The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

Four-legged Fish.

It walks! It has gills, but by goodness it WALKS! The BBC isn’t quite so enthusiastic in describing the discovery of a four-legged fish fossil:

“From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body.

“In terms of construction, it had already undergone most of the changes from fish towards land animal, but in terms of lifestyle you are still looking at an animal that is habitually aquatic.”

Experts believe that Ventastega was an important staging post in the evolutionary journey that led creatures from the sea to the land.

…but maybe it should be.

Entered on 30 June 2008 at 6:11 in the Science file | 1 Observation |  Print

Science Art: Coelastrum by Andrews

Simon Andrews took this microscopic photograph of a cell cluster of coelastrum algae and submitted it to Wikimedia Commons, where I found it.

Entered on 29 June 2008 at 6:59 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Brief: Phoenix on Twitter

How much am I loving the Mars Phoenix tweets?

Very much.

Entered on 28 June 2008 at 5:51 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Meditation, Mindfulness and “Untraining” the Brain.

ScienceBlogs has (have?) a piece on an interesting study about ways to make your thinking less hidebound and more creative:

Yet relatively few studies focus on whether thought and behavior can be de-automatized – or, as I might call it if I were asking for trouble, deprogrammed.

What would count as deprogramming? For example, consider the Stroop task, where subjects must name the ink color of each word in a list of color words (e.g., “red” might be written in blue ink, and the task is to say “blue” while suppressing the urge to automatically read the word “red”). Reaction time is reliably increased when subjects name the ink color of incongruent words (“red” written in blue ink) relative to congruent words (“red” written in red ink), presumably because the subjects need to inhibit their prepotent tendency to read the words. But is it possible to regain control over our automatized processes – in this case, reading …?

Those subjects who underwent training met with instructors for 30 minutes each week, and were instructed to train 20 minutes twice daily for 2 months. Transcendental meditation (TM) required the use of a mantra, and other specific techniques, as described in Maharaishi (1969, cited by Alexander et al., 1989). Mindfulness training (MF) involved a structured word generation exercise, in which subjects must think of a word, then think of another word beginning with the last letter of the previous word, and then repeat this process throughout training without ever repeating a word. Subsequently subjects were afterwards simply asked to generate words belonging to specific categories, and then undergo a fairly generic “creative thinking” exercise (think of novel uses for various objects, but don’t daydream). Mental relaxation simply involved focusing on a pleasant or relaxing thought.

Various statistical procedures were also used to equate instructor effectiveness, subjects’ expectancy of benefits, or regularity of practice; the study was double-blind, in that the instructors and the subjects were unaware of the hypotheses being tested. After training, subjects were tested on a variety of cognitive and personality tests, including associate learning, word fluency, depression, anxiety, locus of control, and of course Stroop. Results showed that the TM and MF groups together scored significantly higher on associate learning and word fluency than the no-training and relaxation-training groups. Perhaps most surprisingly, over a 36 month period, the survival rate for the TM and MF groups was significantly higher than for the relaxation and no-training groups (p< .00025). But more to the point, both TM and MF scored higher than MR and no-training on the Stroop task (p<.1; one-tailed test).

So, 1. meditation and mindfulness training both increase a kind of mental efficiency, which is good to know, and 2. here’s a scientist citing the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which is sort of awesome.

The end of the piece is even more fascinating, showing that strong suggestions – either hypnotic or fake-hypnotic – are even more effective at unleashing the mind.

Quick, someone, tell me what to do!

Entered on 27 June 2008 at 6:20 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Spray-on skin.

PopSci’s got skin in a can. I mean it. An aerosol. You spray it on burns. It’s skin in a can:

Within the next five years, Atala aims to build a portable version for the battlefield that will print layers of skin tissue directly onto deep flesh wounds. For surface wounds, such as burns, the consortium is developing a handheld spritzer that sprays a thin layer of immature skin cells over the wound. These cells, called keratinocytes, are extracted from the patient’s skin and stimulate healing in the wound. In a recent clinical test of the gun on 16 burn patients, all showed “excellent healing” after one to three weeks. The conventional approach of grafting, in comparison, takes just as long but requires three times as much skin and often results in patchwork scarring.

It’s a simple version of the same technology they’re developing to print new organs with stem-cell inkjets.

Entered on 26 June 2008 at 18:04 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Neanderthals About Town.

PhysOrg.com puts on the Ritz with a new discovery about the sophisticated Neanderthals of Great Britain:

“The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically advanced and potentially older than tools in Britain belonging to our own species, Homo sapiens,” says Dr Matthew Pope of Archaeology South East based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. “It’s exciting to think that there’s a real possibility these were left by some of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy northern Europe. The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology – not a people on the edge of extinction.”

We know they had bigger brains than us. Did they have cuff links and snuffboxes, too?

Entered on 25 June 2008 at 6:17 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: All Our Tomorrows

SONG: “All Our Tomorrows” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “DNA Retrieved from 1,000-Year-Old Vikings”, LiveScience.com, 28 May 2008, as used in the post Viking DNA .

ABSTRACT: Well, I kinda knew I’d go for the Viking story this month because it’s Vikings. I thought this might wind up as a shanty about raiding villages to sell fish, but that would probably be too dorky. So I wrote a song about cloning a Viking maiden to love and squeeze and marry and I will call her Brunhilde and we will be together forever….

When in doubt, I always seem to go creepy. I was really trying for sweet (honest!) and the bit where it goes from that low note on “base” up to the high in “tomorrows” was directly inspired by the vastly more talented vocals of Glen Hansard. Maybe I can clone him, too, and make him sing in my place.

If there’s any doubt about what all the letters at the end of the song are about, they’re the standard abbreviations for the four bases that make up DNA (thus the source of the name of the movie Gattaca). I spent a lot more time writing than recording on this, but did discover one thing I quite liked – I used Reaper’s MIDI stuff for the first time, along with a pretty great mellotron VST plug-in called Tapeworm from Tweakbench. Free to download and very easy to plug in and use even for a MIDI incompetent like me. And it sounds pretty much like a mellotron.

Entered on 23 June 2008 at 6:48 in the Songs file | 1 Observation |  Print

Science Art: “Dirigible Balloon” The New Students Reference Work

From The New Students Reference Work (1914), edited by Chandler B. Beach, associate editor Frank Morton McMurry.

Scanned by Wikimedia Commons user LA2.

Entered on 22 June 2008 at 6:55 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Scared eyes see more.

Eyes as round as quarters, mouth pulled into a hideous grimace, New Scientist pulls back the veil on a chilling new study that reveals the survival benefits of looking terrified:

The open eyes allowed quicker detection of objects on the periphery, as well as faster eye movements back and forth, while an open nose took in more air with each breath without any extra effort. An MRI scan confirmed the difference in the space in the nasal cavity.

“These changes are consistent with the idea that fear, for example, is a posture towards vigilance,” says Susskind, “and disgust a posture towards sensory rejection.”

Entered on 21 June 2008 at 6:57 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Why it’s good to be baaaad.

New Scientist reveals why bad boys get more action – it’s because of the evolutionary pressure of the “dark triad” of personality traits, say mild-mannered scientists. Self-obsessed narcissism, thrill-seeking psychopathy and manipulative deceit make a mate appealing because they’re a good way to make lots of thrill-seeking, manipulative, self-obsessed babies:

James Bond epitomises this set of traits, Jonason says. “He’s clearly disagreeable, very extroverted and likes trying new things – killing people, new women.” Just as Bond seduces woman after woman, people with dark triad traits may be more successful with a quantity-style or shotgun approach to reproduction, even if they don’t stick around for parenting. “The strategy seems to have worked. We still have these traits,” Jonason says.

Just don’t try to get James Bond to settle down.

(And why is it these evolutionary science pieces always seem to be circular in some way? We like these traits because these are the traits we have grown to like?)

Entered on 20 June 2008 at 6:03 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print