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Archive for October 2008

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Wound body clock keeps brain bright

Posted by: on: Thursday, 9 October 2008

Messing with your body clock may have bad effects on learning and retention. (I’m looking at you, Gella and Mikko.)
clipped from www.sciencedaily.com
The circadian rhythm that quietly pulses inside us all, guiding our daily cycle from sleep to wakefulness and back to sleep again, may be doing much more
hamsters whose circadian system was disabled by a new technique Ruby and his colleagues developed consistently failed to demonstrate the same evidence of remembering their environment as hamsters with normally functioning circadian systems.
hinge on the amount of a neurochemical called GABA, which acts to inhibit brain activity
circadian clock controls the daily cycle of sleep and wakefulness by inhibiting different parts of the brain by releasing GABA
if the hippocampus – the part of the brain where memories are stored – is overly inhibited, then the circuits responsible for memory storage don’t function properly
performed terribly on a simple learning task, even though they’re getting loads of sleep
circadian system really is necessary for something that is deeply important: learning
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DNA can be used to tell a guy’s last name

Posted by: on: Thursday, 9 October 2008

Another fun fact (not in the article): mitochondrial DNA can be used to tell who his mom was, too.
clipped from www.sciencedaily.com
developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone’s surname from the DNA alone
Doctoral research by Turi King has shown that men with the same British surname are highly likely to be genetically linked.
the Y chromosome, is the one part of our genetic material that confers maleness and is passed, like surnames, from father to son. Therefore, a link could exist between a man’s surname and the type of Y chromosome he carries. A simple link between name and Y chromosome could in principle connect all men sharing a surname into one large family tree.
each name may have had several founders. Events such as adoptions, name-changes and non-paternities would confuse any simple genetic link.
between two men who share the same surname there is a 24% chance of sharing a common ancestor through that name but that this increases to nearly 50% if the surname they have is rare
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Voices going up mean eggs in the drop zone

Posted by: on: Thursday, 9 October 2008

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

Fertile women raise their voice pitch

woman singing
Women’s voices rise and fall in tune with their fertility, according to research by psychologists.
Recordings of women taken at different times in their monthly cycle show that the female voice rises perceptibly a day or two before ovulation, when women are most likely to become pregnant.
The findings are the first to point to a link between voice and fertility and build on recent studies which support the idea that humans may be similar to other animals in displaying outward signs of fertility.
Two years ago, Haselton published another study into female fertility and the monthly cycle, which suggested that women “dressed to impress” when at their most fertile, favouring skirts over trousers and showing more skin.
The work goes against the long-held belief that humans, unlike many other
animals, hide any evidence of ovulation.
Last year, scientists
claimed that women sway their hips more when they are at their most fertile.
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Poop Power!

Posted by: on: Wednesday, 8 October 2008

I knew it was possible. Well done, farmers.
clipped from www.popularmechanics.com

Poop Power: U.S. Farms Save Big Turning Manure to Kilowatts
For farmers already operating on slim margins, the trick to staying afloat could be right under their feet. PM visits one dairy farm that’s already saving $60,000 a year by turning cow manure into energy using an anaerobic biodigester.

ROCKWOOD, Penn. — If I’d driven up Kingwood Road here two years ago, there’s a very good chance that I would have smelled Hillcrest Saylor Dairy Farm long before I reached its gravel driveway. But as I open my car door on Monday not 100 yards from the would-be offenders—approximately 600 Holsteins—the only odor that drifted my way was that of the freshly compacted corn silage that feeds the cows.
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Vertebrae, aka the Swiss-Army Bathroom

Posted by: on: Monday, 6 October 2008

Theoretically, you could poop AND brush your teeth while you showered.
clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk
the world’s first fold-up vertical bathroom.
The two showers� -� one for adults and one for children� -� both rotate 180 degrees while the other units all rotate a full 360 degrees.

Space-age bathroom
But he warned that the Vertebrae� -� named after the human spine� -� weighs 150 kilos, or more than 23 stone, and that householders might have to reinforce their bathroom floor before fitting it.
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Why We Can’t Imagine Death

Posted by: on: Monday, 6 October 2008

It seems that belief in some kind of afterlife isn’t learned.

This is a great article, with plenty of scientific and philosophical food for thought. I just clipped two quotes that struck me, plus something about the Baby Mouse study; I highly recommend you check out the whole article at the source.

clipped from www.sciam.com
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce.
clipped from www.sciam.com
Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.
clipped from www.sciam.com
The simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate and unlearned.
One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer applied after death. Rather they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.
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