Weird science meets ancient cosmic blobs and Stephen Colbert
Full article found here on Ars Technica.
Join us as we take a trip back to the dawn of the universe, where we find a galaxy-sized blob of unknown provenance, then zip back to the present to ponder the politics of Stephen Colbert and the precise function of beer goggles. By John Timmer | Last updated <abbr class="datetime" title="2009-04-26T17:45:00-06:00">April 26, 2009 5:45 PM CT</abbr>
Steven Colbert is the Rorschach test of modern politics: Apparently, if Ohio State students are any indication, everyone finds Colbert funny. But is he making fun of conservatives, or simply being goofy while presenting opinions he honestly shares? Apparently, how you answer that question depends on your own political leanings. As the authors put it, "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."
Ants do consensus building when picking a nest: An impressive use of RFID miniaturization in this work. Researchers fitted ants with tags, and then forced the colony to look for a new nest. It seems that the ants have a sense of the absolute quality of potential nest sites. If they spot a mediocre nest site, they'll continue to wander; if they spot a good one, they'll stay put. This behavior will eventually move the entire colony to the better site, even if it's nine times further than the mediocre one.
Lizards adjust their sunbathing according to their vitamin D levels: The experiment was pretty simple—take two populations of chameleons, supplement the diet of some of them with vitamin D, and track how long they spent sunbathing. Apparently, the animals precisely regulate the amount of time they spend in the sun based on their dietary state.
Quantifying the beer goggle effect: Leave it to the British to consider this a worthwhile research endeavor: send the researcher down to the pub, ask people how much they've been drinking, and then show them pictures of underage girls. Apparently, boozing it up doesn't make someone anymore likely to mistake an underage girl for an adult, but it does make perceive older women with lots of makeup on as more attractive. The researchers—and i'm not joking here—are looking to repeat the work in clubs that have bad lighting.
Weaklings perceive threats as closer: Apparently, humans consistently estimate the source of noises as being closer than they actually are. Researchers have suggested that the universality of this behavior suggests an evolutionary origin—it probably doesn't hurt to overreact to the proximity of a hippo, after all. An abstract that will be presented at the Acoustical Society of America suggests that we may adjust this survival instinct dynamically. The degree to which people overestimate a noise's proximity is apparently proportional to their fitness, based on cardiovascular and strength tests. If you're likely to be able to handle what's coming, it sounds further away, apparently.
A mysterious blob from the dawn of galaxies: It took nearly half a billion years for the universe's matter to cool down and spread out enough to start making the sorts of structures we'd recognize today, like galaxies. Once they did, the first objects started pumping out energy, re-ionizing the atoms that had settled down a millions of years earlier. Now, astronomers have spotted a distant object from this reionization era, and it's a monster. It appears to be roughly the size of a modern galaxy, but had reached that size by 800 million years after the big bang, when only small precursors of the current galaxies should exist. At this point, nobody's quite sure what it is—even the press release announcing the discovery called it a "mysterious space blob."
They all look the same to me: One of the problems that biologists face is that our common-sense perceptions of things often don't match up well with reality. Take, for example, the worm Lumbriculus variegatus. Researchers had been using samples from the wild on three different continents and treating them as one species, largely because they all looked the same (at low magnification, they're also indistinguishable from a piece of string). Someone finally got around to actually checking this, and it appears that there are at least 3 species present, some of which don't even have the same number of chromosomes as the others. The authors speculate that there may be a lot of other cases like this out there, so the earth may hold far more species than most estimates suggest.
Newborn stars taste like raspberries: At least some of them do. Researchers are finding that the interstellar dust clouds that give birth to new stars contain a number of organic molecules, and the complexity of these molecules goes up with each discovery. The latest find, straight from the Sagittarius B2 star-forming region: ethyl formate, a molecule that apparently contributes to the flavor of raspberries. N-propyl cyanide was also present, but that's listed as a health and flammability hazard. The more complex stuff we find in the interstellar dust, the fewer hurdles there are to the origin of life on earth.
Incidentally, credit for finding this story goes to Scientific American, which I started reading back in high school; I expect that applies to many others here. Apparently, Sci Am's publishing parent has decided to merge its staff in with another science property they own: Nature Publishing. Hard to say what this means in the long term, but Nature has been pretty progressive in terms of public access and online content.
Knowledge is depressing: The OECD tracks student achievement worldwide through a testing system termed called PISA. The National Science Foundation sponsored a researcher to pick through the data and follow it up with student surveys on their attitudes towards the environment. The bad news: over 40 percent of Americans scored a D or worse when it comes to understanding environmental science. The worse news: that puts us in the middle of the pack worldwide. The I'm-not-quite-sure-what-this-means news: the less you knew, the more likely you were to think that we'd be able to sort out all our environmental problems. I'd be curious to see whether that trend extends into adulthood.
Full article found here on Ars Technica.
Join us as we take a trip back to the dawn of the universe, where we find a galaxy-sized blob of unknown provenance, then zip back to the present to ponder the politics of Stephen Colbert and the precise function of beer goggles. By John Timmer | Last updated <abbr class="datetime" title="2009-04-26T17:45:00-06:00">April 26, 2009 5:45 PM CT</abbr>
Steven Colbert is the Rorschach test of modern politics: Apparently, if Ohio State students are any indication, everyone finds Colbert funny. But is he making fun of conservatives, or simply being goofy while presenting opinions he honestly shares? Apparently, how you answer that question depends on your own political leanings. As the authors put it, "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."
Ants do consensus building when picking a nest: An impressive use of RFID miniaturization in this work. Researchers fitted ants with tags, and then forced the colony to look for a new nest. It seems that the ants have a sense of the absolute quality of potential nest sites. If they spot a mediocre nest site, they'll continue to wander; if they spot a good one, they'll stay put. This behavior will eventually move the entire colony to the better site, even if it's nine times further than the mediocre one.
Lizards adjust their sunbathing according to their vitamin D levels: The experiment was pretty simple—take two populations of chameleons, supplement the diet of some of them with vitamin D, and track how long they spent sunbathing. Apparently, the animals precisely regulate the amount of time they spend in the sun based on their dietary state.
Quantifying the beer goggle effect: Leave it to the British to consider this a worthwhile research endeavor: send the researcher down to the pub, ask people how much they've been drinking, and then show them pictures of underage girls. Apparently, boozing it up doesn't make someone anymore likely to mistake an underage girl for an adult, but it does make perceive older women with lots of makeup on as more attractive. The researchers—and i'm not joking here—are looking to repeat the work in clubs that have bad lighting.
Weaklings perceive threats as closer: Apparently, humans consistently estimate the source of noises as being closer than they actually are. Researchers have suggested that the universality of this behavior suggests an evolutionary origin—it probably doesn't hurt to overreact to the proximity of a hippo, after all. An abstract that will be presented at the Acoustical Society of America suggests that we may adjust this survival instinct dynamically. The degree to which people overestimate a noise's proximity is apparently proportional to their fitness, based on cardiovascular and strength tests. If you're likely to be able to handle what's coming, it sounds further away, apparently.
A mysterious blob from the dawn of galaxies: It took nearly half a billion years for the universe's matter to cool down and spread out enough to start making the sorts of structures we'd recognize today, like galaxies. Once they did, the first objects started pumping out energy, re-ionizing the atoms that had settled down a millions of years earlier. Now, astronomers have spotted a distant object from this reionization era, and it's a monster. It appears to be roughly the size of a modern galaxy, but had reached that size by 800 million years after the big bang, when only small precursors of the current galaxies should exist. At this point, nobody's quite sure what it is—even the press release announcing the discovery called it a "mysterious space blob."
They all look the same to me: One of the problems that biologists face is that our common-sense perceptions of things often don't match up well with reality. Take, for example, the worm Lumbriculus variegatus. Researchers had been using samples from the wild on three different continents and treating them as one species, largely because they all looked the same (at low magnification, they're also indistinguishable from a piece of string). Someone finally got around to actually checking this, and it appears that there are at least 3 species present, some of which don't even have the same number of chromosomes as the others. The authors speculate that there may be a lot of other cases like this out there, so the earth may hold far more species than most estimates suggest.
Newborn stars taste like raspberries: At least some of them do. Researchers are finding that the interstellar dust clouds that give birth to new stars contain a number of organic molecules, and the complexity of these molecules goes up with each discovery. The latest find, straight from the Sagittarius B2 star-forming region: ethyl formate, a molecule that apparently contributes to the flavor of raspberries. N-propyl cyanide was also present, but that's listed as a health and flammability hazard. The more complex stuff we find in the interstellar dust, the fewer hurdles there are to the origin of life on earth.
Incidentally, credit for finding this story goes to Scientific American, which I started reading back in high school; I expect that applies to many others here. Apparently, Sci Am's publishing parent has decided to merge its staff in with another science property they own: Nature Publishing. Hard to say what this means in the long term, but Nature has been pretty progressive in terms of public access and online content.
Knowledge is depressing: The OECD tracks student achievement worldwide through a testing system termed called PISA. The National Science Foundation sponsored a researcher to pick through the data and follow it up with student surveys on their attitudes towards the environment. The bad news: over 40 percent of Americans scored a D or worse when it comes to understanding environmental science. The worse news: that puts us in the middle of the pack worldwide. The I'm-not-quite-sure-what-this-means news: the less you knew, the more likely you were to think that we'd be able to sort out all our environmental problems. I'd be curious to see whether that trend extends into adulthood.
