I woke up this morning to various emails and tweets saying that I’ve just won the 3 Quarks Daily Science Prize for 2010. Monday mornings don’t usually start this promisingly!

For those who haven’t been following, this is the second of what will hopefully be a long-running competition, focusing on science writing on blogs. The winning entry was this post on the gut bacteria of Japanese people, which have borrowed sushi-digesting genes from their oceanic relatives.

It goes without saying that I’ve very grateful to all the readers who nominated posts and voted for them and to the editors of 3 Quarks Daily for organising the competition.

I’m feel very proud of this, especially because this year’s finalists included some of the finest science writers in the market and because it was judged by none other than Richard Dawkins. The latter is important, for The Selfish Gene was hugely influential to me, showing not only how incredible evolution is but how inspirational a piece of good science writing can be. Without it, I would probably be doing something else.

I also wanted to say something about writing competitions, from the perspective of someone who’s currently judging the ABSW ones, and has judged OpenLab entries in the past. These competitions, by their nature, are incredibly and necessarily subjective. There’s no SI unit for writing quality and no standard template for what the ideal, Platonic piece would look like. It’s relatively easy to sort pieces into rough categories of merit but when it comes to discerning between the top entrants at a finer level, personal opinion factors heavily into it. Which is a really roundabout way of saying that getting into the top stratum is a massive honour and I wholeheartedly congratulate all the semi-finalists and finalists for their tremendous work.

And finally, it’s worth mentioning again (given recent accusations that bloggers have the luxury of time – ha!) that most of us write our blogs in our spare moments, often getting nothing in return save a sense of satisfaction and the odd comment or so. These efforts are worth recognising and I thank the editors of 3 Quarks Daily for doing so.

Stephen Wroe has built a career out of analysing some of the planet’s most formidable skulls. His group at the University of New South Wales have studied the strength, sturdiness and biting power of the sabre-toothed cat, the great white shark, and the Komodo dragon. Now, he has turned his attention to a predator whose skull is far less impressive but yields surprises all the same – us.

Humans, it is said, have relatively weak jaws that can’t inflict or withstand high bite forces. Some have suggested that we are adapted to eat foods that aren’t very tough, or that our use of tools and cooking has lessened the evolutionary pressure on maintaining sturdy jaws. Some have even suggested that our weedy jaw muscles made way for our large brains and thus facilitated their evolution. But according to Wroe, all of these explanations have a fatal flaw – our jaws aren’t weak at all. They’re actually remarkably efficient for a primate.

The notion of weak human chops was based on very unrefined models that treated our jaws as two-dimensional levers. Of course, in real life, we chew in three glorious dimensions. To really understand how strong our mandibles are, we need to add that third dimension to the models.

That’s exactly what Wroe did. He used his signature technique, called finite element analysis, to create a virtual model of a human skull (belonging to a San hunter-gatherer). The technique is commonly used by engineers to test the properties of machines and vehicles, but Wroe uses it to put animal skulls through a ‘digital crash-test’.

For good measure, Wroe also digitised the skulls of six other primates – the gorilla, chimpanzee, orang-utan and white-handed gibbon, and two extinct species, Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus boisei. All of the skulls came from adult females. The images below show an example of these virtual models, displaying the forces that act upon the skulls as they chomp down on the second molar. The blue regions are those under the least amount of stress, while the red, pink and white regions are enduring the highest stresses.

The results revealed that human skulls, far from being weak, are quite tough and unusually efficient for their size. Our second molars can exert a bite force between 1,100 and 1,300 Newtons, beating the orang-utan, gibbon and Australopithecus but lagging behind the gorilla, chimp and Paranthropus. These forces are roughly what you’d expect for a primate of our size. We’re never going to bite with the sheer power of a Megalodon, or the predators that Wroe usually studies, but we’re no slouches when compared to closely related species.

And if you scale all the skulls to the same size, we suddenly become the leader of the pack. If all the jaw muscles clenched with the same force, our teeth would exert a bite force that’s at least 40% greater than any of the other primates, save the gibbon. So not only is our bite very respectable, our jaw muscles need to exert considerably less force from to produce it.

This explains some peculiar characteristics of our skulls. Our teeth are as tough as those of other primates because they still need to withstand the relatively high forces exerted by our bite. But the rest of our skull can afford to be comparatively flimsier. The jaw muscles attach to the skull and inflict stress upon it when they work. But our jaw muscles can produce a strong bite through less effort than those of other primates. As such, they inflict fewer stresses upon the skull, which can afford to abandon some of its sturdiness.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0509

More on skulls and super-bites:

• Sabre-toothed cats had weak bites
• Venomous Komodo dragons kill prey with wound-and-poison tactics
• Prehistoric great white shark had strongest bite in history
• Groovy teeth, but was Sinornithosaurus a venomous dinosaur?
• Moray eels attack with second pair of ‘Alien-style’ jaws
• Bone-crushing super-wolf went extinct during last Ice Age

“To see whether estrus was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), we examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen’s clubs. Eighteen dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days on a study web site. A mixed-model analysis of 296 work shifts (representing about 5300 lap dances) showed an interaction between cycle phase and hormonal contraception use. Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak. These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females, in a real-world work setting. These results have clear implications for human evolution, sexuality, and economics.”

Thanks to David for today’s ROFL!

Photo: flickr/brh_images

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Image credit: NASA and the MODIS Rapid Response Team

Two of my Hive Overmind Discover Magazine co-bloggers took home the top two awards from Three Quark Daily’s science blogging contest: Carl Zimmer of The Loom, and our new blogger Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science. They both wrote about interbreeding of sorts, clearly pandering to the judge, squishy science advocate Richard Dawkins.

OK, seriously, this is very cool. It’s nice to see science blogging get recognized (some major web awards still don’t have a science category), very nice to see good science blogging get recognized, and very very nice that two of the three awards went to folks here at Discover.

When I first moved my blog to Discover a couple of years ago now, I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I trusted the brand and the people at the magazine. This was clearly a good decision — I’m happy here, and I’m really proud of Carl and Ed. They deserved those awards… and I bet we’ll be seeing a few more coming this way over time. We have an excellent group of writers here, and I suspect Discover Magazine will be a force among online science journalism and opinion writing for a long, long time to come.

Sexual urges overcome cultural taboo. So it turns out that the female children of immigrants from conservative societies (South Asian and Islamic) are paying for hymen restoration surgeries. The more interesting question would be if these children become sexually conservative themselves, perpetuating the life history trajectory so that their own children have to go through these sorts of reconstructions.

Vitamin D Deficiency Due To Genetic Variants. Vitamin D supplementation is all the rage right now. What if its efficacy and necessity is conditional on genetic background?

Is the “missing heritability” right under our noses? The issue may have to do with the exigencies of research programs, not a deep scientific mystery.

A Singular Kind of Eugenics. It seems “privilege” is the new hot-button for Lefties who are skeptical of assisted reproductive technologies and genetic modifications. I suspect it’s a Left-wing buzzword which is equivalent to Righties who bring up “dignity” or the “wisdom of repugnance.” Much easier than having to generate clear prose and understand the complex motives which underpin an issue. Buying really expensive smartphones and pure entertainment machines like iPads also are manifestations of privilege. So what distinguishes X from Y? Not the commonality, privilege, but perhaps the same gut intuitions which Right bioconservatives are willing to man up to, repugnance. Some privileges are repugnant (biological interventions) and some frivolous (iPad). Also, when did discourse replace discussion and privilege replace class?

Saltie Makes a Sandwich Almost Entirely Out of Lettuce. There is nothing magical about meat; it’s all about the flavor.

What’s a quick way to make some cash? Sell advertising space on anything you’ve got. That’s what a proposed bill suggests to put a dent in California’s $19 billion deficit. If the bill gets passed, the state will roll out digital car license plate ads for traveling promotion.

While the car is in motion, the plates will display the driver’s standard license plate number, but four seconds after stopping the magic happens. The plates will then flash ads alongside the number until the car starts to move again.

This bill was the bright idea of Curren Price, a democratic state senator from Los Angeles, who told the AP: 

“We’re just trying to find creative ways of generating additional revenues,” he said. “It’s an exciting marriage of technology with need, and an opportunity to keep California in the forefront.”

By forefront, Price implies that other states are also considering digital license plate technology–which he says wouldn’t only drum up advertising revenue, but would also cut costs associated with the traditional ways states distribute and activate license plates.

A San Francisco-based company called Smart Plate is working on this technology, but chief executive M. Conrad Jordan says the product isn’t ready for the assembly line yet. According to the AP, Jordan also sees the plates as a way to show off college or company affiliations–the next step in custom plates.

Given that researchers have recently found ways to hack a car itself, hacking a digital license plate seems relatively easy. One wonders if the DMV, expected to weigh in on the bill in 2013, will consider not just the possible distractions to drivers, but also what it might be like to drive off into the California sunset with IAMDUM on your bumper.

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80beats: Forget Car-Jacking: Car-Hacking Is the Crime of the Future

Image: flickr / gruntzooki

Chimps kill chimps. And according to a 10-year study of Ngogo chimps in Uganda, they do it to defend and extend their territory. John Mitani documented 21 chimp-on-chimp killings during the study, 18 of which they witnessed. And when the chimps kill another, they take over its land.

Because of the 1 percent difference of DNA between us and our ape cousins, it can be irresistible to anthropomorphize them, referring to their deadly attacks upon each other with terms like “murder” or “crime.” And given the murders over territory that litter human history books, it’s hard not to see echoes of our ourselves in chimp “warfare.”

Chimpanzee warfare is of particular interest because of the possibility that both humans and chimps inherited an instinct for aggressive territoriality from their joint ancestor who lived some five million years ago. Only two previous cases of chimp warfare have been recorded, neither as clear-cut as the Ngogo case [The New York Times].

But not so fast, says DISCOVER’s own award-winning blogger Ed Yong. He contacted chimp expert Frans de Waal, who would like to dissent:

“There are many problems with this idea, not the least of which is that firm archaeological evidence for human warfare goes back only about 10-15 thousand years. And apart from chimpanzees, we have an equally close relative, the bonobo, that is remarkably peaceful… The present study provides us with a very critical piece of information of what chimpanzees may gain from attacking neighbours. How this connects with human warfare is a different story” [Not Exactly Rocket Science].

For much more, check out Yong’s full post on the study.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Chimpanzees Murder for Land
80beats: How Chimps Mourn Their Dead: Reactions to Death Caught on Video
DISCOVER: Chimps Show Altruistic Streak

Image: John Mitani

What do you see in this detail from the Sistine Chapel frescos?

We’ll give you a hint: Look at God’s neck.

Still can’t see it? Take a look in a May issue of the journal Neurosurgery. What do a medical illustrator and a neurosurgeon see when they look at a Michelangelo masterpiece?

We propose that in the Separation of Light From Darkness, Michelangelo drew into God’s neck a ventral view of the brainstem as well as the perisellar and chiasmatic regions.

Though finding this hidden drawing seems to take a lot of squinting and genuine imagination, the article’s authors claim that their beliefs have historical and artistic groundings. For one, Michelangelo was a master at dissecting cadavers, a hobby he started at age 17, the authors told NPR. They also point to the lighting, God’s trimmed beard, and the fact that, as a neck, it isn’t anatomically correct. For a brainstem, the authors think, it’s just right.

Some art historians aren’t convinced. Brian A. Curran, an associate professor of art history at Pennsylvania State University told The New York Times:

“I think this may be another case of the authors looking too hard for something they want to find. . . I don’t want to discourage people from looking. But sometimes a neck is just a neck.”

Related content:
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Bad Astronomy: A vast, cosmic cloudy brain looms in a nearby galaxy
DISCOVER: Visual Science The Achilles Heel on Michelangelo’s David: His Shin

Images: Wikimedia, Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo / Neurosurgery

After my post yesterday on Bryan Caplan’s argument for having more children, I was curious as to what the public perceptions of the ideal number of children was in the General Social Survey. There’s a variable with large N’s which is already in there: CHLDIDEL. It asks:

What do you think is the ideal number of children for a
family to have?

Curiously I noticed a bounce back in terms of ideal numbers in the 2000s plotting CHLDIDEL by year, YEAR. This could be just due to demographic changes (a larger proportion of pro-natalist immigrants after 1965), so I sliced the sample in a few different ways. More specifically, I focused on women aged 18-40, since these are presumably the ones who are the ultimate agents in terms of family size, and combined years by decade to increase sample size for the demographic slices.

It does seem that there was a broad societal shift among women of child-bearing age to prefer larger families in the 2000s in relation to the previous decade. Below the fold I have some charts with the means (the small dots) by decade as well as the 95% confidence interval for various demographics.

One of the two reasons that Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo were wrong about the future economic equilibrium, at least over the medium term, is that in the 19th century industrializing nations began to go through demographic transitions. But there is no reason that this need to persist eternally, and one presumes that over time there will be some shift back toward pro-natalism because by tautology those who are by disposition or ideology toward favoring procreation will propagate their genes and memes to a greater extent into the future.

No, I'm not just talking about the economy. The Pew Organization and Smithsonian teamed up to poll us about where we think technology will take us, and I'm struck by the results:
Large majorities expect that computers will be able to carry on conversations (81% say this definitely or probably will happen) and that there will be a cure for cancer (71%). About two-thirds (66%) say that artificial arms and legs will outperform real limbs while 53% envision ordinary people traveling in space.
At the same time, most say that war, terrorism and environmental catastrophes are at least probable by the year 2050. Nearly six-in-ten (58%) see another world war as definite or probable; 53% say the same about the prospect for a major terrorist attack on the United States involving nuclear weapons. An even higher percentage (72%) anticipates that the world will face a major energy crisis in the next 40 years.
The public is evenly divided over whether the quality of the earth’s environment will improve over the next 40 years; as many say the environment is not likely to improve (50%) as say it is (47%). There continues to be a widespread belief that the earth will get warmer in ...

Click here to view the embedded video.

I spotted this right after piano practice this morning. The video is pretty short and still long enough (just like my practice haha).    I like the idea,  it’s quite innovative.  Maybe they are on the way to finding out for sure why the corona is actually hotter than the surface.

From the University of Sheffield:

Musical sounds created by longitudinal vibrations within the Sun’s atmosphere, have been recorded and accurately studied for the first time by experts at the University of Sheffield, shedding light on the Sun’s magnetic atmosphere.

Using state-of-the-art mathematical theory combined with satellite observations, a team of solar physicists from the University have captured the music on tape and revealed the harmonious sounds are caused by the movement of giant magnetic loops in the solar corona – the outermost, mysterious, and least understood layer of the Sun’s atmosphere. Most importantly, the team studied how this sound is decaying, giving an unprecedented insight into the physics of the solar corona.

High-resolution images taken by a number of satellites show that the solar corona is filled with large banana-shaped magnetic structures known as coronal loops. It is thought that these giant magnetic loops, some of them over a few 100,000 km long, play a fundamental role in governing the physics of the corona and are responsible for huge atmospheric explosions that occur in the atmosphere, known as solar flares.

Deep inside the Milky Way’s companion galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud lies a vast complex of stars, gas, and dust. From our vantage point, 170,000 light years away, we see it as a softly-glowing pinkish brain-shaped cloud studded with stars — a description that grossly underdescribes the tremendous beauty of the newly-released Hubble view of it:

Oh, my. Click it to get a bigger version, or go here to get a 26 Mb 4000×4000 pixel version.

What a staggeringly lovely image! And so much to see. More than you’d expect… but that’s part of a surprise I’ll have for you at the end of this post. Bear with me, it’s worth it.

Until then, let me show you a thing or two…

LHA 120-N 11B, as this object is formally called (or just N11B for short), is a giant cloud of star-forming gas, containing as much as 100,000 times the mass of the Sun in gas alone! Inside the cloud, to the lower right, you can see dozens of brilliant blue stars. These are newly-born, massive stars. They burn fiercely hot, blasting the space around them with ultraviolet light and expelling strong winds of gas from their surfaces. Together, these twin waves slam into surrounding material, heating and compressing it. To the upper left of that group of stars you can see what looks like a weather front as the shock waves move through the gas. If this gas is dense enough, it too will collapse and form more stars.

To the extreme upper left of the image is another case of this, but this time from what appears to be a single star. It’s the brightest star in the image, so it’s most likely at the top end of the mass scale for stars, and its heat, light, and wind commensurately stronger. It’s brutal enough to be slamming a region of the cloud light years across! Right around the star itself is more gas, which is most likely left over from the star’s formation itself: a star that massive cannot live for long, and so there hasn’t been time for it to totally blast away its environment. Take a good look at this while you can: in probably less than a million years this star — like almost every other blue star in this entire image — will explode in a titanic supernova event. It will be easily visible to the naked eye, in fact… if you’re fortunate enough to live in the southern hemisphere.

Another fascinating region of the cloud is to the lower left. You can see dark splotches dotting the area; these are dense clouds of gas mixed with dust, a complex opaque molecule formed in both star birth and death. These are the precise spots where stars are being born, collapsing from that material. We see these in almost every gas cloud actively forming stars… and 4.6 billion years ago, our own Sun almost certainly formed in just such a cocoon.

Amazingly, astronomers studying this cloud have found the population consists of three separate generations of stars. The ones in those blobs are merely the youngest, but the most aged stars are only a few million years older. Even the most decrepit of stars in this cloud is only a thousandth as old as the Sun!

Now it’s time for the surprise I promised.

In that first image at the top of this post, turn your attention to the lower right, outside the cloud. In what looks like clear space is a cluster of thousands of jewel-like stars. However, that space is not clear, and, in fact, hints that I’ve been holding out on you. You see, the Hubble image above actually only sees a tiny portion of the entire complex of gas and dust! Check out this much wider field-of-view picture from the Curtis Schmidt 0.6 meter telescope in Chile:

Aha! This object is much, much larger than I’ve been leading you to believe. The brain-shaped region in the Hubble image is actually just that one small part of the far bigger complex called LHA 120-N 11. What we’ve been looking at, N11B, is the region just above the center. The cluster of brilliant stars in the lower right of the Hubble image is actually a massive cluster of newly-born stars occupying the center of the much larger complex. The combined might of those stars is carving out a bubble, a cavity in the middle. The cluster is about 3.5 million years old, and soon stars in it will start exploding as they reach the ends of their lives. What will that do to the gas in that cluster, I wonder?

Incredibly, with all the detail visible in the Hubble image, it’s really only a small fraction of the activity going on in this enormous object. I’ll admit, I was rather stunned when I found that last image. I could tell that the Hubble image was incomplete, and must be part of a larger object, but even so the scale of this amazed me. To see such incredibly fine detail, to see where individual stars are being born and where others are affecting their surroundings… and then to zoom out and see that this must be happening everywhere, all over that vast region. The entire object is several hundred light years across: that’s several quadrillion kilometers, hundreds of trillions of miles. There must be thousands of stars forming in all those clouds, tens of thousands. It’s a stellar factory, churning out baby stars at a ferocious rate.

And yet, with all that, it’s still only the second most massive such object in the Large Magellanic Cloud; the Tarantula Nebula is comfortably heftier.

When I see images like this, I’m reminded quite strongly that the Universe is incredibly complex, beautiful, and — my favorite of all — surprising. The more we look, the more there is to see.

Picture credits: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain) and C. Aguilera, C. Smith and S. Points/NOAO/AURA/NSF

The International Society for Stem Cell Research has had enough. When the organization of stem cell scientists met last week in San Francisco, its leaders promised to get serious about unregulated stem cell treatments.

First, society president Irving Weissman declared his intention to “smoke out the charlatans,” New Scientist reported. The ISSCR is investigating its members who provide advice to clinics that offer experimental stem cell treatments (no such treatments have yet received FDA approval).

At a press briefing on 17 June, he revealed that these members are being told to explain their connections with such clinics. Expulsion from the society was a possibility for members who continue to associate themselves with unproven “therapies”, added Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a member of the ISSCR board of directors [New Scientist].

Also this month, the society debuted its website aimed to inform people about stem cell treatments (and fraudulent claims). Says Weissman:

“Stem cells do hold tremendous promise for the treatment of many serious diseases. Yet there are organizations out there that are preying on patients’ hopes, offering stem cell treatments – often for large sums of money – for conditions where the current science simply does not support its benefit or safety” [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel].

Authorities are putting the clamps on stem cells treatments abroad, too. Earlier this month Costa Rica shut down the stem cell treatments offered by a top clinic there that was run by an American. Stem cell tourists still have other countries they could flock to for unregulated treatments. But they might think twice after the news last week that a woman died from an experimental kidney treatment in Thailand.

Suffering patients may lose their patience at the slow pace of stem cell research, but Weissman says it’s critical to put a stop to quack treatments when the science is still so young:

“Probably 90 percent of what you hear at this conference won’t be even close to trials” [San Francisco Chronicle].

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DISCOVER: Stem Cell Science Takes Off

Image: iStockphoto

No offense, Lucy, but at three feet, six inches you were kind of short. Your diminutive, 3.2 million-year-old bones made it difficult to tell whether your species could even walk like us. Fortunately, researchers in Ethiopia have uncovered an older, bigger relative. As described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some researchers believe that these new bones show that members of Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, could walk like modern humans. 

The paper’s authors call him Kadanuumuu (kah-dah-nuu-muu)–”big man” in the Afar language. Big Man still isn’t really that big by today’s standard: His 3.6 million-year-old bones show that he stood at around five feet.

The fossilized remains don’t include a head, but Big Man has many of the same bones as Lucy, and also others previously missing: a shoulder blade and a rib cage bits. Lead researcher Yohannes Haile-Selassie argues that Big Man’s skeleton upends previous beliefs about Lucy’s love of tree climbing and more primitive walk.

“This individual was fully bipedal and had the ability to walk almost like modern humans,” said Haile-Selassie. “As a result of this discovery, we can now confidently say that ‘Lucy’ and her relatives were almost as proficient walking on two legs as we are, and that the elongation of our legs came earlier in our evolution that previously thought.” [Cleveland Museum of Natural History]

Haile-Selassie argues that Lucy’s stubby legs mislead researchers into thinking that she wasn’t fully adapted to upright walking. He says that if she had been as tall as Big Man, she would have a similar stance.

Others researchers argue that the skeleton adds little new information.

Fossil hominid skeletons as complete as Big Man “are few and far between,” says anthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York. But the new find mostly confirms what was already known about Lucy, he asserts. Lucy’s kind, including Big Man, were decent tree climbers, even if they couldn’t hang from branches or swing from limb to limb as chimpanzees do, he says. “Riddle me this,” asks Jungers in considering Hailie-Selassie’s [sic] emphasis on a ground-dwelling A. afarensis. “Where did they sleep? Did they wait for fruit to fall to the ground? Where did they go to escape predators?” [Discovery News]

Even if Big Man can’t settle the walking debate, he does give researchers some new clues about past hominids and even some close living relatives.

Carol Ward of the University of Missouri at Columbia agrees that the debate over exactly how A. afarensis walked is likely to continue. Still, Big Man does add important information about the evolution of the upper body of hominids, she notes. The shoulder blade, or scapula, is the oldest hominid scapula discovered, and an adult one, which allows for a proper comparison to other species. [Nature News]

This shoulder blade is very different from that of chimpanzees, our closest living relative, as described in a Cleveland Museum of Natural History release, meaning that chimpanzees have evolved quite a bit since we shared a last common ancestor.

Beautiful bone footage available, here.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Was Lucy a Brutal Brawler?
DISCOVER: How Loyal Was Lucy?
80beats: Scientist Smackdown: Did “Ardi” Change the Story of Human Evolution?
80beats: 9-Year-Old Kid Literally Stumbled on Stunning Fossils of a New Hominid
80beats: 1.5 Million Years Ago, Homo Erectus Walked a Lot Like Us

Image: Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Liz Russell, Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

DNA may dictate your development, but you also wouldn’t be you without the unique mix of bacteria that make their home on your body. This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say that the very moment of your birth can decide for a lifetime what kind bacteria live in your body, and even whether you’ll be at a higher risk for conditions like asthma.

The uterus is a sterile environment. So, in the womb, babies don’t have any bacteria to call their own. It’s only once they enter the world that they begin to collect the microbes that will colonize their bodies and help shape their immunity [Scientific American].

How babies enter the world is the key, the team says. The studied surveyed the bacterial colonies of 10 mothers just before birth; four of those women gave birth traditionally and six did through cesarean section. When the scientists then checked up on the bacteria living in the newborns, they found that the difference in birth method decided what microbes the baby would get. Those born vaginally tended to pick up the bacteria from their mother’s vagina, while those born via C-section harbored bacterial colonies that tend to come from skin.

Dr Noah Fierer, one of the study leaders from the University of Colorado at Boulder, US, said: “In a sense the skin of newborn infants is like freshly tilled soil that is awaiting seeds for planting – in this case, bacterial communities. The microbial communities that cluster on newborns essentially act as their first inoculation.” He added: “In C-sections, the bacterial communities of infants could come from the first person to handle the baby, perhaps the father” [UK Press Association].

While C-sections have shot up in popularity and can be a life-saving procedure for the mother, this study suggests that the birth method can skew those “bacterial communities.” And the mix of skin bacteria that C-section babies pick up may not be as effective an inoculation.

Previous research suggests that babies born via C-section are more likely to develop allergies, asthma and other immune system–related troubles than are babies born the traditional way [Science News].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Vital Signs: End-of-term complications almost kill a mother
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria reflect diet and evolutionary past
80beats: Scientists Sequence DNA From the Teeming Bacterial Universe in Your Guts
80beats: Special Seaweed-Chomping Bacteria Found in the Guts of Japanese Diners

Image: iStockphoto

"I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament."
Julius Caesar (III, i, 60 – 62)

Shakespeare was a decent writer, but an astronomer he wasn’t. The North Star isn’t fix’d, because the Earth’s axis wobbles slowly like a top. You wouldn’t see this by eye, since the circuit takes 26,000 years to complete, but astronomers deal with it all the time.

But Shakespeare did get something right in that passage: the stars themselves do move. It’s slow, but it’s there. It’s caused by their orbital motion as they circle the center of the Milky Way. Their velocity can be hundreds of kilometers per second, but that apparent motion is dwarfed to a near standstill by their forbidding distance. Of course, that means that closer stars will appear to move faster than ones farther away, just like trees by the side of the road whiz by as you drive, but distant mountains slide along in a much more stately manner.

It takes decades, sometimes, to see that stellar movement at all — astronomers call it proper motion — but it’s not impossible. Greek amateur astronomer Anthony Ayiomamitis (who has been featured on this blog before here and here) knew that very well, and he was able to prove it. Behold, the unfix’d heavens!

These two pictures show the same region of sky, separated in time by six decades. The top, taken in 1950, is from the famous Palomar Sky Survey, a tool still used by astronomers to guide their observations. The marked star is Barnard’s Star, a dinky, dim red bulb a mere 6 light years away — which makes it one of the closest of all the stars in the galaxy.

Barnard was a phenomenal astronomer, and inferred that since it was a red dwarf, for it to be seen at all means it must be close. He kept his eye on it over the years, and was able to measure its apparent speed across the sky. It moves a phenomenal 10 arcseconds per year, which is tiny in normal life, but pretty frakkin’ fast for a star. In 60 years since the Palomar observations, Ayiomamitis was able to capture it in the lower half of that image, where again its position is marked. Note how far it’s moved! In the intervening decades it’s traveled about 10 arcminutes, or about 1/3 the size of the Moon on the sky!

That’s fast. If every star moved that quickly, the constellations would last only a few centuries before being distorted beyond recognition. As it is, we see pretty much the same constellations ancient Sumerians did.

Note that the Palomar image is in black and white; Ayiomamitis took color images and you can see the dull red glow of Barnard’s Runaway Star.

It might help to see the two images superposed; Ayiomamitis did that for me when he alerted me to his observations:

Very cool. Note the number of faint stars; Barnard’s star is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus, which is near the galactic center, and is loaded with stars. Imagine trying to find that one faint ember among all those stars, and you start to get a glimpse of how amazing an observer Barnard was. Remember, this was before computers, digital photography, or any of those modern conveniences. He used film — actually, emulsion sprayed on glass plates — guided the telescope by hand, developed the plates, and measured them, again by hand. And he found that star among the millions of others.

In real terms, the star is moving at about 140 km/sec (90 miles/second) relative to the Sun. Its direction is bringing it closer to us, though it’ll never get closer than about 4 light years — slightly closer than Alpha Centauri is to us now. It’ll still be faint; only about twice as bright as it is now, and at the moment you need pretty good binoculars to see it at all! It’s shining at about magnitude 9.5, or 1/16th as bright as the faintest star you can see with your unaided eye. Of course, it won’t slide past us for about another 9000 years, so don’t hold your breath. And even though the age of the star is about 12 billion years, as a red dwarf it hasn’t even reached middle age yet. They last a long, long time. I bet over its life it’s seen far closer passes to stars like the Sun, and will live to see many more.

And finally, back to Shakespeare: even ignoring the Earth’s wobble, he still blew it in that passage from Julius Caesar. The North Star moves too. Of course, its proper motion is pretty small because it’s a long way off, over 400 light years away. Compared to Barnard’s Star, it’s hardly moving. Given that then, I suppose, I can give Shakespeare some credit.

Perhaps the fault lies in ourselves, and not the stars.

Image credit: Anthony Ayiomamitis and the Digitized Sky Survey

One of the signs for “Nicaragua”. Photo by Ann Serghas

In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language. The kids were the first to enrol in Nicaragua’s new wave of special education schools. At first, they struggled with the schools’ focus on Spanish and lip-reading, but they found companionship in each other. It was the first time that deaf people from all over the country could gather in large numbers and through their interactions – in the schoolyard and the bus – Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) spontaneously came into being.

NSL is not a direct translation of Spanish – it is a language in its own right, complete with its own grammar and vocabulary. Its child inventors created it naturally by combining and adding to gestures that they had used at home. Gradually, the language became more regular, more complex and faster. Ever since, NSL has been a goldmine for scientists, providing an unparalleled opportunity to study the emergence of a new language. And in a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College, it even tells us how language shapes our thought.

By studying children who learned NSL at various stages of its development, Pyers has shown that the vocabulary they pick up affects the way they think. Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.

The idea that language affects thought isn’t new. It’s encapsulated by the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, which suggests that differences in the languages we speak affect the way we think and behave. Typically, scientists test this link between language and thought by either comparing people who speak different languages, or by watching children as they, and their linguistic skills, develop. But both approaches have problems. Speakers of different languages also vary in many other ways that can affect the way they think, while growing children are also developing in many other aspects of their mental skills, which could confuse any effect of language alone.

But NSL cuts through both of these problems. Here is a language that was learned by successive waves of children whose mental skills were relatively mature, who all came from the same culture, and who all learned the language at the same age.

In most sign languages, signers map the positions of real-world objects using their hands, rather than using words like ‘left’, ‘inside’ or ‘over’. Someone signing a cat on a table would place one hand, representing a cat, over the other, representing the table, with no separate sign for ‘on’. The same works for left and right, with the added rule that usually, the signer represents the scene from their own perspective.

But NSL hasn’t quite got to that stage yet. In the first version developed in the 1970s, the children hadn’t settled on a consistent way of indicating left and right, and the locations of objects in their conversations are fairly ambiguous. The second group of children to expand NSL in the 1980s had more specific conventions for position.

Pyers compared the abilities of people from both groups, now fully grown adults, in two spatial tests. First, she led them into a small room with a single red wall. She hid a token in one corner of the room, blindfolded the children and spun them around until they lost their bearings. When she removed the blindfold, the children had to say where the token was. The second test, like the first, involved hiding a token in the corner of a room, but this time the room was a tabletop model that was rotated while the children were blindfolded.

In both tests, the second group of adults (who learned the more advanced form of NSL) outperformed the first group. Even though their memories and ability to understand the tasks were just as good, the expanded vocabulary of geographical gestures that they learned as children also gave them better spatial abilities well into adulthood.

By comparing the first group of NSL signers to typical children, Pyers also learned something about what’s going on in their heads. Children find the task easy and answer quickly but they often make mistakes. They’ll orient themselves to the geometry of the room, using the long and short walls to tell them where the token is. But they tend to ignore the red wall landmark so when they make mistakes, they usually go for the corner diagonally opposite to the correct one.

The first group of NSL signers were very different. They were more accurate, suggesting that their experience and maturity does at least count for something. Their mistakes are evenly distributed around the three other corners, suggesting that they use neither the landmark nor the room’s geometry to help them. And they took a long time over the test and said that they found it very difficult. They were aware of their own uncertainty, as adults often are, but they simply didn’t have a reliable mental map of the room and its hidden token.

Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.” She added, “[They] did not have a consistent linguistic means to encode ‘left of’.”

This is a fascinating result, especially since the first group of adults were older and had been signing for a longer time. It’s clear evidence that our spatial reasoning skills depend, to an extent, on consistent spatial language. If we lack the right words, our mental abilities are limited in a way that extra life experience can’t fully compensate for. Even 30 years of navigating through the world won’t do the trick. And they may never catch up, even though the language they invented has advanced – after all, some studies with American Sign Language suggest that people who learn spatial terms later on in life never master them.

This is a subtly different idea than the one espoused by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that different languages influence how speakers think about their world. By contrast, Pyers’ results focus “on those aspects of human cognition that are dependent on acquiring a language, any language”. She says that the room tasks tap into a set of mental skills that “crucially depends on language and that this relationship between language and spatial cognition should hold true for speakers of all languages”.

The Nicaraguan signers may well reveal more ways in which language fundamentally affects thought, for other aspects of the language besides spatial locations became more complex over time. These include ways of signifying mental states, and Pyers has already shown that as these became more sophisticated, so did the signers’ abilities to understand the fact that other people can hold false beliefs. Meanwhile, Ann Senghas and Molly Flaherty, who worked on the current study, are looking at how the emergence of a counting system in NSL affected the numerical skills of the signers.

The grand idea behind all of these singular observations is that as human language evolved, our mental abilities became increasingly entwined with linguistic devices. Those devices are part and parcel of modern language, and thus modern thought. NSL, being a new language, is the exception that proves the rule – as it developed, so did the abilities of those who learned it, from their skills at visualising objects in space to their capacity for understanding the minds of their peers.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914044107

More on gestures and language:

• Pregnant pauses and rapid-fire – how do different cultures take turns to talk?
• Babies’ gestures partly explain link between wealth and vocabulary
• Chimps show that actions spoke louder than words in language evolution
• Gestures reveal universal word order, regardless of language
• Communicating chimps and talking humans show activity in same part of the brain
• Guerrilla reading – what former revolutionaries tell us about the neuroscience of literacy

Courtesy of Rick Piltz, I learn of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that powerfully demonstrates just how convinced scientists are that global warming is real and human caused. Indeed, this paper, entitled "Expert Credibility in Climate Change," looks at the relationship between scientific prominence, amount of work published in the field, and acceptance of the scientific consensus. Findings:
(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and
(ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers. Those of us who follow this issue closely won't be surprised--but the results mean that journalists who have given a lot of weight to climate "skeptics" have some 'splaining to do. Essentially, this paper seems to be suggesting that they got the wrong "experts." Incidentally, given how closely this study hits home, I would expect it to be attacked--just as Naomi Oreskes' famous paper "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" ...

I’m not a fan of professional sports. I find the whole scenario of people rooting for their local team, consisting of a bunch of (generally egregiously overpaid) athletes that have no particular connection to their “hometown”, somewhat absurd. I can’t even watch the Olympics anymore, since it seems like a two-week long promotional ad, with a few minutes of mind-blowing athleticism thrown in now and then. I generally prefer playing sports than watching others do so.

However, I confess that I absolutely love the World Cup. I love that the entire world (with the possible exception of the US) becomes mesmerized. Europe and the Americas are well represented. But so are Africa and Asia. Even North Korea managed to qualify. I love that the games are shown without interruption: two 45 minutes halves (plus extra time), with no break for commercials. Just nonstop football/soccer. Yes, the uninitiated complain that almost nothing ever happens. But they are missing that something is always happening. The game is relentless. These are amazing athletes, from all corners of the globe, playing with no rest for 45 minutes straight. There is individual brilliance. There is brilliant teamwork. Granted, the rash of 0-0 games has been disappointing. Although play is generally exciting, it’s still fun to have a goal now and then. Especially if you’re forced to watch in the 3:30am–5:30am slot, as we are in Asia.

Clear evidence that the whole world is watching can be found in the advertisements which appear on the billboards circling the field. There are, of course, familiar names. But there are plenty of advertisements that, at least for me, spark no recognition whatsoever: Mahindra Satyam, Continental (not the airline), MTN, Seara, and an ad in Chinese that I couldn’t even read. It tells you something when someone is paying for what must be some of the most expensive advertising real estate anywhere, anytime, and the vast majority of the “West” can’t even read the ad. This is truly the world’s game. Despite the United States’ protestations (e.g., the “World” Series) otherwise.