Nerds and Words: Week 9

I have dug through the Internet this week and uncovered all this geeky goodness. You can find the thousands of links from previous weeks here.

I have marked my favorite links with a 8. Enjoy.

Science to Read, Watch

The blind have more nightmares, and it gets more interesting from there

8 A whale graveyard where dozens of ancient giants met their end by something almost microscopic

Sock for the heart, and you’re to blame. You give science a good name

The fruit fly’s refusal to be monogamous tells us something about how intelligence evolved

When your friend is down, lend a helping trunk, elephants do

Giant scary birds were giant, scary, but probably not mammal-munchers

8 A wasp with a zombifying stinger able to sense its way through a cockroach brain in under a minute

The jewel wasp is the preeminent cockraoch brain surgeon

What does Smaug have in common with a beetle? More than you may think

Robots of a rotor synchronize their motors

“We are simultaneously on the precipice of several different cliffs.”

8 What’s better than talking science? Talking science with geeky 11-year olds! Listen here

Spiders can hear human activity and learn to work around it

“When we look into the eyes of an elephant, we should recognize an intellectual equal”

8 We bleed 500,000 horseshoe crabs a year for medical services we absolutely cannot get anywhere else

Why we should eat more (delicious) bugs to save the world

Watch the world’s fastest wire-bending machine forever

We have found a bacterium that kills Zebra mussels

A simple task that shows how important the scientific method is: Can You Solve This?

I honestly didn’t know how LEDs worked until Minute Physics explained it with electron spas and parties

8 Could A Skyrim Shout Ever Knock Someone Over?

Arachnophobes imagine spiders as bigger and closer than they really are (but they really are everywhere)

The rock that hit the moon had more energy than is released in the fission of 1 gram of U-235

“The Secret” assumes an extreme emotion is always good. It’s wrong: The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking

8 Why don’t we get outraged over the nonsense sold at Whole Foods?

Alan Alda wants to make scientists better communicators by making them actors, but really just more “human”

Visualizing 100,000 asteroids at once is of course beautiful

Have you thought of the invasive species crawling around beneath your feet?

The natural selection of oblong egg shape in seabirds, in one GIF

The Cassini spacecraft crosses Saturn’s ring plane, inadvertently photographs the best scifi book cover ever

Extreme Nerdery

8 GLaDOS makes an appearance in a NASA science explainer video

If you make your golf ball-powered rocket just right, you can score ALL the hole-in-ones

A True Detective infographic that is obsessive, speculative, and awesome, just like the show

There is a protist in a termite gut that is named Cthulhu

8 If everyone in The Hobbit was a lady. Fantastic

Incoming transmission Captain…

Eventually, Godzilla will be so big that no kaiju could take it down

8 My new favorite instrument can play the Super Mario theme better than anything

Kramer was right about the Ukraine in Risk

It had to happen: A robot that could destroy your Flappy Bird high-score

Sciencey GIFs and Images

8 Still little more chilling than nuclear testing in black and white

Chinese pest eradication poster, Ding Hao (1958)

A murmation of beautiful murmation photos

Set alcohol vapors alight and you get a gorgeous cross between a brain and a developing blastula

You saw the Moon and Saturn together, now see the GIF of the Moon eating Saturn

8 Besides brilliant science communication and funny comics, xkcd also makes actually useful infographics

Following only what’s in the games…prepare yourself…people ARE Pokemon

You guys, 3D WELDING

A GIF from MARS

8 A moist owlet

Pop Culture Happenings

8 Finally, some footage of Li Hongbo’s amazing paper sculptures

It’s exactly what we were worried about: Bill Nye Debate Sparked Funding ‘Miracle’

A History of Clickbait: The First 100 Years

Hyping Your Conspiracy Theory In 5 Easy Steps

8 A ticker tape of real-time porn search terms (very NSFW, very interesting)

Huh. Those “Do Drugs” pencils were real, and only changed after a kid noticed

Who Said It: Ted Nugent or Eric Cartman?

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Smoking Could Alter Teens' Brain Structure

It’s common knowledge that smoking cigarettes is bad for your health, but young people are still choosing to light up more than any other demographic in the United States. Researchers now have evidence that a specific part of the brain varies between smokers and nonsmokers. The researchers say it could be that smoking is causing these changes, even in teenagers who have smoked for a relatively short period of time.

Prior research has shown brain differences between adult smokers and nonsmokers, but few studies focused on the youngest demographic of smokers whose brains are still undergoing development. The new findings indicate that a small part of a brain region called the insula is thinner in young people who smoke.

The insula is a part of the cerebral cortex, and it is involved in shaping our consciousness and emotions. The insula also houses a high concentration of nicotine receptors and plays a critical role in generating the craving to smoke. The study’s lead researcher Edythe London said they focused on this particular part of the brain because previous studies in adults and mice showed its size and volume were affected by smoking.

To test differences in the insula of young smokers, London and her colleagues used structural MRI to compare the brains of 18 smokers and 24 nonsmokers between the ages of 16 and 21. The average age smokers started the habit was 15, and they averaged six to seven cigarettes a day.

The brain scans showed that thickness of the insula, on average, was not substantially different between the groups. However, the thickness of a smaller part of the insular region, the right insula, was negatively related to cigarette dependence. Individuals who had smoked for longer, or had stronger urges to smoke, had a thinner right insula. The team published their findings this week in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

“It looks like, even in these very young kids, there is a link between the structure of the insula and the extent to which they smoke and become dependent,” London said in a Neuropsychopharmacology podcast. “It was shocking. We are beginning to get a story of the functional neuroanatomy of smoking.”

Although the study illustrated a difference in brain structure of young smokers and nonsmokers, it did not establish whether smoking caused the variations. It could be that people with differently structured insulas are more likely to take up smoking for an unknown reason. However, the results pave the way for future studies to determine the actual cause and effect.

“Ideally one would start the study in 12-year-olds who haven’t begun to smoke; follow them out after they begin to smoke; and see if in fact the smaller insula thickness was a predictor of a predilection to become a smoker,” London explained in the podcast.

On the other hand, if London’s team finds proof that smoking causes thinning of the right insula, it would provide further evidence of the detrimental health effects of picking up the habit at a young age. 

Photo credit: Dora Zett/Shutterstock

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Baby Brain Scans Predict Later Cognitive Development?

The shape of a newborn baby’s brain can predict its later cognitive development, according to a new study from New York neuroscientists Marisa Spann and colleagues.

Here’s the paper: Morphological features of the neonatal brain support development of subsequent cognitive, language, and motor abilities

Now, while the word ‘phrenology‘ gets banded around a lot these days by people who don’t like neuroscience, this study actually sort of fits that description – except instead of ‘bumps on skulls’ it was more ‘bumps on brains’. The authors scanned 48 babies (within 6 weeks of birth) using MRI to obtain an image of brain structure; they then analyzed the shape of each brain using a deformation-based morphology approach.

This revealed areas on each brain that were bigger or smaller than the average newborn brain:

The outputs were a set of local ‘indentations’ and ‘protrusions’… or, one might say, troughs and bumps? Anyway, after being scanned, the babies were followed up for two years and tested every 6 months to measure their developmental functioning in the domains of motor, language, and cognitive skills (using the Bayley-III scale.)

There were significant correlations between brain shape and later development, however interestingly, most of these were negative correlations – that is, infants with a thinner cerebral cortex in each particular area did better:

Here for example you can see results for the cognitive domain at ages 6, 12, 18 and 24 months. There are correlations in many areas, mostly negative (purple blobs), with the exception of some positive (yellow) correlations in the occipital cortex but these areas only predicted performance at 6 months.

So it would seem that in general, ‘less is more’ for many parts of the newborn brain. Which is interesting because in a previous study, as the authors write,

At birth, head circumference as a proxy for brain volume was the strongest (positive) predictor of intelligence at 4 years (Gale et al 2006).

Spann et al don’t seem to have analyzed whole-brain volume, but why would regional cortical thickness be a negative predictor of development? They suggest that it might be a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race type deal:

Slower or more protracted maturation of the brain or brain subregions, that are otherwise growing rapidly specifically in the neonatal period, may support the development and emergence of improved motor, language, and cognitive abilities in later infancy.

However… the sample size wasn’t huge. Although they scanned 48 babies, only 37 had usable MRI data (for the other 11, quality was too poor). And of those, they were only able to get developmental assessments on n=33 at age 6 months, falling to n=18 by 24 months. A decently sized study at the outset, it had become a decidedly small one by the end.

And I do worry (as I always seem to these days) about head movement. It’s hard enough to get adults to lie still in an MRI scanner. With babies it’s all but impossible which is why the authors used the special motion-resistant T2 PROPELLER sequence. However, they still had to throw out about a quarter of their scans, perhaps for excessive motion.

Could the scans they included have been degraded by movement, perhaps correlated with baby temperament and later behaviour, and could this have confounded the deformation-based morphology? Spann et al say that “the similarity transformation of an infant brain to a template is robust to the presence of noise in the imaging data” but it would have been nice to see some quantitative checks of that assumption.

Spann, M., Bansal, R., Rosen, T., & Peterson, B. (2014). Morphological features of the neonatal brain support development of subsequent cognitive, language, and motor abilities Human Brain Mapping DOI: 10.1002/hbm.22487

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Deadly 'Snowboob' Envelops Southern Ontario

Check out this incredible photo of the snow squall just north of Toronto taken from the CTV Toronto chopper pic.twitter.com/z37h7mJ5Go

— CTV Toronto (@CTVToronto) February 27, 2014

I was planning to pack it up early today until I saw this amazing Twitpic on Mashable.

Perhaps you’ve heard of haboobs, intense dust and sand storms that can reach 10,000 feet high. Not uncommon in Phoenix during the monsoon season there, they look like a giant brown wall as they approach. But have you ever imagined a ‘snowboob’?

It turns out that snow squalls can take on the same appearance as haboobs. The wall of snow in the image above enveloped Toronto and other parts of Southern Ontario yesterday (Feb. 27).

Here’s another view:

This captures the giant #snowboob squall in Toronto (via CP24) https://t.co/dOcvbA8P0Z

— Brian Ries (@moneyries) February 27, 2014

Unfortunately, the giant snow squall caused mayhem for drivers across southern Ontario. Near Barrie, Ontario, north of Toronto, the sudden white-out conditions resulted in a 96-car pileup. And at least one death has been blamed on the wall of snow — to the west in Sarnia. You can find more details at The Toronto Star.

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The Most Depressing Things <em>True Detective</em> Says About The Self Are True

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. A secretion of sensory experience and feeling. Programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when, in fact, nobody is anybody.

Rust Cohle has tumbled down a deep, dark philosophical hole and wants us to follow him. In HBO’s episodic crime drama True Detective, Cohle—played masterfully by Matthew McConaughey—accentuates his homicide investigations with disturbing existential rumination. Listening to Cohle lecture on the futile nature of human life or the cosmic indifference of the universe is emotionally arresting to say the least. His “corrosive” soul is the fulcrum for the supernatural element in True Detective, a nihilistic car wreck to stare at each week.

But Cohle is more than just dark when he speaks about human nature, he is right.

When Cohle says that we are “programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody,” he’s not just trying to ruin partner Marty Hart’s “silent reflection periods,” he is bringing up some of the biggest questions in the scientific exploration of human consciousness. Is the mind separate from the body? Who is in control? What makes the mind? Some research suggests that fully understanding consciousness involves biting the bullet that Cohle loads in the gun: our sense of self is programmed, a construct, an illusion.

Ask most people if mind and body are one and they will say no. This is referred to as “naïve dualism.” The people who think the body and mind are separate—more specifically the physical brain and the mind—are not naïve or stupid themselves, so to speak, but rather we are born thinking this way without consideration. When we look in the mirror, for example, we instinctively comment on our physical appearance separate from the mind. “You” haven’t aged but your body looks older. When you trip on the sidewalk you might say your legs gave out, but it wasn’t your fault. We feel as though we drive our bodies like a vessel our minds inhabit. But these feelings are still considered naïve because of what we now know about the brain.

James Bridges/Michele K. Short/HBO

When we knew nothing of where the mind sprang from, it was understandable to think ourselves something of a puppet master. We are born (and cultured) with a sense of self located somewhere behind the eyes, in between the temples. Ultimately, our intuitive sense of self is like our pre-programmed intuitive sense of physics—useful in most situations, but not very accurate when we ask bigger questions.

With support from countless experiments and a number of intersecting fields, science is now certain mind and brain are one. More succinctly, “The mind is what the brain does.” If you—the you that harbors your personality, your will, your conscious thought—were truly separate from the physical brain, then brain damage or surgery could never change who you were. But it does. In theory, a surgeon could remove or alter a part of your brain and you would become an entirely different person (the case of Phineas Gage being the classic example). We’ve seen it enough times to know that our naïve dualism lives up to the designation. You are your brain. Dualism is no longer a scientifically tenable position. It may be a philosophical one, but Cohle has something to say about that too.

The dark truth Rust Cohle is alluding to is this: Who you are is entirely dependent on the physical brain, “this meat,” as Cohle puts it. And this meat makes mistakes about reality all the time.

Illusions are the easiest (and maybe the least depressing) way to see that our brains make mistakes. A famous optical illusion like this one makes it pretty clear that something is off. No matter how many times you try to see it, only by changing the conditions does something flip in your brain to say, “These blocks are the same color.”

Your brain is a prediction and modeling machine. There is simply too much information coming into our senses at any one time not to take advantage of some shortcuts. In the block example, your brain is assuming that the blocks are a different color because of their apparent lighting and 3D orientation. It makes a guess and that’s what you perceive.

Another example you’re going to hate me for: Your nose is always in your field of vision. The only reason why you don’t notice it all the time is that your brain is effectively editing it out like some green screen effect. Not only does the brain edit out reality, it fills it in. For example, you have two fairly substantial blind spots in your vision that you never notice. Only when you do a test like this do they “appear.” Otherwise, you would never see two large black spots in your vision. The brain is making predictions about the world and modeling what would be in those blind spots if the world were consistent within them. It’s a weird concept—the world we perceive is only our brain’s best simulation of what is beyond our eyes, ears, and noses. It gets even weirder than that.

In The Self Illusion, psychologist Bruce Hood lays out the case for how the brain’s models extend all the way to the self. Life seems rich and continuous and coherent to us, but thanks to the numerous illusions that fool us we know that’s not true. Because of how our vision works, for example, we are functionally blind between the times our eyes dart from one focal point to another, but we never notice. (Just try to see your eyes moving in a mirror.) Hood claims this blindness adds up to hours each day, but it’s never a part of our conscious experience. Those kinds of insights lead to a disturbing conclusion—the brain also models the self.

The “you” that rationalizes and chooses and deliberates is simply a way for the brain to navigate the world. Having a sense of a self that apparently controls the body from behind the eyes is an efficient way to deal with other sentient creatures, and evolved along with our intelligence, or so psychologists like Hood suggest. This conclusion doesn’t necessarily have to come from a scientific perspective either. In Buddhist philosophy, the term “anatta” refers to Rust’s contention of the “not-self” or the self illusion. If you simply pay attention to the nature of perception—what you feel and how—eventually you will notice that the sensation of a singular sense of self melts away. Of course, that kind of meditation does not work for everyone, and does not prove there is no “you.” Maybe shrinking your mirror down to the size of a quarter will help.

Think about the brain’s self modeling like The Matrix. In that film, humans are kept alive and thinking by electrical inputs wired straight into their brains. The humans in turn create a sense of self and experience from these inputs alone. But their sensory experience is completely illusory, and they’d never know it. Is that really any different from how we experience the world? Isn’t the self just a jumbled of sensory input that is stitched together like some rag doll that looks terrible up close? Now that’s thinking like Rust Cohle.

Rust Cohle by p1xer on deviantART

Matthew McConaughey’s character in True Detective could go down in TV history as the world’s biggest bummer—a pessimist walking into extinction. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Knowing that the mind is not separate from the brain, that our senses can be fooled, that our sense of self can break down if we simply pay attention to the here and now, Rust Cohle is right—we are a multitude of unconscious processes cobbled together in a locked room and labeled “You”.

People… I have seen the finale of thousands of lives man. Young, old, each one was so sure of their realness. That their sensory experience constituted a unique individual. Purpose, meaning. So certain that they were more than a biological puppet. Truth wills out, everybody sees once the strings are cut off all down.

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If you haven’t seen True Detective, this will give you a good sense of the fantastic (and depressing) acting you are missing (video contains spoilers):

And check out the incredible fan art!

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Human consciousness is nowhere close to figured out, and there is no way I could cover every argument about the self here. For more, check out these videos and books:

The Self Illusion: How Your Brain Creates You—A talk by psychologist Bruce Hood

Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self—By Jennifer Ouellette

The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity—By Bruce Hood

Image Credits:
Rust Cohle by p1xer on deviantART
James Bridges/Michele K. Short/HBO

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The Astonishing Trend Line of Planetary Discovery

Earlier this week, two NASA-affiliated teams announced the discovery of 715 new planets around other stars. I have to pause on that number for a moment. From the dawn of Mesopotamian astronomy around 2000 BC until 1992 AD, astronomers discovered a grand total of three planets: Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. (I’m still counting Pluto as a planet. So sue me.) Now, in a single data release, scientists have found 715, bringing the total number of known alien worlds to 1,750.

A brief history of planetary discovery. Blue shows early discoveries, red shows previous Kepler discoveries. The gold bar displays the 715 new planets announced this week.
(Credit:
NASA Ames/SETI/J Rowe)

And the news is even more amazing than the raw numbers convey. Through almost all of history, our solar system contained the only real estate that we knew about. Yes, astronomers studied other stars and nebulae, but they knew nothing of planets–the only places where life can exist, so far as we know, the only places where humans might set down and explore. Now we know that other planets exist, and that they come in a wide variety of exotic forms never before imagined.

Extrapolating from the latest statistics, our galaxy must contain at least 5 billion Earth-size planets, and perhaps ten times that many, orbiting in locations that could be hospitable for life. We have truly entered a new era in the human relationship to the cosmos–one that I would call the 4th Great Era of Discovery.

What were the other 3? I’ll have a lot more to say about that in my next post.

Follow me on Twitter: @coreyspowell

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Talking Science, Aliens, And RoboCop With Kids!

The hardest part of communicating science isn’t when it’s in front of your peers or viewers or readers—the people you expect to know what you are talking about and why. For me, it’s talking science with kids. There isn’t anything like the inquisitive stare of a pre-teen to elicit the feeling you are about to speak in front of your biggest audience ever.

At the same time, communicating science to kids can be the most rewarding part of the job. That highbrow metaphor you use to make sure readers understand exactly how that particular protein interacts with that particular cell in this particular animal doesn’t mean a thing anymore. You have to be at the top of your game, ready to field questions on everything from RoboCop to the plausibility of Ancient Aliens.

Returning for a second time, I tried to do just that with Gil, the incredibly precocious 11-year old host of the Nerdist Network’s Mutant Season podcast. It’s another long one, and we tend to get caught up in our own nerdiness, but we had a lot of fun. You can listen to the whole episode here and tell me how I did in the comments below. If you want something a bit more zombie-heavy, check out our first discussion too!

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