The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

I see sounds.

ScientificBlogging.com has a story that I’d suspect was an April Fools if this wasn’t the middle of summer. Supposedly, like our intelligent cousins to the seas, humans are capable of using echolocation to “see” sounds:

In order to learn how to emit, receive and interpret sounds, the scientists are developing a method that uses a series of protocols. This first step is for the individual to know how to make and identify his or her own sounds (they are different for each person), and later to know how to use them to distinguish between objects according to their geometrical properties “as is done by ships’ sonar.”

Some blind people had previously taught themselves how to use echolocation by trial and error. The best-known cases of these are the Americans Daniel Kish, the only blind person to have been awarded a certificate to act as a guide for other blind people, and Ben Underwood, who was considered to be the world’s best “echolocator” until he died at the start of 2009.

However, no special physical skills are required in order to develop this skill. “Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you, and within another two weeks you can tell the difference between trees and a pavement,” Martínez told SINC.

The scientist recommends trying with the typical “sh” sound used to make someone be quiet. Moving a pen in front of the mouth can be noticed straightaway.

Feather in your tank.

The Daily Green recently revealed an alternative fuel scheme that may be much better than bird-brained:

Finding novel uses for chicken feathers is a pet project of Professor Richard P. Wool of the chemical engineering department of the University of Delaware. He had a very original idea: Why not use carbonized chicken feathers — which resemble highly versatile (and tiny) carbon nanotubes — to…store hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles. Picture very tiny natural sponges, which have a big weight advantage over metal hydride storage of this useful element. How great is that?

Wood enlisted Turkish-born graduate student Erman Senöz in the project, whose results were announced this morning at a conference in College Park, Maryland. “We started three years ago,” Senöz said. The pyrolysis process — very high heat without combustion in the absence of oxygen — yields fibers “that are micro-porous, very thin and hollow inside like carbon nanotubes. They start forming at 350 degrees Centigrade, and above 500 C they collapse. We’re trying to find the perfect temperature.”

Science Art: 3D movie taken by the Terrain Camera (TC) of KAGUYA (SELENE) during its maneuvered falling to the Moon.), Japanese Space Agency JAXA.

(Larger version here.)

This is the Japanese lunar probe Kayuga (Selene) crashing into the Moon.

More specifically, this is a 3D rendering of data sent by the probe as it ended its mission – just as it was programmed to do. Silently. Inexorably. Beautifully. There’s a Japanese word, aware (ah-wah-ray), that describes the beauty of sadness and transience. It’s a wonderful concept.

Here, we have built a masterful, efficient, gleaming machine. We are sending it to the moon. It will destroy itself there. We will learn much from this.

And then it will be gone forever.

SONG: This is the Sound.

SONG: “This is the Sound” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Acoustic Black Hole Created in Bose-Einstein Condensate”, Technology Review, 10 June 2009, as used in the post “A SONIC BLACK HOLE!”

ABSTRACT:
So, first off, the chorus to this was written intentionally – this song is not the sound of a sonic black hole, since a sonic black hole would be absolutely silent – no phonons (particles of sound) would escape. So this song is the sound of the sound of silence. I mean, I also like the simple repetition, but I thought it was important to point out that it was actually on purpose.

Of course, reading about researchers creating a black hole made of sound… there was no way not to do a song about that. Two weekends ago, I went to go see the physics-savvy Squeaky play (what might be) one of their last shows, and talked a little about this research, and there were crunchy guitars, and much saying of the word, “Dude,” and so, well, a big sprawling skull-bending post-punk song was what I was aiming at. There are only three chords, but the bassline keeps changing. Oh, and the tempo never changes either, although it sort of feels like it does for the massive bridge. Recording this took a long time, but it made me happy.

Next, a penitential cover that (I think) will be nothing like this.

Guild Salute: MASSIVE Science Songs.

How did I only find out about this amazing, ambitious site now?

It’s the Math And Science Song Information, Viewable Everywhere (MASSIVE) database, affiliated with the Science Songwriters Association. Any outfit that includes The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets and Mose Allison in the same list is OK by me.

So very many songs…. Breathtaking.

MASSIVE and SSA, the Guild salutes you!

(And is currently looking over membership materials….)

Global Warming Trivia – from the SEA!

The Scientists and Engineers for America have a fun trivia question today:

Which gas of the following is the most important greenhouse gas but will NOT be covered by the new landmark climate legislation?

Stumped?

Here’s the answer.

Deadly Roundup

Scientific American confirms my suspicions about my neighbors and their well-manicured, weedless yards. All that stuff they’re spraying? Yeah, it’ll kill you:

One label requirement for Roundup is that it should not be used in or near freshwater to protect amphibians and other wildlife.

But some inert ingredients have been found to potentially affect human health. Many amplify the effects of active ingredients by helping them penetrate clothing, protective equipment and cell membranes, or by increasing their toxicity. For example, a Croatian team recently found that an herbicide formulation containing atrazine caused DNA damage, which can lead to cancer, while atrazine alone did not.

POEA was recognized as a common inert ingredient in herbicides in the 1980s, when researchers linked it to a group of poisonings in Japan. Doctors there examined patients who drank Roundup, either intentionally or accidentally, and determined that their sicknesses and deaths were due to POEA, not glyphosate.

POEA is a surfactant, or detergent, derived from animal fat. It is added to Roundup and other herbicides to help them penetrate plants’ surfaces, making the weed killer more effective.

…

Seralini’s team, however, did study multiple concentrations of Roundup. These ranged from the typical agricultural or lawn dose down to concentrations 100,000 times more dilute than the products sold on shelves. The researchers saw cell damage at all concentrations.

Pay attention to your daydreaming.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to paying attention lately – and how we really need to not do that all the time. Wall Street Journal, Discover magazine and PhysOrg all have similar reports on daydreaming, actual dreaming and generally unfocused thoughts… and their importance in getting the big ideas.

Taken together, these paint an interesting picture of WHO’S REALLY IN CHARGE in here. Who does the real thinking inside this head I like to think of as mine. Is it me? I can’t really say….

Discover, on attention
The human brain is arguably the most complex organ in the natural world. And yet studies on mind wandering are showing that we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes on even the easiest tasks, despite the fact that we make mistakes whenever we drift away.

…

The fact that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have to do with the future.

Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most fruitful type of mind wandering. In their fMRI study, Schooler and his colleagues found that the default network and executive control systems are even more active during zoning out than they are during the less extreme mind wandering with awareness. When we are no longer even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture.

Because a fair amount of mind wandering happens without our ever noticing, the solutions it lets us reach may come as a surprise.

PhysOrg, on dreaming:

“We found that – for creative problems that you’ve already been working on – the passage of time is enough to find solutions,” said [Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System]. “However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity.”

Mednick added that it appears REM sleep helps achieve such solutions by stimulating associative networks, allowing the brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas.

Wall Street Journal, on the wandering mind

“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who reported the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. As measured by brain activity, however, “mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”

She suspects that the flypaper of an unfocused mind may trap new ideas and unexpected associations more effectively than methodical reasoning. That may create the mental framework for new ideas. “You can see regions of these networks becoming active just prior to people arriving at an insight,” she says.

…

By monitoring their brain waves, he saw a pattern of high frequency neural activity in the right frontal cortex that identified in advance who would solve a puzzle through insight and who would not. It appeared up to eight seconds before the answer to a problem dawned on the test subject, Dr. Bhattacharya reported in the current edition of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

“It’s unsettling,” says Dr. Bhattacharya. “The brain knows but we don’t.”

Song delay….

Yes, it’s the 23rd. There should be a new song here. There isn’t.

You, oh faithful readers, will have a scientific song rather soon. And then, as is the custom here, you’ll have a truly horrible penitential cover.

Mea culpa.

Crunchasaurus?

PhysOrg ventures into the vast Gobi Desert to reveal a historical find – the fossilized remains of the first confirmed nut-eating dinosaur:

Larger, more numerous gizzard stones point to a diet of harder food, such as nuts and seeds. “The psittacosaur at hand has a huge pile of stomach stones, more than 50, to grind away at whatever it eats, and this is totally out of proportion to its three-foot body length,” Sereno explained.

Technically speaking, the dinosaur is also important because it displays a whole new way of chewing, which Sereno and co-authors have dubbed “inclined-angle” chewing. “The jaws are drawn backward and upward instead of just closing or moving fore and aft,” Sereno said. “It remains to be seen whether some other plant-eating dinosaurs or other reptiles had the same mechanism.”

They looked like parrots. On the inside, at least. Big, nut-eating parrots.