On Saturday night, I dreamed that I could see Saturn’s rings. Hard to tell where I was standing—on Saturn itself? on a nearby moon?— but the rings appeared as shimmering curtains, like the Aurora Borealis except in blues and purples and yellows. Last night, I dreamed that I was on some scientific adventure, driving with a crew in the back of a station wagon along a dusty road. I was handed a paper cup that contained a large insect, as tall as a praying mantis. It had buggy eyes and long brown wings. Someone broke off the legs and handed them to me. I put them in my mouth, started to chew, and when no one was looking, spit them out the station wagon’s back window onto the dusty road.
Filed under: Science, Science News | Tags: behavior, child psychology, dialysis, medicine
They feel your pain. Children between the ages of seven and 12 appear to be naturally inclined to feel empathy for others in pain, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, who used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to study responses in children.
The responses on the scans were similar to those found in studies of adults. Researchers found that children, like adults, show responses to pain in the same areas of their brains. The research also found additional aspects of the brain activated in children, when youngsters saw another person intentionally hurt by another individual. More>
For my pal Kevin: Dialysis-on-the-go. Two researchers from UCLA and the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System have developed a design for an automated, wearable artificial kidney, or AWAK, that avoids the complications patients often suffer with traditional dialysis.
The peritoneal-based artificial kidney is “bloodless” and reduces or even eliminates protein loss and other dialysis-related problems. More>
Filed under: Politics, Science, Science News | Tags: climate change, congress, global warming, intelligent design, presidential candidates, technology
Uncle Darwin
Keeping with the 4th of July weekend theme, we welcome back Science Saturday with the politics of science. According to the Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA), a nonpartisan, educational organization whose mission is “to facilitate evidence-based decision making at all levels of government,” more than 70 percent of voters “place a significant amount of importance on public policy decisions that are based on science and technology to solve problems we face today, like global warming, energy, public education, and health care.”
To that end, SEA has joined with Science Debate 2008 and other major science organizations to ask the 2008 presidential candidates fourteen questions on science and technology issues. The fourteen questions relate to: innovation, climate change, energy, education, national security, pandemics and biosecurity, genetics research, stem cells, ocean health, water, space, scientific integrity, research, and health.
Over the last eight years, we’ve seen public policy corrupt fact-based inquiry for political purposes—from local school boards intervening in science classrooms to demand that “intelligent design” (a term courts have since found to be a skillfully spun version of creationism) be taught alongside evolution, to “marginalized or mischaracterized” studies on global warming from NASA’s press office, from willfully refusing to open an EPA email, sending one of the most important issues of our time into cyber limbo, to withholding information about condoms that would control the spread of AIDS in Africa. Who knows how much has been lost in this era of political appointees run amok?
SEA is also asking for accountability among congressional candidates. They’ve been given an easier task of addressing only seven questions, which is all the more reason to hold their feet to the fire. When you visit the site, you can send a message to your senator or representative and ask them to answer SEA’s questionnaire. You can also learn more about their past positions on a variety of science and technology issues.
Filed under: Science, Science News | Tags: baby polar bear, Flocke, polar bears
The End of an Epoch? Geologists from the University of Leicester propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earth’s history and marked the start of a new one—the Anthropocene. Geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams and their colleagues on the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London have presented their research in the journal GSA Today.
In it, they suggest humans have so changed the Earth that the Holocene epoch has ended, identifying phenomena such as:
- Transformed patterns of sediment erosion and deposition worldwide
- Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature
- Wholesale changes to the world’s plants and animals
- Ocean acidification
Filed under: Science
I’ve been reading The Art of Subtext, a book about fiction and subtext by Charles Baxter. In a passage I read last night, Baxter writes about how much in our lives goes unheard, not deliberately (although there is that too), but out of a need to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by the amount of noise surrounding us every day. We filter the messages we hear out of necessity. This made me think about a woman—a high-functioning autistic—I heard on NPR’s Fresh Air many years ago. She spoke about how rain sounded like a machine gun.
While it is still inconclusive that the climbing incidence of autism is due to anything other than a higher reporting rate and broadening definition for diagnosis, it is curious that in this age of sensory bombardment one of the leading psychiatric disorders among children is related to sensory overload.
[Note: While the timestamp on this post is January 13, 12:59AM, it was actually posted EST, 11:59PM on January 12. Technically, it is Saturday. Just sayin.]
Mercury Rising NASA returns to Mercury for the first time in more than three decades on Monday. The Messenger spacecraft will do a flyby 124 miles above the planet’s surface. Scientists expect the Messenger will capture images of large, never before seen portions of the Sun’s closest neighbor. According to a press release from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the “encounter will provide a critical gravity assist needed to keep the spacecraft on track for its 2011 orbit insertion around Mercury.”
Yes, But Could They Do a Triple Lutz? Archaeological evidence shows that bone skates (skates made of animal bones) are the oldest human-powered means of transport, dating back to 3000 BC. Why people started skating on ice and where is not as clear, since ancient remains were found in several locations spread across Central and North Europe.
In a recent paper, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society of London, Dr. Federico Formenti and Professor Minetti show substantial evidence supporting the hypothesis that the birth of ice skating took place in Southern Finland, where the number of lakes within 100 square kilometres is the highest in the world.
Could a Monkey Really Do Your Job? Boxer and Feinstein, two female rhesus macaque monkeys presumably named after California’s U.S. Senators, demonstrated that they could perform mental addition nearly as well as college students. According to scientists Jessica F. Cantlon and Elizabeth M. Brannon of Duke University’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, “…Monkeys perform approximate mental addition in a manner that is remarkably similar to the performance of the college students. These findings support the argument that humans and nonhuman primates share a cognitive system for nonverbal arithmetic, which likely reflects an evolutionary link in their cognitive abilities.” The researchers published their findings in PLoS Biology. According to a press release from Duke, “While the college students were correct 94 percent the time and the monkeys 76 percent, the average response time for both monkeys and humans was about one second.” In previous research, Cantlon and Brannon discovered that “monkeys have a semantic perception of numbers that is like humans’ and which is independent of language.”
Filed under: Science
This Science Saturday is a salute to Mount Washington. Not for any particular reason, except that I have pictures of it and it’s one of my favorite places in the world (never mind that I haven’t gotten around much). It’s the tallest peak in the northeast and belongs to New Hampshire’s Presidential Range in the White Mountains. It’s also known as the site of the world’s worst weather, which may explain why I love it so. (more…)
