Believing headlines makes you stupid

The headline in the Telegraph reads "Attending meetings lowers IQ: research".

That seems obvious enough, as witness any number of meetings I have attended.

But you have to look beyond the headline. The description in the story doesn't talk about meetings as such. Read Montegue, the lead author, was quoted as deprecating meetings but the rest of the details didn't match.

I got suspicious, and looked up the original paper in the Royal Society Bulletin. What they really studied was what happens when a small group is told your IQ. People did better on the tests when they worked alone than when they were in a group with everybody knowing everything at once.

So people get worse at IQ tests if they think that other people are judging them along the way. Not a huge surprise, but nothing like the headline. (BTW, truncated graphs like Figure 2(c) aren't a very honest way of expressing the data; they make the differences look larger than they are.)

Print yourself a dinosaur

Too bad the printed plastics I've seen aren't that strong. Drexel University is planning to scan and 3-D print dinosaur bones. They'll be able to fiddle with the design to undo the crushing and compression and create copies that are very similar to the originals.

At first this has to be single bones or skulls (everybody like T-Rex), but one goal is to create a complete model. Since skeletons aren't complete, that means rescaling bones from one to match another--which should be straightforward.

Clothing the bones is another matter entirely. Even assembling them is a project. Bone is pretty strong for its size, and assembling these 3-D models would create something heavy but not strong. I think you'd need some internal "skeleton" for the bones to support the weight. Maybe mock up something that looks like the connective tissue to hide the joints. That would tend to look more creepy than fascinating, so perhaps not; and in any event we don't know how big their tendons were.

And if I recall correctly, there are still arguments about the stance of the Tricerotops.

So maybe they'll spin off a firm to make velociraptor skulls. (Didn't Newt have a T-Rex model skull in his office back in the day?)

Changing personalities?

A story in a journal that unfortunately I have no access to is reported to claim that military service makes, on average, a slight but permanent change in one's "agreeableness." This was a longitudinal study in Germany of 1300 young men, 250 of whom joined the military at one point. Longitudinal studies are a good thing, but those numbers worry me a little: a slight effect in only 250 men is a bit hard to measure.

But imagine for the moment that their numbers are OK. It could be that the intense nature of military training does what you might naively expect, and makes men more aggressive. (I don't think that would be quite as useful as training them to obey orders and how to react under fire. Just being more aggressive seems like a bad thing for discipline.) Or it could be that the military, which attracts more aggressive men in the first place, gives them life-or-death training that leaves them less interested in little white lies; and they fill out the questionnaires more accurately.

The report's author draws a different conclusion from the one you expect:

It’s striking that military service can have this long-lasting effect on people. But, on the other hand, this research also underscores that it’s really difficult to change a person’s personality. If military service is one of the most intensive experiences imaginable, and the best the military can do is a modest change on the one dimension of agreeableness, what does that say about our individual prospects for becoming, say, more outgoing, or to exercise more regularly, or to finally quit smoking?

"It kind of flies in the face," Jackson said, "of how some people wish that they had more control over changing just who they are."

How outgoing you are is personality-based, and likewise how self-controlled you are, but habits are sometimes amenable to preparation, so I'm not sure his examples are good.

Inspector, what are you doing with that cell phone?

UCLA engineers devised a way of using a cell phone's camera as part of a portable e coli test rig. It is pretty small, but from the description it sounds like a one-shot deal: once the "antibody functionalized glass capillaries with quantum dots as signal reporters" have gotten their load of contaminated water for the camera to inspect, you either need to get fresh tubes or autoclave the old ones. Maybe they could devise a portable autoclave running off the cell-phone battery? Or maybe just rinsing thoroughly with distilled water is enough.

The general idea is nice, and the format is certainly extremely compact. I suppose a jewelers loupe would work as well for seeing the dots, but a cell phone camera is better for detailed inspection and for sending the image to somebody else. And if the resetting problem (cleaning it up after a use) is solved, it would be very handy.

What Would Orwell Think?

Big Think has a report on a curious finding that language influences behavior, in particular that languages that do not crisply distinguish between present and future (not strongly "future time referencing"=FTR) have speakers who tend to save more for a rainy day. English (and Greek) maintain strong distinctions between present and future, not like German or Chinese.

Being clear about the timing of your topic turns out to be one of the areas where grammars differ. Some tongues, including English, are strong future-time-reference, or FTR, languages: If Chen, a professor at Yale's School of Management, wants to say he can't meet you tomorrow because he has a seminar, he has to say "I am going to listen to a seminar." On the other hand, others are weak FTR languages. In Mandarin, Chen would say Wˇo qù t ̄ıng jiˇangzuo ("I go listen seminar," where "go" just means that he's heading over, nothing to do with when).

Chen theorized that weak-FTR languages would be more conducive to future-oriented behavior because, in those grammars, the future feels the same as the present. Linguists have mapped strong and weak FTR languages in Europe, so Chen correlated that information with data on behaviors that sacrifice present pleasures for the future self, like saving, exercising and avoiding tobacco (culled from the World Values Survey, the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe, and the OECD's trove of reports on economic behavior since 1970).

His results are rather mind-boggling: In Europe, speakers of weak-FTR languages (German, Finnish and Estonian are examples) were 30 percent more likely to have saved money in a given year than were equivalent speakers of a strong-FTR language (English, Spanish or Greek, for instance). (To put that in perspective, according to Chen's analysis, speaking a strong-FTR language is as a big a risk-factor for not-saving as unemployment.) Weak-FTR language-speakers have piled up an average of 170,000 more euros per person for their retirement than strong-FTR speakers, and are 24 percent less likely to have smoked heavily, 29 percent more likely to exercise regularly, and 13 percent less likely to be obese.

I'd like to see that verified before I try to draw conclusions from it, but it reminds me a little of NewSpeak: a language designed to make some kinds of thoughts impossible to think. That, given human nature, seems to me to be impossible; but we easily see that a culture's vocabulary (catch phrases and connotations for key words) can make some kinds of thoughts easy to express, and others harder. Members of different subcultures in our own land talk past each other, unable to communicate the wealth of nuance one side or the other vests in words like "fairness." Perhaps a grammar can have a similar influence.

Second Sleep

The subject of "second sleep" came up a few weeks ago. Pre-17’th century they figure that people had "segmented sleep" with one or more wakeful and even busy periods during the night.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

I’ve not read the book yet (not till March at the earliest—too busy). I’d think camping experiences wouldn’t tell you much, because we have the habits of the rest of the year to guide us. But what with going to bed early and overly wobbly air mattresses, I frequently do find myself waking up in the night.

And we all know the 3am wakeup. You can't get back to sleep for an hour, or maybe two.

I was perhaps too young to wake up easily at the time, but we lived only a few hundred yards from an African village for a time. I remember roosters crowing at all hours of the night (not just in the morning), and some loud celebrations that went on until whenever, but I don’t remember any other middle-of-the-night noises. Without electricity they didn’t stay up watching TV or listening to the radio much. On the other hand, wandering about at night when you can't see the snakes easily is contra-indicated, so maybe they stayed quietly at home.

It is already too late for me to go to bed early to test it out...

Interference time

This story isn’t new, but it’s kind of cool. Everybody knows about double slit interference with light: since light is waves you get interference if it can go through two openings. Electron can do the same sort of thing; they behave both as particles and as waves. And there are some non-intuitive features of measurement.

You can get interference fringes in space with electrons, which is how we know they can act like waves and where quantum mechanics comes from. It turns out there can be interference in time too.

The idea was clever, though the implementation was tricky. The team had to generate laser pulses so short that there were only a few wavelengths. (There are some ambiguities about defining the wavelength when the train is that short, but that doesn’t matter for the purpose.) In particular they could reproducibly generate wave trains about 1 1/2 wavelengths long, and for a given polarization direction have 2 peaks or 2 valleys.

The team was able to control the output of the laser so that all the pulses were identical. The researchers could, for example, ensure that each pulse contained two maxima of the electric field (that is, two peaks with large positive values) and one minimum (a peak with a large negative value). There was a small probability that an atom would be ionized by one or other of the maxima, which therefore played the role of the slits, with the resulting electron being accelerated towards a detector. If the atom was ionized by the minimum, the electron traveled in the opposite direction towards a second detector.

The team registered the arrival times of the electrons at both detectors and then plotted the number of electrons as a function of energy. The researchers observed interference fringes at the first detector because it was impossible to know if an electron counted by the detector was produced during the first or second maximum.

There was no interference pattern at the second detector because all the electrons were produced at the same time at the minimum. However, when the phase of the laser was changed so that there was one maximum and two minima, interference fringes were seen at the second detector but not at the first.

So with two different "time apertures" you get interference too.

As expected

Opera found a problem: It looks like a bad cable. Even if this is the answer, it still has to be checked, of course.

UPDATE: This morning's report says they found a problem in an oscillator (that "clock tick" I wrote about earlier) that would make the effect go in the other direction: faster. The report doesn't estimate the size of the effect, leading me to suspect that it is small and has probably been known about for some time. It lets them balance the report, though. But I could easily be wrong; it is hard to keep a secret in this field. (Scientists like to find out new things and then tell everybody about them; it's one of their big motivators.)

I recognize those

Tom and Charley and I, and Tom's half-dachshund Barney were exploring in the jungle down by the creek. Barney came out of the water shaking, and a 16" long bright blue snaky thing was whipping around him. He shook it off quickly and we had at it with a machete and some cudgels until the remains were safely hammered out of sight in the mud. We kept a close eye on Barney but he suffered no ill effects. I'd gotten a couple of good glimpses of the thing: it was too fast for any worm, but it was rounded on both ends--not like any snake I'd ever seen. And bright blue...

We tried to find it in the book of Liberian snakes, but never did.

We didn't have a book on amphibians.

Little touches of irony

Detroit is restricting ownership of some toy guns. Brandishing a toy gun is already assault, IIRC, if it looks enough like a real one to deceive a reasonable person.

Some Chinese citizens in Zimbabwe are being deported for eating endangered tortoises. I wonder if there is something else going on here; I'd have expected them to treat the Chinese with kid gloves--not like they treat their own people.

The EU is drafting legislation to declare Canadian oil sand oil to be more polluting than other kinds. It has to be true if a legislature said so, right? Makes science easy: just pass a bill declaring the Higgs to be a spin-2 boson of mass 625 GeV/c^2 and we're done, right?

Hitler's son?

The Telegraph reports on a story from Le Point about the son from an affair Hitler had during WW-I with a French teenager.

Jean-Marie Loret, who died in 1985 aged 67, never met his father, but went on to fight Nazi forces during the Second World War.

Apparently Hitler was already bent early on in his life:

Miss Lobjoie later told Jean-Marie: "When your father was around, which was very rarely, he liked to take me for walks in the countryside.

"But these walks usually ended badly. In fact, your father, inspired by nature, launched into speeches which I did not really understand.

"He did not speak French, but solely ranted in German, talking to an imaginary audience

Of course Hitler-iana is a popular field for hoaxes, and this may not be true. (Remember the diaries?)

But if the story is true, his mother gave him up for adoption, and only told him about his father shortly before she died in the 50's. Jean-Marie Loret had fought the Germans during WW-II, and even joined the resistance, so this was a bit of a blow.

Mr Loret said: "In order not to get depressed, I worked non-stop, never took a holiday, and had no hobbies. For twenty years I didn't even go to the cinema."

But leave it to a lawyer to notice that:

Mr Gibault said that Mr Loret's own children might now be in a position to claim royalties from Mein Kampf ('My Struggle'), Hitler's famous book which has sold millions of copies around the world.

Targeting nanotube drug delivery

The headline reads: Exploding Carbon Nanotubes Could Work as Drug-Based Delivery Devices. The idea is that sealed carbon nanotubes can serve to deliver tiny amounts of drugs to cells, and instead of expecting the drugs to slowly leak out (rather randomly), you can raise the local temperature with a laser (or I suppose a probe of some kind for spots deep inside the body) and make water in the little tubes pop them like popcorn.

Cute idea, though I wonder about the fragments. They admit that shock waves from the pop might be problematic. They'd be weak, but so is some of the cellular machinery.

Apparently water confined in a nanotube exhibits somewhat different characteristics, behaving a little more like a gas while well below the usual boiling point. I'm not sure why this would be so. Perhaps the geometry is too one-dimensional to permit the full range of motions that let attracted molecules dance around each other, though I'd naively expect that to increase viscosity. Maybe some of the nanotubes have enough conductivity (it varies) that interference from induced charges reduces how well the real molecules attract each other. I'll look into that

Test tube meat

BBC reports that "Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year."

Professor Post's group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.

I predict that

• The taste will be awful
  
• The universal reaction will be "yuck"
  
• If they do make a hamburger by the end of the year it will be small, and, as they indicate have to have blood and fat mixed in
  
• If they make a go of it the price (currently £200,000/hamburger) will in fact come down as they predict
  
• The price will never be competitive, because it will never be as efficient at turning grain into protein (15%) as natural means, unless they use sleight of hand accounting.

Clinging to walls

Many people have been trying to figure out how to duplicate a gecko's ability to cling to a sheet of smooth glass, and a U-M Amherst group claims to have done it. Sort of.

Previous efforts to synthesize the tremendous adhesive power of gecko feet and pads were based on the qualities of microscopic hairs on their toes called setae, but efforts to translate them to larger scales were unsuccessful, in part because the complexity of the entire gecko foot was not taken into account. As Irschick explains, a gecko’s foot has several interacting elements, including tendons, bones and skin, that work together to produce easily reversible adhesion.

...

The key innovation by Bartlett and colleagues was to create an integrated adhesive with a soft pad woven into a stiff fabric, which allows the pad to “drape” over a surface to maximize contact. Further, as in natural gecko feet, the skin is woven into a synthetic “tendon,” yielding a design that plays a key role in maintaining stiffness and rotational freedom, the researchers explain.

Importantly, the Geckskin’s adhesive pad uses simple everyday materials such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which holds promise for developing an inexpensive, strong and durable dry adhesive.

That "simple everyday materials such as polydimethylsiloxane" struck me as a little odd, but it turns out that it is one of the silicones used as an antifoaming agent and is allowed in a startling array of food products from beer to chewing gum and canned fruit.

I don't know that this is exactly what the gecko does when it clings tightly enough that it could hold 9 pounds up, but if it works as advertised--16 square inches maxes out at load of 700 pounds in a removable/reusable pad--that's not bad at all. For comparison, the adhesive picture hangers are typically rated for about 5 pounds for a surface area that would support 45 with this system.

• 
  You obviously wouldn't want to trust this kind of support in an earthquake. Wall vibration would probably pull it off. Don't bump into it either.
  
• It is only as strong as the underlying surface. If the paint starts to de-adhere, that TV starts tumbling down.
  
• Will the pad start creeping with time?
  

. . . this little piggy blew up.

Paging Dave Barry:

Something, probably a new variety of microorganism, is foaming up in hog manure pits. It won't surprise you to learn that decomposing hog manure generates methane, and that methane, trapped in the foam bubbles, explodes, sometimes destroying hog barns and killing pigs. The foam can reach 4 feet in thickness, which would be quite a bomb.

The researchers still aren’t sure what causes the foam. But they have noticed a correlation between adding dried distillers grains in soluble — a product of the ethanol production process increasingly used in livestock diets — to the hogs’ diets and the foam, although that solution is too simplistic, Jacobson said.

I'm quite fond of bacon, but I'll be the first to admit that large scale hog farms are very bad neighbors. True, business may be booming, but the side effects are dangerous and sometimes lethal.

But this foam problem should be a reminder that those invisible little creatures have interesting potential. Maybe we can breed something to live in those giant manure pools that can reduce their stench and toxicity.

Pigeon shoot

If you squint, I suppose this drone looks like an oddly noisy pigeon. Of course if your eyesight is that bad you probably shouldn't be shooting.

SHARK promises to press charges against somebody if they can find out whodunnit, but I have the funny feeling that a jury might not convict. I gather from other sources that Americans aren't that keen on having government drones watching us (this isn't a war zone, thank you very kindly), and private ones are probably fair game.

Solar "tornado"

Ever wonder what was happening in those giant looping solar prominences?

Space.com has a story and a little video from NASA. Glowing gas is swirling around at the base like a vast magnetic tornado.

Bacteria against the tsetse fly?

BBC has a story about research on using modified tsetse fly gut bacteria against it. There were 7000 new cases in 2010, making it one of the smaller killers—but nasty nonetheless; the disease is fatal and so are O(5-20%) of the cures.

A few small details: It is a plan but not a procedure. How do you infect the flies? If they die they may not be able to infect each other or the next generation. And do those gut bacteria get into people?

HHS rules and religious institutions

My first reaction to the "compromise" was "I say it's spinnage, and I say the hell with it!"

It turns out that it wasn’t even a change; the original proposal stands. The promise was even more deceitful than it appeared to be.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, ...

I almost missed it: the 50'th anniversary of John Glenn's flight.

I did countdowns at the drop of a hat, with sound effects to match. Shepard was first, and a great thrill for a young boy; but I picked up that Glenn's flight was going to be special.

Of course I wanted to go to space, didn't everybody? Maybe the powers-that-be had their own agenda, but the program spoke to a real and innocent love of adventure; and that "giant leap" we really meant to be for all mankind. At least most of us did.

I didn't understand quite what the problem was that threatened the return; that the re-entry was hot I had to take on faith. (I get it now; and also why keeping the pack in place wasn't the no-brainer I thought then.) But he made it back safely and we all celebrated. I guess we weren't afraid to have heroes then.