The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

The sound of a hundred shrugging epidemiologists.

New Scientist is being reassuring – sort of – when it declares that this swine flu pandemic business isn’t any kind of surprise:

But in 1998, says Richard Webby of St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, swine H1N1 hybridised with human and bird viruses, resulting in “triple reassortants” that surfaced in Minnesota, Iowa and Texas. …

By 1999, these viruses comprised the dominant flu strain in North American pigs and, unlike the swine virus they replaced, they were actively evolving. There are many versions with different pig or human surface proteins, including one, like the Mexican flu spreading now, with H1 and N1 from the original swine virus.

…

There are now so many kinds of pig flu that it is no longer seasonal. One in five US pig producers actually makes their own vaccines, says Vincent, as the vaccine industry cannot keep up with the changes.

This rapid evolution posed the “potential for pandemic influenza emergence in North America”, Vincent said last year. Webby, too, warned in 2004 that pigs in the US are “an increasingly important reservoir of viruses with human pandemic potential”. One in five US pig workers has been found to have antibodies to swine flu, showing they have been infected, but most people have no immunity to these viruses.

Kind of puts a damper on that whole bacon thing now, doesn’t it?

Entered on 30 April 2009 at 6:59 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

For those on the right, sorry, he really is joking.

The Colbert Report recently made science news over the space station naming controversy. Well, unbowed and unbloodied, the “right-wing” “pundit” once again “made the news” – this time showing up on the Huffington Post and elsewhere as a tool. A tool for studying how conservative leanings affect perception of satire:

The International Journal of Press/Politics:
Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism.

In other words…

Huffington Post:
I think a lot of conservatives are going to pissed when they realize that Stephen Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner was not, in fact, an awkward and ineffective attempt to praise President George W. Bush, but actually a bitter and satiric criticism of his incompetence!

This may be another statement of Poe’s Law, which becomes less ha-ha funny and more psychologically intriguing the more you think about it. There are deep links between humor and politics… the ability to laugh and the kind of social contract you make with the world.

Entered on 29 April 2009 at 6:41 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Memory and meditation.

You’d expect that meditation would improve your ability to remember things, I suppose. But this study mentioned in New Scientist shows that it really depends on how recently you meditated – and if you’re doing it in a particular way:

The Sechen monks proved no better at determining whether the second shape was identical to or the mirror image of the first shape, compared to people who don’t meditate. Their visual memories, too, seemed normal.

Then, by chance, Kozhevnikov tested a monk immediately after a meditation session. “He showed unbelievable performance. Suddenly, I realised that I need to give this test right after meditation,” she says.

On subsequent exams of 15 monks and experienced meditators in the US, she got the same results. Before meditation, they performed no better than anyone else. Yet after 20 minutes of meditation, their visual memory and spatial skills improved dramatically.

What’s more, only practitioners of a meditation style that emphasises visual imagery – called deity yoga – registered an improvement. Kozhevnikov also tested 14 people experienced in a form of meditation that does not focus on mental imagery – known as open presence meditation – and their visual memory and spatial skills saw no gains.

She thinks the same effect might be true for painters and other visual artists. I suppose it’s not much different from someone who’s physically warmed up for a workout. Stretching matters.

Entered on 28 April 2009 at 20:35 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Aard-wolf, Webster’s New International

Proteles cristata, the earth-wolf of southern Africaraman amplifier. He’s got a guilty look about him, doesn’t he? He knows what the other hyenas have been hiding. They’re his cousins.

They eat carrion and whatever they can kill; he eats termites – as many as 300,000 a night, lapping them up with his long, sticky tongue.

What. What are you looking at. Go on, get out of here.

From Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911, G & C Miriam Co. Springfield, MA, found here.

Entered on 26 April 2009 at 6:39 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

SONG: “64 Actuators”

SONG: “64 Actuators” _{(To download: double right-click & “Save As”)}

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Jacket Lets You Feel the Movies”, IEEE Spectrum, 18 March 2009, as used in the post “Jacket makes movies feelies,” (with perhaps a side order of “The satellite feels” and “Touch the vision.”)

ABSTRACT:
This song feels more like… more like a sketch than a finished painting, like there are some details still left to fill in. But I think that fits with the general theme. It’s sort of an examination of this haptics business and the way we’re creating phantom sensations (instead of the persistence of vision, the persistence of motion?) that act as substitutes for the real thing.

So, naturally, I write a song about wearing a jacket that fools you into thinking you’re being touched by someone you want touching you. Stitch me up in these phantoms. Am I dreaming your fingers, your arms between the seams?

An actuator is the gizmo that makes your cell phone or Xbox controller vibrate.

I kinda wanted to base the guitar parts around Jefferson Airplane’s “Today” – a bassy acoustic with a slow, clean electric riff tweedling over it – but where the wah-wah came from is anybody’s guess. Sounds like waves. I also was thinking about The Long Winters’ The Worst You Can Do Is Harm, which I’ve been listening to a lot over the past few days. Odd way of getting lyrics to fit a song on that album. It works better than what I did here, but then again, this is just a sketch. You’ll have to imagine the rest. Touching you wirelessly.

Entered on 23 April 2009 at 16:51 in the Songs file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Home-grown and then some.

The FASEB Journal makes me uneasy with a new biochemical study. I’m beginning to worry that any minute now, government agents will be arresting my head:

Scientists made their discovery by first extracting several small proteins, called peptides, from the brains of mice and determining their amino acid sequence. The extracted proteins were then compared with another peptide previously known to bind to, but not activate, the receptor (THC) affected by marijuana. Out of the extracted proteins, several not only bound to the brain’s THC receptors, but activated them as well.

“The War on Drugs has hit very close to home,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. “Last year, scientists found that our skin makes its own marijuana-like substance. Now, we see that our brain has been making proteins that act directly on the marijuana receptors in our head. The next step is for scientists to come up with new medicines that eliminate the nasty side of pot—a better joint, so to speak.”

Self-made marijuana? That’s trippy.

Entered on 22 April 2009 at 6:29 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Ammā Dnghu: A taste for PIE.

Forget Hebrew, Latin and Old Norse – the Page F30 blog reports on folks out there working to bring back a really old language:

That’s the concept behind the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language, a language that is believed to have been spoken around 3000 BC to 2500 BC, at least two millenia before Latin began to achieve any sort of prominence. The theory goes that a few centuries later this language eventually evolved into different languages, which eventually became the ancestors of various language families, and these eventually diverged again into other individual languages that we have today, languages that differ from each other but still retain large similarities to each other.

This original PIE language has never been written down, but luckily the huge number of Indo-European languages (400+ languages) and the commonalities between them have allowed us to reconstruct the original language with a fair amount of accuracy.

…

The most prominent group at the moment advocating the serious revival and use of a modern common Indo-European language is the Indo-European Language Association, located at Dnghu.org, and one of their goals is to eventually see it become a working language of the European Union. The name dnghu itself is a good choice. Dnghu is PIE for tongue or language….

In Germanic languages, dnghu became tongan and thence tongue, while in early Latin, it became dingua and then lingua and thence language.

Ammā is easy to guess – just stick an “m” in front of it.

Entered on 21 April 2009 at 17:27 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Men need not apply.

The Telegraph, among other news sources, revels in my obsolescence. I am biologically and genetically surplus to needs. I am a man, and they’ve found the first species that’s done away with men altogether:

Researchers were first drawn to Mycocepurus smithii by its skill at cultivating various different fungal crops for food but closer inspection raised questions about the ants’ sex life.

Six separate tests on the ants failed to uncover any males, researchers led by Anna Himler at the University of Texas at Austin wrote in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

They reproduce by cloning queens whenever they need a new crop of babies. The rest of the time, they compare drape patterns and oh god I am not going to tumble into the cesspool of gender-essentialist gags if I can at all help myself. Which I can’t, because I’m a man.

Entered on 20 April 2009 at 6:48 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science art: Cannabis sativa, Nordisk familjebok

Happy 4/20, all you stoners.

This is where rope comes from. And paper, and oil, and birdseed, and cheese, and fabric, and…. duuuuude.

Image found in a very special category on Wikimedia Commons.

Entered on 19 April 2009 at 6:26 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Sushi ain’t green.

Scientific American raises the alarming prospect that, much quicker than anyone expected, bluefin tuna is going the way of the dodo:

As European fishing fleets prepare to begin the two-month Mediterranean fishing season on Wednesday, WWF said its analysis showed the bluefin tuna that spawn — those aged four years and older — will have disappeared by 2012 at current rates.

“For years people have been asking when the collapse of this fishery will happen, and now we have the answer,” said Sergi Tudela, Head of Fisheries at WWF Mediterranean.

You know, we have really good records for what people thought about, and pretty good records for how things looked. But how can we remember how something tasted?

Entered on 17 April 2009 at 6:36 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print