The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Chimps are Wired for Words.

ScienceDaily reports on new findings from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, who say that chimpanzee brains are really close to human brains as far as the parts that do the talking for us. In other words, they could well be doing some talking among themselves that we just haven’t translated yet:

In the new study, the researchers non-invasively scanned the brains of three chimpanzees as they gestured and called to a person in request for food that was out of their reach. Those chimps showed activation in the brain region corresponding to Broca’s area and in other areas involved in complex motor planning and action in humans, the researchers found.

The findings might be interpreted in one of two ways, Taglialatela said.

“One interpretation of our results is that chimpanzees have, in essence, a ‘language-ready brain,’ ” he said. “By this, we are suggesting that apes are born with and use the brain areas identified here when producing signals that are part of their communicative repertoire.

“Alternatively, one might argue that, because our apes were captive-born and producing communicative signals not seen often in the wild, the specific learning and use of these signals ‘induced’ the pattern of brain activation we saw. This would suggest that there is tremendous plasticity in the chimpanzee brain, as there is in the human brain….

Entered on 29 February 2008 at 16:05 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Wave-powered boat sets sail.

PopSci takes to the sea with Japanese sailor Ken-ichi Horie, 69, who has harnessed wave power to make his new ship go:

At the heart of the record-setting bid is the Suntory Mermaid II, a three-ton catamaran made of recycled aluminum alloy that turns wave energy into thrust. Two fins mounted side by side beneath the bow move up and down with the incoming waves and generate dolphin-like kicks that propel the boat forward. “Waves are a negative factor for a ship—they slow it down,” says Yutaka Terao, an engineering professor at Tokai University in Japan who designed the boat’s propulsion system. “But the Suntory can transform wave energy into propulsive power regardless of where the wave comes from.”

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With a maximum speed of five knots, the Suntory will take two to three months to complete a voyage that diesel-powered craft accomplish in just one. But speed is not the point. The voyage aims to prove that wave propulsion can work under real-world conditions….

Horie’s the same fellow who crossed the Pacific once in a solar-powered boat, then in a junk-rigged catamaran made from recycled bottles and beer kegs.

[via]

Entered on 28 February 2008 at 16:17 in the Science file | 2 Observations |  Print

Nicknamed “The Monster.”

BBC News is raving about the discovery of the largest marine reptile ever to swim on Earth – a creature powerful enough to snap a car in half with its jaws:

The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil “treasure trove” uncovered on the island.

Nicknamed “The Monster”, the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail.

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The expedition’s director Dr Jorn Hurum, from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum, said the Svalbard specimen is 20% larger than the previous biggest marine reptile – another massive pliosaur from Australia called Kronosaurus.

There are pictures of small children lying next to the bones -and lovely, lurid illustrations of the thing trying to snatch a bird in mid-flight – at the link.

[via]

Entered on 27 February 2008 at 16:39 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Red Spot Mystery

Discovery assures us that space contines to be utterly inexplicable – at least as far as that famous, bizarre, permanent hurricane on the King of Planets:

Numerical modeling of the spot, as well as laboratory experiments trying to reproduce the dynamics of the Great Red Spot indicate there’s more going on than meets the eye.

“One of the interesting things we’ve discovered about this is that when you try to recreate this in the lab, it’s highly, highly unstable,” Marcus told Discovery News. “It just literally rips itself to shreds.”

Yet the real Giant Red Spot is one of the most stable features visible on Jupiter. So what gives?

“It’s telling us something about Jupiter,” said Marcus. “There must be something special about Jupiter’s atmosphere that makes it different.”

They think there’s some kind of major changes in temperature going on somewhere deep under the atmosphere, but they just don’t know – the only window down that far is the Red Spot.

Entered on 25 February 2008 at 6:19 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Anatomy of Horse

A 15th century AD Egyptian diagram kept by the University Library in Istanbul, showing what’s inside a horse.

Entered on 24 February 2008 at 6:43 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: Flip the Switch.

SONG: “Flip the Switch” _{(To download: right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Deep brain stimulation may help Alzheimer patient’s memories”, Telegraph.co.uk, 31 January 2008, as used in the post Memory on tap.

ABSTRACT: I’m not sure what it says about me that I read a story about a procedure that’ll give you absolute photographic recall of any one event in your past and my first thought is, “Well, there goes this relationship.” The memory being described here isn’t a real one, although I developed an inexplicable obsession with the image of bees crawling through gas stations after driving through Georgia in the mid 1990s, when I seemed to keep running into sad, desperate bees. Crawling on the concrete. So I wanted to write a nostalgic song The Zombies might have sung about the moment in which a girl gives the kind of ultimatum that both parties eventually sort of forget ever happened for the sake of domestic tranquility. Then I gave up on making the drums sound real and ran out of time to meddle with much of anything else, which is probably for the better. Simple seems to work.

As far as the recording goes,I think the lesson here is that one’s vocal performance improves once one no longer gives a damn about waking up the kids. (They stayed asleep, too.)

Entered on 23 February 2008 at 13:12 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

New Scientist Music Special

Just because anyone reading this should be interested, New Scientist is looking at music, why we have octaves, how we recognize music and weird ways music can mess with our minds.

Check it out.

Entered on 23 February 2008 at 6:46 in the Music file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Cloned Booger.

BBC News reports on a new breakthrough from South Korea. A biotech firm named RNL Bio is cloning a pit bull named Booger:

RNL Bio is charging the woman, from California, $150,000 (£76,000) to clone the pitbull using tissue extracted from its ear before it died.

The work will be carried out by a team from Seoul National University, where the first dog was cloned in 2005.

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RNL Bio says this is the first time a dog will have been cloned commercially.

“There are many people who want to clone their pet dogs in Western countries even at this high price,” company chief executive, Ra Jeong-chan, told the Korea Times.

The firm is expecting hundreds more orders for pets over the next few years and also plans to clone dogs trained to sniff out bombs or drugs.

Entered on 22 February 2008 at 18:48 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

A Flying Telescope!

How I resisted calling this “Eye in the Sky” I don’t know. But yeah, Universe Today is all excited about SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy), the new flying telescope, getting one step closer to the heavens:

SOFIA is a converted 747SP airliner that used to carry passengers for United Airlines and Pan Am, but now only has one voyager: an infrared telescope.

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Cloudy nights, normally the bane of observational astronomy, will not impede the ability of SOFIA. Other advantages are that scientists will be able to add specialized observing instruments for specific observations, and fly to anywhere in the world.

The telescope is 10 feet across, and weighs around 19 tons. It will look through a 16-foot high door in the fuselage to study planetary atmospheres, star formation and comets in the infrared spectrum.

Whoah.

Cool.

Entered on 21 February 2008 at 6:13 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Making Oil Out of Thin Air.

That’s what they’re doing at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to the New York Times. Zap CO2 and H2O from the atmosphere with electricity and the air itself becomes petroleum:

This plan has a minor hurdle, too; the electricity for driving the chemical processes, according to a white paper describing the overarching concept, would come from nuclear power. The proposal says it’d be worth it to have a payoff of steady, secure streams of methanol and gasoline with no carbon added to the atmosphere (and a price for gasoline at the pump of perhaps $4.60 a gallon — comparable to petroleum-based fuels as oil becomes harder to find).

I suppose a benefit is that it’s removing greenhouse gases, too – by turning them back into fuel.

Entered on 20 February 2008 at 6:26 in the Science file | 2 Observations |  Print