Since I posted about facial composites last week, I need to mention this, The most typical face on the planet:
The researchers conclude that a male, 28-year-old Han Chinese man is the most typical person on the planet. There are 9 million of them.
The image above is a composite of nearly 200,000 photos of men who fit that description.
Click through to see what the face looks like.
I’m in New Orleans this week, doing some writing and also attending…Mardi Gras. I just saw my first parade, Muses, last night.
Which inspired the joking title of this blog post. For fun, I Googled the phrase “the science of mardi gras” to see what turned up. All I got was a bizarre reference to a pretty unscientific comment by Anderson Cooper:
It’s a very public event, of course, but there’s something intensely personal about the throwing of the beads. You make eye contact with someone, toss them a necklace. They say thank you, and you roll on. The only beads people want are the ones they catch themselves. I find that very telling. The beads that fall on the ground are rarely picked up. They lack the personal connection, the bond has been broken.
That’s not my experience of Mardi Gras. My experience is that the good beads are fought for, and kids scavenge on the ground for whatever isn’t caught. If a bead is still lying on the ground it’s because it’s broken.
What’s more, as a look at the “science of mardi gras” this is pretty lame. A real science of Mardi Gras might examine, say, the strange and artificial economy that gets created for a short span of time. In this economy, completely worthless beads suddenly come to have a temporary but real value–especially if they’re plastic pearls–even as more “scarce” throws, like coconuts, spears, etc, are valued still higher. (Of course, the ones really making money are the people selling beads by the “gross”–a bag of 144 individual ones–for more than $ 20, just so they can be thrown off of floats.)
There would also be a lot of studies of alcohol’s effects on group behavior. So–Mardi Gras’s “science” very much awaits.
1) First, a post from the past: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters.
2) Weird search query of the week: “are you allowed to drink alcohol in class.”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “Are we still evolving”:
You know what would actually be a hoot for a documentary?
What if we ran SNP chips on several people who study Neandertals, and I tell them which Neandertal parts they have, all in front of the cameras.
That would be so much fun!
4) 4) And finally, your weekly fluff fix:
Dienekes points to two interesting phenomena which when juxtaposed together show how the pace of technological change can outrun ideological arguments and hand wringing. Those of you who have been reading me since the early 2000s know where I stand on issues such as the “Kennewick Man” controversy. I think there’s an objective reality which should be studied. The latter is a normative judgement. There’s no rule embedded in the universe that truth needs to be set free, it’s a preference. So when it comes to Creationism of organized institutional religions, or shamanic ethnic Creationism, I don’t put much weight in its value or importance. But the shadow of Kennewick Man still looms over contemporary controversies as we crest the peak swell of human genomics in terms of the rate of increase of insight. Apparently members of the America Indian Program at Cornell are objecting to The Genographic Project. The project is headed by Spencer Wells, who has an appointment at Cornell now. An English professor associated with the American Indian Program apparently sent the student newspaper an almost parody-like email of impenetrable obfuscating academic-speak:
In a statement issued by AIP, the program’s director, Prof. Eric Cheyfitz, ...
OK, a little off topic for this weblog…not science, not nerdy. But The New York Times has an article up, James Franco Straddles Two Roles at Yale, which made me think of this SNL sketch:
Do you think The New York Times reporter was playing an inside joke? Or is James Franco actually a real life parody of himself? (I don’t even know what I mean I guess)
To make a dent in brown snake populations, feed them poison-stuffed mice; to devastate brown snake populations, create robots to do the job for you. That’s what conservationists want to do in Guam to stop these pesky reptiles from further destroying the native bird population. The robots would have to stuff mice with 80 milligrams of acetaminophen (poisonous to snakes), glue the mice to cardboard strips, and then attach paper streamers to these monstrosities—all so that these modern day Trojan horses get lodged in the snake’s forest canopy when they’re lobbed out of airplanes (and hopefully wind up in a snake’s tummy).
But that’s not all the the mischief that robots have been up to recently:
The U.S. Navy wants to start dabbling in robots too: Semi-autonomous micro-robot swarms that could themselves manufacture their own robots. Cute, huh? In a project proposal for scientists, the Navy says it’s looking for a few good robots that can “pick and place, dispense liquids, print inks, remove material, join components” and “move cooperatively” to manufacture “novel materials and structures.” Prepare now for the robot apocalypse! (No, ...
It’s smelly week on NCBI ROFL! All week long we’ll feature the funniest papers about the science of stink. Enjoy!
Gustofacial and olfactofacial responses in human adults.
“Adults’ facial reactions in response to tastes and odors were investigated in order to determine whether differential facial displays observed in newborns remain stable in adults who exhibit a greater voluntary facial control. Twenty-eight healthy nonsmokers (14 females) tasted solutions of PROP (bitter), NaCl (salty), citric acid (sour), sucrose (sweet), and glutamate (umami) differing in concentration (low, medium, and high) and smelled different odors (banana, cinnamon, clove, coffee, fish, and garlic). Their facial reactions were video recorded and analyzed using the Facial Action Coding System. Adults’ facial reactions discriminated between stimuli with opponent valences. Unpleasant tastes and odors elicited negative displays (brow lower, upper lip raise, and lip corner depress). The pleasant sweet taste elicited positive displays (lip suck), whereas the pleasant odors did not. Unlike newborns, adults smiled with higher concentrations of some unpleasant tastes that can be regarded as serving communicative functions. Moreover, adults expressed negative displays with higher sweetness. Except for the “social” smile in response to unpleasant tastes, adults’ facial ...
Earlier this week at a scientific conference in Boston, HIV researchers announced a remarkable success in countering the virus’ drain on the immune system. But this early step is far from a cure.
Why it’s exciting:
Carl June and colleagues tested six male patients who already had HIV and were taking a standard antiviral regimen. Like many HIV patients, the drugs helped them, but their counts of immune cells stayed low. June’s team tested a therapy created by Sangamo BioSciences in Richmond, California, that alters a patient’s actual white blood cells to make them more HIV-resistant.
Researchers removed a sample of CD4+ T cells, the type of immune cells affected by HIV, from each man and used Sangamo’s enzyme to disrupt the CCR5 gene, which encodes a protein that HIV uses to enter CD4+ cells. The engineered cells were then infused back into the patients. Immune-cell counts subsequently rose for five of the six patients who received the therapy. “It’s very exciting,” says John Rossi, a molecular biologist at the City of Hope’s Beckman Research Institute in Duarte, California. “If they did ...
Apparently July 12th, 2011, is now a hard date for the publication of George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, the 5th book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin has confirmed the date on his website: “Barring tsunamis, general strikes, world wars, or asteroid strikes, you will have the novel in your hands on July 12. I hope you like it.” He even has a late-1990s style countdown going. For what it’s worth, the first book, A Game of Thrones, came out in the summer of 1996. That means that a 10 year old starting the series in 1996 would be 25 now. In all probability this is going to be ~10 books, so who knows how old that 10 year will be when it’s all done.
Personally, I found that the last book was kind of a let down. Amazon reviewers seem to agree, as books 1-3 got 4.5 stars, but book 4 only 3. If Martin can’t bounce back, I assume that this series going to go the way of The Wheel of Time (before it was resurrected ...
Matt Lamkin argues that universities shouldn’t ban cognitive-enhancing drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. Lamkin is a lawyer and, like myself, a master’s candidate in bioethics. He rightly believes that a ban would do little to promote fairness or safety among students. The rule followers would be at a disadvantage while the rule-breakers would be at a greater safety risk. But Lamkin doesn’t believe we, as a society, should be ok with cognitive enhancement usage. Instead, he argues:
The word “cheating” has another meaning, one that has nothing to do with competition. When someone has achieved an end through improper means, we might say that person has “cheated herself” out of whatever rewards are inherent in the proper means. The use of study drugs by healthy students could corrode valuable practices that education has traditionally fostered. If, for example, students use such drugs to mitigate the consequences of procrastination, they may fail to develop mental discipline and time-management skills.
On the other hand, Ritalin might enable a student to engage more deeply in college and to more fully experience its internal goods—goods she might be denied without that assistance. The distinction suggests that a ...
Although well over 500 planets orbiting other stars are known to exist — and we know of many, many more awaiting confirmation — direct images of the planets are very rare. That’s because stars are billions of times brighter than planets, and the planets tend to huddle so closely to their star that their feeble light gets overwhelmed.
But it’s possible, and we have several images of such exoplanets. One of them is Beta Pictoris b, a super-Jupiter orbiting the star Beta Pic (as we in the know call it) about as far out as Saturn orbits the Sun. Its existence was confirmed in 2009, but it was also seen in earlier images in 2003 and 2008. The motion of the planet from one side of the star was obvious, and now observations from March 2010 again show it has moved as it orbits the star:
Pretty cool! These infrared images from the Very Large Telescope all have the starlight removed to show the faint planet (the faint rings and other blobs are optical effects and can be ignored). The upper left picture is from 2003; the upper ...
[This is the first of three intertwined posts on PKMzeta - the molecule that keeps our memories intact]
We’re used to the idea that we become more forgetful with age. As time passes, our memories naturally fade and weaken, and that’s if we’re lucky enough to avoid traumatic accidents or diseases like Alzheimer’s. But Reut Shema, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has found a possible way of preventing this decline, and even reversing it.
By loading the brains of rats with a protein called PKMzeta, she managed to strengthen their memories, even old and faded ones. “Multiple old memories were robustly enhanced. These results have no precedent,” says Todd Sacktor, who led the study together with Yadin Dudai.
PKMzeta is the engine of memory. This single protein behaves like a machine that constantly works to keep our memories intact. Switch it off, and we forget things permanently. It’s our lone defence against a constant tide of forgetfulness that threatens to revert our brains back to a blank slate (see “Exposing the memory engine”).
In 2007, Shema, Dudai, and Sacktor showed how important PKMzeta is by inactivating it in the brains of rats using a chemical called ZIP. They trained the rodents to avoid an artificial sweetener before injecting ZIP into the part of their brain involved in taste. The chemical irreversibly erased their distaste for sweetener. Even if they’d learned to avoid it a month earlier (several years in human terms), they forgot all about it once ZIP had blocked their PKMzeta. The protein’s powers aren’t limited to taste. Shema, Sacktor and others have since disrupted all sorts of memories by blocking PKMzeta, from old fears to motor skills to the location of objects.
These were a compelling result but the team hadn’t entirely sealed their case. “People have done science where you block things to see what happens, but you don’t really know what’s going on,” explains Karim Nader, a memory researcher at McGill University, who has worked with Sacktor before. ”You think it’s the equivalent of a smart bomb, but maybe it’s a dirty bomb. You block something in the brain and there are eight million things that could happen. So you have to enhance it and see if you have the opposite effect.”
And that’s exactly what Shema has now done. Once again, she taught rats to avoid the taste of sweetener. This time, a few days before their training, she infected the rats’ brains with viruses carrying PKMzeta. With extra copies of the protein at hand, the rats were more likely to remember their distaste for sweetener. Even if Shema injected the viruses a week after the rats’ training, when their aversion to the sweetener had started to fade, the extra PKMzeta enhanced their dulled memories.
“That’s the grand slam,” says Nader. “It’s got to be that molecule.”
Sacktor thinks that PKMzeta is unique in being able to boost old memories in healthy animals. In 2007, Li-Huei Tsai managed to reinstate lost memories in rats by chemically blocking a group of proteins called histone deacetylases. These chemicals stop DNA from scrunching up, which makes the genes within it easier to reach. But Tsai only did this in rats that suffered from a type of dementia. “That’s not the same thing as enhancing a normal animal’s old memories and making them stronger,” says Sacktor.
There are also many ways of strengthening memories in their earliest stages, when they first form and when they move from short-term to long-term storage. Rehearing the same information can help, as can a good nap. Just last month, I reported on a protein called IGF-II that can do the same. “But what we have with PKMzeta is unprecedented, in that you can take old memories that have already been around for a week and make them stronger,” says Sacktor. “That’s what’s really different about this.”
The viruses apparently weren’t just flooding the brain with PKMzeta, indiscriminately strengthening all the nearby synapses. Instead, the extra protein appears to have ended up in some synapses but not others. “This in a sense is just as remarkable,” says Sacktor. “You put in more of it and you don’t screw up the whole system. PKMzeta somehow knows how to fit into the memories that are already there.” Sacktor thinks that PKMzeta is drawn to itself. It somehow ends up in the right places and strengthens connections that have already been tagged by existing PKMzeta.
“Think about zeroes and ones on a hard disk,” he says. Removing PKMzeta with ZIP is like erasing information by flipping all the ones to zeroes. “Now we’re saying we’re putting in more ones, but it’s like they’re going where the other ones are, rather than randomly going to ones or zeroes.” This strange homing ability could help us integrate new information to existing memories, or to make sense of our memories over long periods of time. It’s the strangest aspect of PKMzeta and the one that Sacktor is most eager to crack. (See “Todd Sacktor talks about the memory engine”)
For now, David Sweatt, who studies memory at the University of Alabama, says that the new study is a “significant step forward” that greatly strengthens the role for PKMzeta in memory. “The identification of PKMzeta activators as potential cognition-enhancing agents is particularly exciting.”
But Sacktor is rightly cautious about any applications. “First of all, I don’t think we’re going to be using viruses!” he says. Rather than introducing extra copies of the PKMzeta gene, the ultimate goal is to work out how the brain makes the protein itself and give that process a boost. Even then, it’s difficult to say anything about benefits or risks, when people have only done studies in rats.
“One really doesn’t know how this would work out in people,” says Sacktor. Remembering every experience in painful detail might not be a pleasant or useful experience. “I think the point is more for people whose memories are falling apart because of neurodegeneration. There could be good and bad things about enhancing memory, but in people who are losing their memory, I think it makes sense. If people can’t remember whether they left their stove on or they can’t remember their children…”
Reference: Shema, R. (2011). Enhancement of Consolidated Long-Term Memory by Overexpression of Protein Kinase Mz in the Neocortex Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1200215
Image by KayVee
More on PKMzeta
More on memory:
While modeling plasma flows deep inside the sun, scientists may have found an explanation for why some sunspots cycles (like the most recent one) are weaker than others. “It’s the flow speed during the cycle before that seems to dictate the number of sunspots. Having a fast flow from the poles while a cycle is ramping up, followed by a slow flow during its decline, results in a very deep minimum.”
Risky business: In defending President Obama’s vision for space exploration that relies upon commercial space companies, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says the country must “become unafraid of exploration. We need to become unafraid of risks.”
Bad timing: Just as Apple unveils its new iPad—and Steve Jobs uses the opportunity to gloat about his company’s superiority in apps compared to Google’s Android system—Google had to take 21 apps off the Android Market because they were infected with malware.
The journals of Harvey Cushing, the father of neurosurgery, include admirable documentation of his own mistakes—giving medical historians a window into the birth of modern surgery around the turn of the 20th ...
I received a very interesting email from Alan Stern — head of the New Horizons Pluto flyby mission, and who, for a year, was NASA’s Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate.
Here’s what it said:
The attached open letter was sent to Congress today after being signed by over 55 space leaders.
The letter urges Congress to fully fund NASA’s plan to use commercial companies to carry crew to the Space Station.
Among the letter’s signatories are an unusually broad group of former NASA executives and advisors, former astronauts, CEOs and directors of firms large and small, space scientists, space journalists, and others. We include 14 former NASA astronauts, 5 former NASA senior executives, 13 educators and nonprofit leaders, and 24 space industry leaders from a wide variety of firms and institutions, both large and small.
I am a big advocate of this, having written many times that NASA should be exploring and creating new technologies, but should not be in the business of hauling stuff to space. That is better — and more cheaply — done by commercial contractors.
I’ve put the entire letter online here for you to read.
Here’s one ...
One of the recent episodes of NOVA ScienceNow was entitled “How Does the Brain Work?” On this week’s Point of Inquiry, I asked Dr. Tyson about the episode and what it found. Here’s a transcript, from around minute 6:20 of the show:
Tyson: Science exists, in part, in large measure, because the data taking faculties of the human body are faulty. And what science does as an enterprise is provide ways to get data, acquire data from the natural world that don’t have to filter through your senses. And this ensures, or at least minimizes as far as possible, the capacity of your brain to fool itself.
So to the neuroscientist, the brain is this amazing organ. And to the physical scientist, it’s like, ‘get it out of here.’ Leave it at home. Just bring your box, and have the box make the measurements. So that’s an interesting duality.
The brain–you can survive. My favorite among these is how easily the brain recognizes patterns even when there are no patterns there. You can statistically show there are no patterns, but your brain creates patterns. And the long term explanation for that has always been, it’s better to think that’s a tiger in the bushes, and then run away from it, and have it not be a tiger, than for it to be a tiger and not know it’s there and then you get eaten.
So the people who did not see patterns in the history of the species got eaten by creatures that were in fact making patterns in the visual din of the forest.
Q: The birth of science is, of course, the attempt to override this–and Francis Bacon talked about the “Idols of the Mind,” and that’s essentially what we’re now understanding through neuroscience. But it suggests there’s something about human nature where, scientific thinking is always going to be kind of the kid who gets left out of the group.
Tyson: I think the, if it were natural to think scientifically, science as we currently practice it would have been going on for thousands of years. But it hasn’t. It’s relatively late in the activities of a culture. Science as we now practice it…this is a relatively modern, that’s been going on for no more than 400 years. And you look at how long civilizations have been around, and you say, there’s a disconnect there.
Clearly, it’s not natural to think this way; otherwise, we would have been doing it from the beginning. And meanwhile, mathematics is the language of the universe–fascinatingly so–and yet science and math tend to be the two subjects that you will commonly hear people complain about in their time in school.
And so, I remain perennially intrigued by that fact: that the operations of the universe can be understood through your fluency in math and science, and it’s math and science that give people the greatest challenges in the school system.
Again, you can listen to the full episode here.
Sometimes the strangeness and beauty of nature come together in a scene so lovely, so surreal, that words fail. Such is the case in Phil Hart’s spectacular gallery of pictures showing bioluminescence in Gippsland Lakes in Victoria, Australia:
Oh, my. Can you believe this is real? I had to compress the file to get it to work on the blog, so please click it to see it in higher-resolution, and also look at the other astonishing pictures in his gallery.
Phil has a page describing in detail the pictures. In this case, a 1.5 hour exposure shows the glow from the trillions of Noctiluca Scintillans protists in the lake, as well as the trails of stars as they circle the southern celestial pole. That light on the horizon is not the Moon, but a house or some other man-made object. I love how the reflection curves and breaks up near the shore.
Phil’s pictures are simply breath-taking, and you just have to go and take a look. I am continually astonished at just how beautiful and surprising nature can be. It’s thrilling to see such disparate pieces ...
Light is pushy. The physical pressure of photons is what allows for solar sail space missions that ride on sunlight, and what allows for dreams of lasers that will push those sails even faster. And light can trap objects, too: Optical tweezers can hold tiny objects in place. Pulling an object with light, however, is another matter. Though it’s counter-intuitive to think you could create backward-tugging force with a forward propagating laser and create a real-life tractor beam, the authors of a new physics paper write that they have shown a way it could be done.
Jun Chen’s research team says that the key is to use not a regular laser beam, but instead what’s called a Bessel beam. Viewed head-on, a Bessel beam looks like one intense point surrounded by concentric circles—what you might see when you toss a stone into a lake. The central point in a Bessel beam suffers much less diffraction than a standard laser, and so scientists can use them for precision operations like punching a hole in a cell.
Paul French talks about his new book, Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. And rest assured, this is one measure by which America is still #1 in relation to China….
Over the past year and a half I have seen Tx/Rx Labs grow from a 300 sqft room to a 4000 sqft lab. By collaborating with each other, Tx/Rx Labs makes innovation accessible to everyone. Whether it be learning new skills, accessing equipment, tapping into another member’s knowledge, Tx/Rx Labs facilitates the path to working on technology. In March, Tx/Rx Labs will be hosting HACK-B-Q, a technology demo series where we will show some of the cool projects we have been working on. Please show your support for the movement by coming out, and telling your friends.
What’s a Hack-B-Q? Think free B-B-Q with the added bonus of getting to share knowledge with TXRX Members who have expertise in exciting DIY technology projects. And that’s just for starters: There are tons of exciting projects in progress and members with expertise in chemistry, electrical engineering, biology, physics, programming, mechanical engineering, and many others, all of whom are interested in sharing that knowledge for the benefit of the community.
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NASA Announces Winners of OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Video Contest
"NASA has announced the winners of the 2010 NASA OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Award. The contest encouraged students to produce short, creative videos about their favorite technology from NASA's Spinoff 2009 Publication. NASA collaborated with Hasbro using the correlation between the popular TRANSFORMERS brand, featuring its leader OPTIMUS PRIME, and spinoffs from NASA technologies created for aeronautics and space missions used here on Earth. The goal was to help students understand how NASA technology 'transforms' into things used daily."
