condition. A similar effect was observed in the maximum velocity and standard deviation (SD) of the fore-aft amplitude of the COP trajectory. The values were significantly smaller in the gum-condition compared to those in the post-condition. These findings suggest that mastication of chewing gum affects the postural control by enhancing the postural stability during upright standing.”

Photo: flickr/sjon
Thanks to Lee for today’s ROFL!

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Chewing gum won’t help you walk, anyway.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: A moment on your lips, forever in your intestine.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: When your sweat turns red, maybe it’s time to eat less food coloring.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

In many high-tech parts of the world, iPhones are what people turn to when their minds wander from what they were supposed to be doing. For a study in this week’s Science, however, researchers turned the tables on these people, using the iPhone as a tool to study the wandering mind. Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that the minds wanders a lot (no surprise there), but also that daydreaming could make people unhappier.

Their app, called Track Your Happiness, takes advantage of the iPhone’s unparalleled ability to butt into its owner’s life.

iPhone users, aged 18 to 88, signed up for a Web application that contacted study them at random times during their days to ask a simple set of questions: How happy were they at the moment? What were they doing? Were they thinking about something other than what the task at hand, and if so, were they thinking of something pleasant, neutral, or negative? [Boston Globe]

The stats: “We analyzed samples from 2250 adults (58.8% male, 73.9% residing in the United States, mean age of 34 years),” the scientists write. Altogether, 46.9 percent of the time the responders said their minds were wandering when the iPhone rang to query their thoughts. The only activity during which people reported daydreaming less than 30 percent of the time was having sex. (Though, this means respondents either stopped having sex long enough to answer the survey—in which case DISCOVER applauds their dedication to science, but questions their judgment—or they heard the phone buzz and thought, “That must be the survey, I should answer it afterward”—in which case they perhaps were lying about not being distracted.)

But Killingsworth and Gilbert’s main finding is that all this mind wandering does generally make people unhappier, at least according to the self-reported survey. Respondents who reported that their thoughts had drifted from the task at hand were more likely to declare themselves unhappy.

The link may be due to an asymmetry in how daydreams affect mood. Killingsworth and Gilbert found that daydreams about pleasant things were linked to improvements in mood, but only slight improvements. Thinking about neutral topics while mind-wandering was linked to a similarly modest drop in happiness, but daydreams about unpleasant topics coincided with a 20-point drop on the 100-point scale that app users used to rate their mood. [New Scientist]

Eric Klinger, a daydream researcher at the University of Minnesota, Morris, told the Boston Globe that this study’s data backs up what scientists have found about the frequency of mind-wandering in the past. However, he says, isn’t it possible that getting interrupted by your iPhone asking you how you’re feeling could change how you’re feeling?

He noted that it would be interesting to know whether the interrupted activity, itself, was experienced as pleasant or not, to better understand whether the nature of the activity influenced a person’s happiness. “Daydreaming and mind-wandering serve a number of crucial roles,” Klinger said. “They are nature’s way of keeping us organized.” [Boston Globe]

On behalf of lifelong daydreamers everywhere, I appreciate this defense of letting one’s mind drift away, even if it doesn’t always lead to happiness.

Innovative ideas and insights often arise through free association. And being able to plan and strategize effectively require a focus on the future, not the now. “There’s no doubt that this capacity is beneficial in a variety of ways and it’s certainly very possible that a lot of creative thinking involves mind wandering,” says Killingsworth. [TIME]

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Image: flickr / William Hook

From Ed Yong:

Cats have been our companions for almost 10,000 years. They have been worshipped by Egyptians, killed (or not) by physicists, and captioned by geeks. And in all that time, no one has quite appreciated how impressively they drink. Using high-speed videos, Pedro Reis and Roman Stocker from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that lapping cats are masters of physics. Every flick of their tongues finely balances a pair of forces, at high speed, to draw a column of water into their thirsty jaws.

Read the rest of the post at Not Exactly Rocket Science, where Yong explains that each sip is a tug-of-war between inertia and gravity. Here’s a little of that high-speed video:

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Even the sight of the reddest, rawest steak won’t get your blood boiling. Surprising new research has found that staring at pictures of meat actually makes people less aggressive.

The insight comes from McGill University undergraduate Frank Kachanoff. He wondered if the sight of food would incite men’s defensive desires, much like a dog aggressively protecting its food bowl, he explained in a press release:

“I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown that just looking at an object which is learned to be associated with aggression, such as a gun, can make someone more likely to behave aggressively. I wanted to know if we might respond aggressively to certain stimuli in our environment not because of learned associations, but because of an innate predisposition. I wanted to know if just looking at the meat would suffice to provoke an aggressive behavior.”

To determine aggression, the experimenters put a man in a room and give him the ability to punish a person who was sorting photograghs. In one iteration of the test the pictures showed neutral objects, and in the other they showed cooked meat dishes. The amount of painful sound the participant decided to inflict on a bad picture sorter for his mistakes was used as a guide to the level of aggression the participant was feeling.

Kachanoff presented his work at an undergraduate research symposium at McGill. He found that the men who watched the sorter work with pictures of meat inflicted less painful punishment than the men watching the neutral pictures, which makes some sense in hindsight, Kachanoff explained in a press release:

“We used imagery of meat that was ready to eat. In terms of behaviour, with the benefit of hindsight, it would make sense that our ancestors would be calm, as they would be surrounded by friends and family at meal time,” Kachanoff explained. “I would like to run this experiment again, using hunting images. Perhaps Thanksgiving next year will be a great opportunity for a do-over!”

With all such evolutionary explanations for modern behavior, this should probably be taken with a few grains of salt (just like a tasty steak should be). But it would be interesting to see if this phenomenon would carry over into any other food images, and if meat had the same effect on females.

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Image: Flickr/soyculto

Cats have been our companions for almost 10,000 years. They have been worshipped by Egyptians, killed (or not) by physicists, and captioned by geeks. And in all that time, no one has quite appreciated how impressively they drink. Using high-speed videos, Pedro Reis and Roman Stocker from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that lapping cats are masters of physics. Every flick of their tongues finely balances a pair of forces, at high speed, to draw a column of water into their thirsty jaws.

Drinking is more of a challenge for cats than for us. They have to drink from flat, horizontal bodies of water. Even with our hands tied, we could do that just by putting out mouth at the surface and sucking, but then we have large cheeks that can form a proper seal. Pigs, sheep and horses have the same ability, but cats and dogs do not. Their cheeks don’t extend far enough forward so they have to use a different technique: lapping.

Cat owners have watched their pets lap at water for thousands of years but when Stocker did so, his curiosity was piqued. “Three years ago, when I was watching my cat Cutta Cutta lap during breakfast, I realized there was an interesting biomechanics problem behind this simple action,” he says. The lapping motion is so fast that to fully appreciate it, you need a high-speed camera. Slow-motion films of Cutta Cutta revealed that a cat doesn’t actually scoop up its drink with its tongue in the way that a dog does. Its technique is more subtle.

For a start, it drinks only using the very tip of its tongue. As it extends its tongue, it curls the tip upwards so that the bottom side rests on the surface of the liquid, without actually breaking it. The cat lifts its tongue, drawing a column of liquid with it. Just before the column collapses, the cat closes its mouth, captures the elevated liquid, and takes a refreshing drink.

This sequence depends on a battle between two forces. The first is inertia, the tendency for the water column to keep moving in the same way until another force acts upon it. That force is gravity, which constantly threatens to pull the water column back into the bowl. With its rising tongue, a cat uses inertia to “defeat gravity” long enough to close its mouth on the almost-collapsing tower of liquid.

Amazingly, Reis and Stocker found that this sequence was first filmed way back in 1940, in an Oscar-winning documentary film called Quicker ‘n a Wink (the cat’s at 4:42). “MIT has a center for high-speed photography started by and named after Doc Edgerton,” says Stocker. “After we had borrowed high-speed cameras several times to get shots of Cutta Cutta, conversation casually turned to the topic of our investigation. When Jim [Bales, who runs the center] heard it was the lapping of a cat, he got very excited and immediately pointed us to a 10 second video clip by Doc Edgerton, who had captured high-speed videos of a cat lapping 70 years ago! Edgerton did not attempt to explain the mechanism of lapping, but his clip remains timeless (the commentary even more so!).”

Skip forward 70 years, and Stocker and Reis’s modern (and colour) videos reveal the action in even greater detail. Reis used these to work out Froude’s number, a value that measures the trade-off between inertia and gravity. For domestic cats, the number is 0.4, close enough to 1 to indicate a good balance between the two forces.

The duo also analysed the lapping action using a glass disc to mimic the tongue-tip of a cat, and robotic stage to lift the disc at pre-programmed speeds and heights. These revealed that the cat pulls its tongue back at just the right speed and to just the right height to draw the largest volume of water into its mouth.

Stocker and Reis even found that all types of cats, from the humble house tabby to the mighty tiger, lap in the same way. He grabbed some films from a local zoo and in an astonishing case of the Internet providing useful cat videos, he scoured YouTube for videos of big cats lapping. The videos showed that just like domestic cats, the Froude’s numbers for lapping tigers, lions and leopards are all close to one. Again, inertia and gravity are play off against each other to produce the greatest possible sip, although the bigger cats compensate for their bigger tongues by lapping more slowly.

All of this started with something as simple as a cat owner watching his pet drink from a bowl and wondering how it does it. From there, the team pursued their project without any funding, or help from graduate students. They just really wanted to know the answer. If you look at the world through the eye of a scientist, even an unassuming sight like a cat drinking from a bowl can be a cool discovery just waiting to happen. Rather than killing cats, curiosity can thrive on them.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1195421

More on cats:

• Cats manipulate their owners with a cry embedded in a purr
• Sabre-toothed cats had weak bites
• How many people did the man-eating lions of Tsavo actually eat?
• Pocket Science – 2.1 billion year old fossils, and arm-wrestling a sabre-tooth cat

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

Injecting stem cells into injured mouse muscle not only helped the muscle heal, but gave the mice enhanced muscle mass for years to come.

The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, used skeletal muscle stem cells from young donor mice and injected them into injured muscles of mature mice. Researchers figured that the stem cells would be able to create new muscle cells in the recipient mouse, but the question was: could these new cells be incorporated into the existing muscle on an adult mouse?

After injuring the recipient mouse’s muscle and injecting the cells, the researchers noticed that the injury healed quickly and the mice had larger muscles (about twice the volume, and a 50 percent increase in mass) than before the injury, which they expected. But were surprised to see that the muscle enhancement was sustained throughout the recipient mouse’s lifetime, up to two years.

“This was a very exciting and unexpected result,” [Bradley] Olwin, who worked on the study, said in a statement. “We found that the transplanted stem cells are permanently altered and reduce the aging of the transplanted muscle, maintaining strength and mass.” [Reuters]

The recipient muscle had to be injured, though, to accept the stem cells. When the researchers injected the cells into uninjured muscle they weren’t incorporated into the muscle and they didn’t see changes in muscle mass or volume.

“The environment that the stem cells are injected into is very important, because when it tells the cells there is an injury, they respond in a unique way,” [Olwin] said. The team hopes eventually to find drugs or combinations of drugs that mimic the behavior of transplanted cells. [Reuters]

The researchers say a similar procedure could possibly help aging muscles regain their vigor, or could help people suffering from muscular diseases, such as muscular dystrophy. But human trials are still a long way off. Hans Degens, an expert on muscle atrophy who wasn’t involved in the current study, explains:

“One of the worrying things for humans is the need for an injury to be simulated prior to treatment. In muscle wasting you would have to decide which muscles to treat, as the treatment would only affect a single muscle. It should also be noted that mouse muscles are considerably smaller than human muscles – you may have to make multiple injections.” [BBC News]

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Discoblog: Uncontroversial Stem Cells Are Just a Used Tampon Away
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Stem cells only grow up properly in the right environment

Image: Flickr/Rightindex

My first book, Bad Astronomy, came out in 2002. It’s enjoyed a few printings since then, and still sells nicely.

I get a lot of requests for an audio version, and I’m happy to announce that Audible.com has made one! It’s narrated by Kevin Scullin, a nice guy who contacted me a while back about it. We had some interesting email exchanges, mostly involving pronunciations. That’s something that hadn’t occurred to me! When you write a book, mispronouncing a word in your head is no big deal, but I imagine will generate a lot of mail in an audio book.

The book sells for $19.95, but they have a deal there where you can get it $7.49. Go to the link above for details.

Not to forget you UK folks, there’s a version for you guys as well. It’s pretty much the same, but in your version color is spelled with a u.

There’s a sample on the Audible site, and it’s a little odd to hear my words spoken by someone else. I guess I’ll never make it as a screenwriter.

Anyway, if you get a copy, please leave a comment and let me know what you think! And also rate it on the Audible site. I’m sure they dig that kind of thing. Thanks!

Hubble’s successor will be late, and over-budget. So concluded a NASA panel this week that investigate the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s next big thing, intended to survey the skies in infrared light with its 18-segment mirror. The word all along has been that James Webb would launch in 2014 at a cost of $5 billion, but the independent review (pdf) concluded that the earliest possible launch would be September 2015, and at a cost of more like $6.5 billion.

The report raised fear that other projects would be hurt. “This is NASA’s Hurricane Katrina,” said Alan P. Boss, who leads the subcommittee that advises NASA’s astrophysics program. The telescope, he said, “will leave nothing but devastation in the astrophysics division budget.” [The New York Times]

John R. Casani, who managed missions like Cassini and Voyager that are the picture of NASA success, led the panel. The technical side of the Webb telescope isn’t the problem, the report found–the management side is. The report faulted the management team for failing to make realistic estimates of the project’s costs and timetable, and further criticized NASA headquarters for not calling the managers on their impractical assessments.

Even to meet the delayed launch date of 2015, Casani says, NASA would need to scrounge up an additional $200 million next year and in 2012. Christopher J. Scolese, NASA associate administrator, said that feat of financial juggle was unlikely. But Charles Bolden, the head of NASA, said he would act on the recommendation to shake up the project’s management.

“No one is more concerned about the situation we find ourselves in than I am, and that is why I am reorganizing the JWST Project at Headquarters and the Goddard Space Flight Center, and assigning a new senior manager at Headquarters to lead this important effort,” Bolden said in the statement. [MSNBC]

All this comes just weeks after Nature called JWST “the telescope that ate astronomy” and wondered whether the telescope’s huge scale and budget would squeeze out other projects, leaving science too dependent on the big machine.

It hasn’t been the best month for NASA, anyway. A planned space shuttle Discovery launch was delayed last week after inspectors found a fuel leak. Subsequent looks at Discovery have now turned up cracks in the external fuel tank that could indefinitely delay the mission.

The two cracks – each 9 inches long – were found on the exterior of the aluminum tank, beneath a larger crack in the insulating foam that covers the 15-story tank. The cracks are in an area that holds instruments, not fuel. NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said engineers believe the tank can be repaired at the launch pad, although it’s never been tried before. It’s unclear, though, whether the work can be done in time to meet a Nov. 30 launch attempt. [AP]

Lastly, a bit of good news: The ever-productive Cassini probe, which surprised its operators by going into safe mode on November 2 in the midst of its grand tour of the Saturn system, should be fully operational again before Thanksgiving.

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Bad Astronomy: The Making of JWST’s Sunshade

Image: NASA/MSFC/Emmett Givens

Over at The Star:

U.S. Representative John Shimkus, possible future chairman of the Congressional committee that deals with energy and its attendant environmental concerns, believes that climate change should not concern us since God has already promised not to destroy the Earth.

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Shimkus already serves on the committee. During a hearing in 2009, he dismissed the dangers of climate change and the warnings of the scientific community by quoting the Bible.

First, he noted God’s post-Flood promise to Noah in Genesis 8:21-22.

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“The Earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a Flood,” Shimkus asserted. “I do believe that God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.”

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On Tuesday, Shimkus sent a letter to his colleagues burnishing his credentials by saying he is “uniquely qualified among a group of talented contenders to lead the Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Representative Shimkus may be unique, but he’s certainly not uniquely qualified to lead the nation’s Energy and Commerce Committee. Climate change isn’t simply about balmier temperatures, but a changing environment. The nation–and world–need to prepare for the myriad of ways it will impact food production, water, health, national security, immigration, and so much more. Shimkus clearly fails to understand what’s at stake.

A team at Georgia Tech is looking to replace your sponge bath nurse with this sexy beast to the right. No, not the girl. The sponge bath robot next to her, named Cody. He’s the one that wants to wipe you down with his delicate towel hands.

The robot was developed by researcher Charles Kemp’s team at the Healthcare Robotics Lab, and was described in a presentation and accompanying paper (pdf) at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

The robot uses cameras and lasers to evaluate the human’s body, identifying dirty spots, then gently wipes with its towel hands, making sure not to apply too much or too little pressure. It has flexible arm joints with low levels of stiffness to make sure that it doesn’t push too hard.

Study coauthor Chih-Hung (Aaron) King put himself in the tester’s spot for the robot’s first rubs. He relived the experience for Hizook:

“As the sole subject in this initial experiment, I’d like to share my impressions of the interaction. In the beginning I felt a bit tense, but never scared. As the experiment progressed, my trust in the robot grew and my tension waned. Throughout the experiment, I suffered little-to-no discomfort.”

Hit the jump for a video of the bot rubbing on King:

An interesting note about robots performing this kind of task: They are the ones that initiate human-robot contact. It may not seem like a big deal, but being in the receiving position of a robot-induced sponge bath might be a little unnerving, King explained to Hizook:

“The tasks performed in this experiment involved the robot initiating and actively making contact with a human. This differs from most (current) research on human-robot contact, which is initiated by humans rather than robots. It would be interesting to study how the general population, specifically patients, would react to such robot-initiated contact. Indeed, the psychological impact of robot-initiated contact may become important for future human-robot interaction (HRI) research.”

Meanwhile, we can’t make up our minds: Would it be more unnerving having Cody wipe you down than it would be embarrassing to have a human nurse or loved one do it?

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DISCOVER: The Robot Invasion Is Coming—and That’s a Good Thing

Image: Travis Deyle/Hizook Video: Georgia Tech Health Robotics Lab

A huge spike in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen about 800 million years ago, the story goes, paved the way for the Cambrian explosion a couple hundred million years later, and with it the rise of complex life. But a new study out in Nature says that picture is incomplete. Researchers found evidence of substantial oxygen 1.2 billion years ago, meaning that the conditions needed for complex life appeared much earlier than scientists knew, and that perhaps something else was required to set off the explosion of biodiversity.

The geologists led by John Parnell hunted in the Scottish Highlands for clues in ancient rocks, where evidence of ancient bacteria could reveal how much oxygen was around 1.2 billion years ago.

Before there was a useful amount of free oxygen around, these bacteria used to get energy by converting sulfate, a molecule with one sulfur atom and four oxygens, to sulfide, a sulfur atom that is missing two electrons. Geologists can get a glimpse of how efficient the bacteria were by looking at two different sulfur isotopes, versions of the same element that have different atomic masses. Converting sulfate to sulfide leaves the rock with a lot more of the isotope sulfur-32 than would be there without the bacteria’s help. [Wired.com]

Those isotopic levels showed Parnell how efficiently the bacteria used oxygen in the cyclical chemical reactions, with one group of bacteria turning sulfate into sulfide and another doing the opposite conversion. This allowed the geologists to gauge how high the atmospheric oxygen level may have been, Parnell says.

“Evidence of this chemical reaction tells us that the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere were at this key point for evolution, at this much earlier stage in Earth’s history. Our findings, which shift this key point in the evolution of life on Earth to a much earlier date than previously proven, will give impetus to further investigations into the timescale of the development of complex life, which followed this event,” he said. [The Independent]

Suppose Parnell’s team is correct, and these chemical reactions mean that the level of oxygen 1.2 billion years was roughly the same as the during the Cambrian explosion—that is, high enough to give rise to more complex forms of life than simple microbes. Then why did complex life wait so long to get going? It’s an open question, but one possible trigger was the end of an ice age:

The earliest indisputable evidence for complex animal life – slug-like organisms called Kimberalla – are not seen until the Ediacaran Period, which came at the end of the last great global glaciation These fossil remains are found today in 555-million-year-old rocks in Australia and Russia. “What we are now showing is that the conditions in the atmosphere were in place [1.2 billion years ago], so it probably needed some other factor to trigger the early evolution of complex life and the fact that the Ediacaran fauna occurs after the ’snowball Earth’ episode suggests those two are linked somehow,” said Professor Parnell. [BBC News]

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Just One Bite And Life Took Off
80beats: How “Snowball Earth” Could Have Triggered the Rise of Life
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80beats: One of the Earth’s Earliest Animals Left Behind “Chemical Fossils”
80beats: Study: 650-Million-Year-Old Sponges May Be World’s Oldest Animals

Image: Parnell et. al / Nature (The cave where the rocks were found)

Remember yesterday when I pointed out the Republican Congressman Joe Barton who wants to be head of the Energy and Commerce Committee? Well, there are other Republicans vying for it. One of them is John Shimkus from Illinois. You need to understand that this Committee has a lot of overlap with the issue of global warming, as oil, gas, and coal are major contributors to the buildup of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Having said that, gird your loins to hear what Representative Shimkus had to say last year:

Did you catch the important bit there? God will decide when to end the Earth, not man. The obvious inference is that Congressman Shimkus thinks humans cannot destroy the Earth, or hurt its habitability. Terrific.

This is the same guy who tried to argue that producing less CO₂ would starve plants.

The last thing this country — this world — needs, quite literally, is someone running the Energy and Commerce Committee who is this egregiously and willfully ignorant about global warming and the effects of carbon dioxide. Of course, tied for last place is Joe Barton. A third Republican, Fred Upton of Michigan, is also eying the top spot on the Committee, and I’m not sure he’s a whole lot better.

No matter what happens here, the news is either awful or worse. My only hope is that the Senate will stonewall any regressive measures made by the House… but that would mean the Democrats would have to stand up to the Republicans. We’ll just have to wait and see how that turns out.