Of Mice and Manet
Shigeru Watanabe, a psychologist at
Keio University in Japan, have a more enjoyable life than most mice in laboratories.
Dr Watanabe is interested not in their bodies but in their minds. Specifically,
he is exploring their taste in fine art. Dr Watanabe was curious to see whether
his mice had a preference for certain painters. He put them in a chamber, one
at a time, and showed each a pair of paintings by different artists. Since
science lacks (as yet) a way to read mouse minds, he measured how long the
animals remained near one or other of the pictures. His mice expressed no
particular preference between a picture by Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian
abstract painter, and another by Piet Mondrian, a Dutch artist famous for his
simple compositions of black, grid-like lines filled with primary colors.
 |
| Picture by Wassily Kandinsky |
Dr Watanabe added
morphine to the mix. The mice were injected with the drug when viewing one
picture, and with an inactive saline solution when viewing another. After a few
repetitions, they began to associate one of the paintings with the morphine
high, and would spend longer standing next to it. This implies that the mice
were able to tell one painting from another, when given an incentive to do so.
Dr Watanabe found
evidence that, as well as simply telling one picture from another, his mice
might be able to appreciate individual style. When they were shown a number of
paintings by a single artist after being given morphine, they showed a
preference for other works by the same artist that they had never seen before.
A similar result was obtained with an experiment that used milk, rather than
drugs, as the reward.
Mice are thought to
rely much more heavily on smell and touch to make their way in the world. And
it suggests that one way to improve the lot of laboratory mice around the world
might be to brighten up their cages with a nice Manet or two.
This interested me because I didn't think mice would care for art, but they actually appreciate it.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/plants_animals/mice/
Robodiptera
Some people are convinced they are already out
there: swarms of tiny flying drones discreetly surveying the world on behalf of
their shadowy masters. Robotic flies actually are now getting airborne. Robert
Wood and his colleagues at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired
Engineering at Harvard had a successful flight of what are probably the
smallest hovering robots yet was reported in Science. These robots (pictured above) are the size of crane flies.
They are ornithopters, meaning their wings flap. Wingtip to wingtip they
measure 3cm and they weigh just 80 milligrams, and they have a single pair of
wings.
Dr. Wood is not
trying to build a military drone, but it is the basic science behind flying
insects that he is interested in. However, there is no doubt the armed forces
are taking a keen interest in this sort of work. But civilian applications such
as search and rescue are likely to be as important as military and security
ones. The idea that inspired the study was that of using swarms of robotic
flies to pollinate crops.
The robot’s
wings are powered by artificial muscles. These are made from layers of a
piezoelectric material—one that deforms when an electric current is applied to
it. They can hover and carry out simple manoeuvres. which
include turning by flapping one wing harder than the other. Dr. Wood’s flies
are computer-controlled, and the computer is ona desktop and is connected to the robot by a thin copper wire,
which carries 19 milliwatts of electricity. In the future, they could put a
chip in the robot.
-
-Dr. Wood wants to improve the robot's flying ability, and eventually have it fly outdoors and cope with rain, gusts of wind, and predators that might not be able to tell the difference between the robot and an actual fly.
This topic really interested me because I'm interested in what the future holds for us in technology, and I wonder if this invention will be as popular as the I Phone.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577036-insect-robot-no-bigger-fly-takes-air-robodiptera
http://lostindaweb.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/robodiptera-an-insect-like-robot-no-bigger-than-a-fly-takes-to-the-air/ A Close Shave
On February 15, a hunk of space rock passed extremely close to Earth, while another exploded in the skies of Russia. The first asteroid called 2012 DA14 had been know to astronomers for around a year, but they calculated that there was no risk of collision. But the 30-metre 190,000 tone rock came 17,200 miles above the surface, inside the orbit of some satellites. It was the nearest ever recorded for an asteroid that size.
The second came without a warning! The 10,000-tonne meteor released 500 kilotons of energy, equivalent to the yield of a large nuclear bomb. There were no fatalities but more than a 1000 people were injured as windows were blown out of buildings.
John Tonry from the University of Hawaii is building an asteroid-hunting telescope called ATLAS with $5m from NASA. He cannot afford to hire a proper telescope engineer, and is having to design the device himself. ATLAS is intended to spot "city-killer" and should be able to spot a rock on a collision course a few days before it hits.
There are many methods of dealing with a huge asteroid. One is detonating a nuke near an asteroid's surface. Another is to paint the rock white, which will alter the way it reacts with the sunlight, nudging it into a new orbit, or rocket motors might be strapped to it, to propel it in a desirable direction, or a large spacecraft could orbit around it, where its gravity would alter the asteroid's orbit around the sun. Researches from Santa Barbara University proposed putting into orbit a solar-powered laser that could be used to beam to vaporise the surface of an incoming asteroid, and knock it off course with even a few days notice.
The trouble with these ideas is that we need to recognize the asteroid farely early. America's National Research Council said that evacuation is the only feasible option for dealing with hard to spot asteroid arriving with little warning. Economists wonder whether spending money on asteroid research either for detection or deflection is even worth it because asteroid strikes are rare.
This is important to me because people should become more aware of the potential danger of asteroids, and I believe we should build both a detection and a deflection device because it is better to be safe than sorry.
http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/solar-system/asteroids-comets-article/
Making a Fist of it
The human fist is a strange organ that has different names depending on what it's being used for. If you hold something its called a hand and if you use it to hit someone, it's called a fist. Most primate's hands are long of palm and finger and short of thumb.
What Homo sapiens can do with their fingers that primates cannot do is do a precision grip, were an object is held between the pad of the fingers, and a power grip, in which all fingers and the thumb are wrapped around what is being grasped. These two grips are crucial to our tool-crafting skills, and it has been long thought that the widespread use of tools by humanity's ancestors was the driving force behind the modern hand's proportions. However, in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Micheal Morgan and David Carrie of the University of Utah has shown that the exact geometry of the hand is probably the result of its "destructive rather than its constructive power."
Scientist asked ten athletes, a mixture of boxers and martial artists to strike a punch bag as hard as they could using either an open palm or a normal fist and the force was measured. They also used pistons to measure the stiffness of different hand shapes, which included: a fully clenched fist, a semi-fist, and a poorly formed fist, in which the fingers were folded over the palm and the thumb pointed outward (which is the closest a chimpanzee can come to making a fist.)
The accelerometer in the punch bag suggested that a sideswipe made with a closed fist delivers 15% more force than an open-handed strike. The reason the clenched fist is so much more powerful is because of the stiffness imparted by the way the bones are arranged in a properly formed fist. The way the fingers curl back on themselves, which leaves no empty space inside a fist, and the butteressing (supporting) role of the thumb, which adds further stiffness, are also two crucial points that make the fist stronger. A chimpanzee style fist is four times less rigid then humans because it leaves a gap through the middle of the fist, and the thumb plays no butteressing role.
All this data suggests that fists are indeed proper evolutionary adaptations with their own history of natural selection, rather then being just the coincidental byproducts of humanity's handiness with a tool.
This article is important to me because I am interested in human anatomy and human evolution.
Ground Down
The quote, "that which does not kill him makes him stronger"- Frederich Nietzsche was tested in 1995 by David Almeida, a psychologist at Penn. University to see whether unpleasant experiences really do increase resilience. A study published in the Psychological Science suggests that they do the exact opposite. Almeida tested 1,483 patients. He asked them to take tests. The first involved reporting, on a scale of one to five (where one was none of the time), how often during the previous 30 days they had felt nervous, worthless, hopeless, restless, or fidgety; how much everything felt like an effort, and how often they were so sad that they felt nothing could cheer them up.
Then they were asked if they had ever been treated for anxiety, depression, or another emotional disorder during the previous year.
Dr. Almeida then let a decade go by, and recontacted the patients; he was only able to test 711 people though, and he asked them the same questions as before. When he and his colleagues analysed the answers, they realized that contrary to the Nietzeche's quote, seeming insignificant daily stresses in the past had taken a long-term toll on mental health. They found that the more often people (who had not been treated for a disorder) felt nervous, fidgety, worthless or hopeless ten years ago, the higher were their chances of having developed a disorder in the interim (meantime).
Of course different people will react differently to events, but the study suggests that for some, even minor setbacks can be harmful, weakening the psyche, rather than strengthening it, as Nietzsche suggested they could.
This interest me because I am very interested in learning about the brain, how it works and reacts, and I've always wondered what would happen to a person who is stressed out and what the long term effects would be.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21576064-deep-breath-day-keeps-psychiatrist-away-ground-down
http://retailtrust.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14/~/the-physical-and-emotional-effects-of-stress
A sensitive matter
For the past 15 years, the Earth has not been warming up as much as scientist predicted. The cross between the rising green-house-gas emissions and not-rising temperature is a huge puzzle in climate science. However it doesn't mean that global warming is not happening. This imbalance may mean that for some reason there is a lag between increasing carbon dioxide levels and higher temperatures in 2000-2010 or that might mean that in the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, that was an anomalous period.
"Climate sensitivity" is what scientist use to describe the way the climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels. This relates to how hot the earth will get for each doubling of CO2 concentrations.
Carbon dioxide absorbs infra-red at a constant rate. For each doubling of CO2 levels, there is 1°C of warming. However, carbon dioxide influences the amount of water vapor and clouds that amplify or diminish the temperature rise. This suggests that affects the equilibrium ( A state of physical balance) directly meaning that doubling CO2 levels would actually produce more than a 1°C.
The IPCC said that the Earth's climate could rise 2°C- 4.5°C, and also that 4.5°C "cannot be excluded." This is very scary because a rise around 3°C ( 37.4°F) could mean more areas would be affected by drought, up to 30% of species could be at a greater risk of extinction, there would be likely increases of intense tropical cyclones, much higher sea levels, etc.
However, an unpublished report by the Research Council of Norway said that there is a 90% probability that the temperatures will increase only by 1.9°C (35.42 °F). Another study by Julia Hargreaves of the Research Institute for global Change in Yokohama said that there is a 90% chance of the temperature rising 2.3°C. Her research is based on how the environment reacted 20,000 years ago. Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist said that the temperature would increase by 1°C. His research is based on his reanalyzed work cited by the IPCC and took account of more recent temperature data.
GCMSs are used to stimulate how the climate will work over the long time and are very detailed. Energy balance models use temperature data to estimate the sensitivity of the climate system, so they respond to actual climate observations.
As a rule of thumb, global temperatures rise by about 1.5°C for each trillion tones of carbon put into the atmosphere. So far, the world has pumped put half a trillion tones of carbon since 1750 and temperature have risen .8°C (33.44°F). The next half-trillion tonnes will be emitted by 2045; the one after that before 2080.
The CO2 could increase temperatures by around 2°C and perhaps 4°C; however, despite all the work on sensitivity, no one really knows how the climate would react if temperatures rose by as much as 4°C.
This interests me because I wonder about air quality in the city we live in and what the effects of air polution can be. This article is extremly important becuase people need to be aware of the severe impact that air pollution has on the Earth, and we need to work together to minimize our use and adapt to the climate change.
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/pollution-overview/
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/climate-change-and-ozone-pollution.pdf
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