The Great Beyond

Check out these maps highlighting where all the neurotic people live in the United States (and the extroverts, and the most agreeable people, etc), as published in Richard Florida's latest column (Boston Globe). The result is fascinating in a water-cooler kind of way. Look! All the neurotic people are in New York! Those open to new experiences cluster in California, etc. etc.

But we at Nature are left wondering exactly how these maps were made… It doesn’t say in the article how precisely how the data was collected, or if there might be a bias, for example, due to people living in cities being more involved in the study than others. It also doesn’t say whether the maps have been normalized for population density, though we hope they have. Okay, this is a column: you don't expect that kind of detail in a column. But then where can you get it? (I can't find a paper on the subject... Richard - help us out!)

The five personality traits highlighted are standard in psychology; you can take a test to assess your personal scores in these five traits online here (warning: you need to agree to a few conditions and it’ll take a while).

Florida is a regular columnist and “professor of business and creativity” at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. The field he is exploring here is that of ‘psychogeography’, which seems to be an emerging trend in social sciences.

Posted by Nicola Jones on May 07, 2008
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There’s a great story today in the LA Times about US lawmakers and their cars.

According to journalist Richard Simon, “a little-noticed amendment to last year’s energy bill ... requires House members who lease vehicles through their office budgets to drive cars that emit low levels of greenhouse gases”.

This means the big, gas-guzzling monsters beloved of true Americans are out, and the cuddly, slightly-eco-friendlier models beloved of Europeans, Hollywood actors and hippies are in.

The best part of Simon’s story though is the quotes...

Continue reading "Keep your damn eco-cars, say US politicians" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 01, 2008
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A humongous – though technically only colossal -- squid is about to be dissected live over the internet.

This rare example of a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was frozen when it was pulled out of the sea early in 2007. Now researchers at Te Papa museum in New Zealand are defrosting it in preparation for its autopsy.

“They’re incredibly rare - this is probably one of maybe six specimens ever brought up,” says Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at the museum (BBC).

Continue reading "Live super-size squid autopsy" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 28, 2008
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We’ve covered the UK ‘physics funding crisis’ before, which might lead to a number of facilities including the Jodrell Bank telescope closing.

Now someone has written a song about it. ‘The Jodrell Bank Song’ by The Astronomers, produced by local radio station Silk FM, was released on Monday.

“When the Science and Technology Facilities Council announced plans to cut back the funding for Jodrell Bank the world was outraged,” says the group’s website, which also contains interviews regarding the Jodrell Bank site. “The future of the famous Lovell telescope and the e-Merlin project is now in doubt. Without funding, the site cannot continue to operate.”

Hat tip: The Guardian

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology
Songs about science part IV: GeekPop08
Songs about science part V: singing scientists

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 23, 2008
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A new front has opened up in sport’s war on drugs. Contestants in Spanish bullfights are to be subjected to dope testing if they ‘behave strangely’ during bouts.

We’re not talking about the matadors here.

According to Spanish paper El Mundo, dope testing of bulls has taken place occasionally before, but new procedures at the San Isidro festival will see more testing, with the actual work carried out by an official lab for the first time. Scientists will be looking for either steroids or tranquilisers.

“The first give the bull more resistance, and may mask a limp or a small injury so the animal passes preliminary inspection,” Mirat Fernando, a vet with the Regional Public Health Laboratory told the paper. “... And tranquilizers are used to change the behaviour of the bull.”

Making bulls more docile is not something that goes down well with fans. The Daily Telegraph notes that some are already saying recent bulls have been rather too meek.

An investigation into doping began in 2002 after some bulls “appeared to behave strangely”, but it was inconclusive (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph).

The San Isidro event in Madrid is regarded as one of the most prestigious in the bullfighting calendar. Fines of up to 60,000 euros may be imposed on those who drug their bulls.

Image: detail from photo of a bullfight in Granada / via Wikimedia

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2008
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A number of headlines today will surprise those who thought an iceberg sank the Titanic. ‘Low-grade rivets sank Titanic, claim scientists’, says one example.

What Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Timothy Foecke are actually claiming is that duff rivets used to hold bits of the ship together meant it sinking faster than it should have done. If the Titanic’s builder had used better materials, they argue, it would have stayed afloat longer after hitting the ’berg, allowing rescuers to arrive.

In their new book McCarty and Foecke say that builder Harland and Wolff used iron rather than steel rivets for key sections of the bow and stern. The bow is where the iceberg hit and Foecke tells the New York Times that damage “ends close to where the rivets transition from iron to steel”.

Foecke also says the iron used was not rivet quality, based on documents from Harland and Wolff and from analysis of rivets recovered from the wreck.

Continue reading "Riveting science from the Titanic" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 16, 2008
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The first excavation inside Stonehenge since 1964 is taking place right now. This is, of course, a great excuse to claim we soon know the truth of the mysterious stones.

The point of the latest dig is to work out when stones were first placed on the site, in a ‘Double Bluestone Circle’ of which no trace remains. The current iconic set of stones was re-erected later than this original circle and it is hoped that carbon dating, presumably of organic material found in the excavations, could indicate when the stones first arrived on site (English Heritage dig website).

“The bluestones hold the key to understanding the purpose and meaning of Stonehenge,” says Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage. “Their arrival marked a turning point in the history of Stonehenge, changing the site from being a fairly standard formative henge with timber structures and occasional use for burial, to the complex stone structure whose remains dominate the site today.”

And dig scientist Geoffrey Wainwright confidently declares, “We will be able to say not only why but when the first stone monument was built.”

Of course journalists will be fervently hoping he’s wrong about the "why" part...

Continue reading "Stonehenge dig a threat to journalists " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 02, 2008
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It’s easy to get paranoid when you’re writing about news stories on April 1st. However this one seems legitimate: scientists have discovered that we’re far more paranoid than generally believed.

They know because they’re watching you. Not really. What researchers led by Daniel Freeman did was monitor subjects sent on a virtual reality tube ride (some of you may call that a subway or a metro journey).

Freeman, a psychiatry researcher at the King’s College London, found most people found their virtual fellow commuters either friendly or neutral. But a significant proportion, going on for 40%, were a little paranoid.

You can watch a video of the journey on the BBC’s version of this story. I’d be pretty paranoid if I was on this tube – the passengers are freaky.

Continue reading "Paranoia stalks London’s Underground" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2008
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A surprising number of quite dramatic stories today – one big round-up post will have to do for them all.

Dextre, the Canadian space agency’s new robot, is meant to be helping construct the ISS. Instead it’s making outlandish demands:
In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at ‘Dextre the Magnificent.’ Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order.

Virgin and Google are going to Mars. They want YOU to join them (if you can score highly enough on their selection questionnaire that is).

Continue reading "A chemist, a physicist, and a biologist walk into a bar" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 01, 2008
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The world’s earliest sound recording has been successfully played back, nearly 150 years after it was created.

In 1860, roughly two decades before Edison’s phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville scratched a recording of French folk song Au Claire de la Lune onto paper blackened by smoke using his phonautograph.

Well, it’s supposed to be Au Claire de la Lune and my colleagues insist it sounds like it. To me it sounds like a recording of an owl being played underwater on a particularly cheap pair of speakers. It’s so bad that the newsreader on the BBC’s Today programme couldn’t stop laughing, even though her next item was an obituary.

Make up your own mind: here’s the 1860 recording.

Regardless of the quality, it’s still pretty amazing that the recording could be played back. To do this Patrick Feaster and David Giovannoni, of historians’ group First Sounds, took high resolution scans of the piece of paper and then produce a digital version playable with a virtual stylus (press release). The New York Times has probably the best article on the topic. It’s well worth a read.

Image: a phonautograph / Library and Archives Canada

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 28, 2008
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Crockett and Tubbs just don’t cut it anymore, so Miami police could soon be deploying hovering drones to keep an eye on the locals.

The slightly disturbing Micro Air Vehicle weigh 6 kg and are “capable of vertical takeoff and landing with transition to sustained high-speed flight”, according to their manufacturer Honeywell. Miami/Dade police are clear to use the drones after the Federal Aviation Authority granted them an airworthiness certificate last month (press release).

“Our intentions are to use it only in tactical situations as an extra set of eyes,” police department spokesman Juan Villalba told Reuters. MAVs could be used by SWAT teams dealing with hostage taking, he added.

Not everyone is happy though.

Continue reading "Miami prepares for police drones" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 26, 2008
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A retired American professor has succeeded in triggering an investigation into her claims to own a patent on technology vital to a host of modern technologies.

Gertrude Neumark Rothschild claims a veritable rogues’ gallery of modern electronics companies have infringed her patent on LEDs in products including “mobile devices, instrument panels, billboards, traffic lights, HD DVD players (e.g., Blu-ray disc players [sic]), and data storage devices”, according to a statement from the US International Trade Commission.

The ITC, a federal body which looks after US trade issues, voted to investigate the claim last week. In total, 30 companies are involved, including Nokia, Pioneer, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba. Rothschild has already settled a similar claim against Philips (Forbes).

If Rothschild is successful in her claim products from these companies could be banned from the US.

ARS Technica notes:

There’s little to indicate that Dr. Rothschild has decided to launch such an endeavor as a means of commemorating her imminent octogenarian status. This isn't the first time, however, that the good doctor has filed suit against major companies she felt were engaged in patent infringement. She previously filed suit against both Toyoda Gosei and Philips Lumined over their alleged infringement of US Patent No. 4,904,618 ("Process for Doping Crystals of Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors") and 5,252,499 ("Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors Having Low Bipolar Resistivity and Method of Formation"). The suits were eventually settled out of court.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 26, 2008
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The much hyped Tesla electric sports car finally went into full production this week. This year’s batch of the $100,000 vehicles is already sold out (press release, news coverage).

Although electric vehicles have been around for some time, the humble British milkfloat for example, they have up to now been slow, short range or merely comical. By contrast the Tesla does 0-60 in under 4 seconds, can travel over 300 km and looks like something you wouldn’t die of embarrassment if you were spotted in.

Whether this marks the real arrival of the electric car is far from clear however. And the Tesla is in no way ‘zero emission’, as the company claims...

Continue reading "Tesla roadster: dawn of the electric age or misfire?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 19, 2008
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In perhaps the weirdest computer developments of the year so far, a team of US scientists have managed to hack into a pacemaker. They not only hacked in but managed to mess around in ways that you really wouldn’t want them messing if it was your heart the device was stuck in (read the research paper pdf).

Technically the device they hacked wasn’t just a pacemaker, but an ‘implantable cardioverter defibrillator’, which not only sets a beat but can shock a heart back to the right rhythm. In the US over 100,000 people have such devices (AP).

“Using our own equipment (an antenna, radio hardware, and a PC), we found that someone could also turn off or modify therapy settings stored on the ICD,” write the researchers in a series of FAQs.

“Such a person could render the ICD incapable of responding to dangerous cardiac events. A malicious person could also make the ICD deliver a shock that could induce ventricular fibrillation, a potentially lethal arrhythmia.”

The researchers however insist there is nothing to worry about, they are merely highlighting a loophole that needs to be looked at.

Continue reading "Hacking the heart" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 12, 2008
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Entries in this year’s Wellcome Image Awards go on display tomorrow in London (here). The annual award for images created by scientists has thrown up some truly remarkable winners this year.

My favourite: Annie Cavanagh’s fly standing on sugar crystals.

“I think it’s really important to express science for the public in an artistic fashion so that they relate to something that they think is beautiful as well as scientific,” says Cavanagh, who works for the School of Pharmacy, part of the University of London.

More images from the collection – which will also go on show in Tokyo later this year – below the fold. One criticism: it would be nice to have a little more detail from the artists on how these amazing images were created.

Continue reading "Are you ready for your close up?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 11, 2008
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Are you getting bored of these yet? Below the fold, a slight change of emphasis as we shift from songs about science to songs by scientists. Richard Feynman demands orange juice and the British Antarctic Survey come over all creative.

Continue reading "Songs about science part V: singing scientists" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 06, 2008
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Sweeeet. Two researchers from the United States have uncovered what happens in brain of a jazz pianist when he or she goes off on an improvisational spree. And it looks as if all inhibitions are switched off in the name of music.

Charles Limb and Allen Braun put jazz musicians in an MRI machine and got them to play things they already knew on piano and to improvise. They then subtracted the results for memorized tunes from the results from improvisation, which should reveal only the parts of the brain used when riffing.

Cool fact: Limb and Braun had to create a special piano with no metal parts that could be used inside the MRI machine’s powerful magnetic fields (pictured below).

Creative juices flowing not only shut down the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain linked to self-censoring, but also fired up the medial prefrontal cortex, linked to self expression (research paper).

Continue reading "This is your brain on jazz" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 05, 2008
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If you are reading this blog as a distraction from submitting research for publication, it’s your lucky day. Martijn Schuemie and Jan Kors of the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam have come up with a tool to make life easier.

Rather than racking your brain to decide which journal is most likely to publish your work, their computer program – called Journal/Author Name Estimator or Jane –will take a paper’s title or abstract and tell you where to take it.

“With an exponentially growing number of articles being published every year, scientists can use some help in determining which journal is most appropriate for publishing their results, and which other scientists can be called upon to review their work,” Schuemie and Kors explain in a paper from the Bioinformatics journal.

Evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, who is also academic editor-in-chief at PLoS Biology, reckons Jane is “freaky and cool” (blog). Over on Nature Network one of our editors, Maxine Clarke, is not so enthused:

I think it is possibly quite counter-productive to use this kind of text-based comparison system on its own. At Nature, for example, we are looking for novel results, not something similar to what we have just published.
...
I just tried out Jane and was advised to submit my paper to the Saudi Medical Journal—the abstract I used had nothing to do with medicine, and why Saudi I have no idea!

Continue reading "Picker produces paper publication proposals" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2008
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The Null Hypothesis blog has just hosted an entire (albeit entirely virtual) festival of songs about science.

Pick of the bunch: Jonny Berliner’s bleak analysis of cosmology, ‘Dark Matter,’ is great. Just download the whole thing though, it’s all well worth a listen.

On show here, another track featured on festival, Professor Science performing ‘Sweet Home Apparatus’, an ode to the Golgi apparatus. Someone needs to organise this festival in the real world...

Previously on Songs about Science
Songs about science
Songs of science part II
Songs about science part III: geology

Posted by Daniel Cressey on March 03, 2008
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Reports this week announced that researchers have ‘solved the mystery’ of how Maya Blue was made (National Geographic News, New York Times), off the back of a paper published in the journal Antiquity. The vivid pigment, which was painted on human and other sacrifices, has been a focus of interest for decades. Although the main ingredients of the pigment – indigo and clay – have long been known (see this 1966 paper in Science), archaeologists have wondered about the details of how, when and where it was made.

The paper describes the study of a particular pot of incense in which researchers discovered flecks of clay and indigo. The slow-burning incense resin provided the heat needed to create the paint, and, according to LiveScience, might have been a key ingredient in binding the other ingredients together. The bowl was then chucked into a sinkhole thought to be a portal to the spirit world. The location and the incense suggest that “the production of the ancient Maya blue was based on the performance of the religious rituals” (The Chicago Tribune). Although the find may not be too surprising, the bowl appears to be the first artefact to show evidence of the pigment production process.

The recipe behind Maya Blue also made news in 2002 (National Geographic). That team patented a number of ‘Maya Blue’ recipes in 2006, including one that involved a combination of indigo, clay, and resin.

Posted by Nicola Jones on February 29, 2008
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It must have seemed like a great idea at the time, at least until science got involved. Rather than powering your floor lamps by nasty, carbon footprint increasing mains electricity why not use gravity?

That’s what Virginia Tech student Clay Moulton thought. So he designed the Gravia, a metre high lamp powered by a slowly falling weight that users would lift to the top. As the weight falls, the theory goes, it can be used to power LEDs – producing 600-800 lumens, about the same as a 40-watt bulb over a period of four hours (press release).

Although it hasn’t been built, Gravia even came second in a Greener Gadgets Design Competition. Websites praised it.

Then people started crunching the numbers…

One person noted on a Slashdot discussion:

The drop is 58" according to the plan [core77.com]. This gives about 0.022W at 100% efficiency.
For reference, the highest efficiency LEDs that I know of get 131 lumens per watt. If we're generous and allow them 150 lumens/watt, they still need 4W of power. This would require a drop of 255 metres using the 50lbs of weights he claims. Since we can't really go above 1.5m high, we'll need almost 4 tonnes of weights.

Later some estimates of the number creep up to 24 tonnes (ZD Net). It doesn’t seem likely this light is going to be in your shops anytime soon. We’re expecting a statement from Virginia Tech soon…

Read the university response in full below the fold.

Continue reading "Heavy work for green light" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 21, 2008
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The latest installment of our occasional series celebrating songs about science comes via the Green Gabbro blog (a gabbro is a type of rock). Geologist Maria Brumm has a rundown of love songs for geoscientists.

Sadly, she finds “As it turns out, geological love songs are hard to find - and when you do find them, they’re likely to be depressing (or else they’re a ‘hot lava’ orogeny). Plate tectonics for some reason always moves us apart, never together.”

Here’s one of her selections, Uncle Tupelo performing their song New Madrid:

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 19, 2008
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As hundreds of movies have gleefully told us, our eventual subjugation by robots is inevitable. According to a new interview with Ray Kurzweil we’ll be helping by implanting them into our own brains (BBC).

Founder of the Kurzweil Technologies company, Kurzweil is a futurologist who has actually got things right in the past including when computers would beat humans at chess. So his claims may stand a closer look. As well as speculating that we will soon be embedding nano-robots into our bodies, he thinks machines themselves will achieve ‘human level intelligence’ by 2029.

“We’re already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. … We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons,” he told the BBC.

Even though he apparently counts Alien and The Matrix as among his favourite movies, he added this caveat: “But that’s not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us.”

Mind you if those robots want to get up to our level they’re going to have to get serious. The latest one to come to the Great Beyond’s attention monitors your brainwave patterns and does an interpretive dance based on the results (that’s the video above, in case you were wondering). It’s part of an exhibition entitled BRAINWAVE: Common Senses, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York (featured recently in Nature; subscription required).

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 19, 2008
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Oh boy. A woman in California is paying $150,000 to have her recently deceased dog cloned.

By a member of Hwang Woo-suk’s research team.

And the dead mutt is called Booger.

Oh boy.

According to media reports the dog is being cloned by a company called RNL Bio. Their website has links out to all the media reports but no press release (at least in English, Korean readers please correct me on this).

The Korea Times says RNL Bio will deliver the cloned pit bull to Bernann McKinney, Booger’s former owner, in February next year. Booger was apparently particularly precious to McKinney as he saved her life after another dog bit off her arm (Daily Mail).

Continue reading "$150,000 for that doggie in the window" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 18, 2008
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If we’re lucky, this image of Carl Sagan may soon be adorning letters from America. The Sagan Appreciation Society has launched a petition to create a stamp honouring the astronomer and this is one of the proposed designs.

“As Carl was America's science populariser, it seems fitting that he be bestowed with a populist kind of honour,” say Patrick Fish, Sagan Appreciation Society founder. “Carl wasn't just an astronomer, physicist and the world's pre-eminent science teacher. He was arguably the first exo-biologist, one of the fathers of global-warming awareness, a peacemaker, and a brilliant author who could make science sound like poetry.”

Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow, says in the Ithaca Journal, “Carl was an avid stamp collector as a boy, and we treasure the albums he made then. They’re filled with his handwritten notes in the margins — perhaps the earliest evidence of his passion for the diversity of Earth’s cultures. So this particular tribute to Carl would have held special significance for him, as it does for me.”

The society plans to submit the petition and designs to the US Postal Service’s Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which recommends about 25 new subjects a year for commemorative stamps.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on February 15, 2008
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