Human ETs, Tropical Polar Regions, and Self-Eating Cells as a Treatment for Cancer
Dec 31 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Earth scientists have managed to discover a lot of not-earth planets in the last couple of decades, though none of them look to be very much like Earth. Now Eric Ford, a University of Florida astronomer, has published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal that suggests To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out as Living Planet…
If they could measure our planet’s rotation, its atmospheric gases, the presence of abundant water, and calculate what our temperature range must be, our planet would definitely stand out as life-friendly. To intelligent life forms a lot like us, anyway. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it kind of neat to consider myself as ET. Even though I doubt we’d qualify as cute enough or friendly enough to other ETs for them to want to actually meet us.
Professor Traces the Biological Source of Humor
Dec 25 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Humor Develops From Aggression Caused By Male Hormones
Sam Shuster, Described as a “Professor” (but with no indication of what he’s a ‘professor’ of) got a paper published in the British Medical Journal this week claiming that he’s figured out that the human capacity for humor develops from aggression caused by male hormones.
Professor Shuster figured this out by riding a unicycle around the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne and noticing the reactions he got from people of various ages. Those responses were predictable droll jokes, which indicated to Shuster that such jokes must have a biological cause. And because the most aggressive reactions came from young men, he’s convinced it has something to do with androgens in teenage boys. Most adult women responded with praise or encouragement instead of jokes, so apparently women - at least in one town in England - don’t have a sense of humor.
A Candidate Debate on Science and Technology?
Dec 18 at 6:06pm by Aileen
They’re calling it Science Debate 2008. It’s a grassroots initiative to petition for a Presidential candidates forum specifically about issues of science and technology. The list of science bloggers in the Blogger Coalition is impressive, and represents almost all of Seed Media Group’s ScienceBlogs stable. The list of initial signers includes Nobel Prize laureates, academics, corporate CEOs, congresscritters, political science policy advisors, journal editors and regulatory agency veterans.
I heard about the initiative from Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew’s front page post announcing it over on Daily Kos on December 10th. He called for bipartisan and independent science bloggers to sign up, so I emailed the group through their form and offered my support. I didn’t get a reply and I’m not listed as a supporter, but I’m going to talk about it anyway.
New Theories and X-Rated Space Follies
Dec 13 at 6:06pm by Aileen
Quantum Iron in the Core, Killer ETs and Indecent Singularities
Researchers have recently discovered some new things about both our own planet’s core and our close encounters of the closest kind with extraterrestrial billard balls. Beginning here at home, geophysics researchers published a paper in Science reporting that Deep Earth Model Challenged by New Experiment.
Apparently the iron concentrated in the lower Earth mantle behaves quite differently than previous models predicted. Instead of finding a particular, thin “transition zone” at a certain depth where the temperature and pressure ‘flips’ the spin of electrons in Iron atoms to a paired state (a quantum effect that affects the density of the iron compounds), the experiments found a whole new region in the lower mantle where both high and low spin states coexist in the same crystal structure.
This continuous transition zone grew to a thickness of nearly 750 miles, comprising the entire region between the depths of 620 and 1,365 miles beneath the surface of the Earth.
Worried About Global Warming? Don’t Get Divorced!
Dec 6 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Researchers Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University have published data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrating that getting divorced isn’t a ‘Green’ thing to do.
Soaring global divorce rates - even in places with strict religious policies against it - are driving urban sprawl and increasing consumption of resources like water and fuel for electricity.
Liu and Yu started with the obvious - when a couple divorces they require two housing units instead of one, even if the children share time at each. These require resources to construct and they take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. The story in Science Daily, A Really Inconvenient Truth, notes that a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to one person or to a family. Among the findings when they started digging deeper:
Chimps Beat Humans in Numbers Recall Video Game
Dec 5 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University has once again embarrassed humans by testing chimpanzees against human adults on ‘working memory’. The chimps consistently beat college students in a computer game of remembering numbers, using the same test for both the chimps and the students. As Matsuzawa said…
“No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans,” he said. “Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection — better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”
The research was published in the journal Current Biology.
Links:
Newsweek: Young chimp beats college students
Chimps top humans in numerical memory
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