Month: August 2004

More Procrastination

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date August 12, 2004

Reuters: Gene Blocker Turns Monkeys Into Workaholics
The researchers used anti-sense RNA to lower the levels of a dopamine receptor in the brains of rhesus monkeys who had to push levers in response to visual cues.

Procrastinating monkeys were turned into workaholics using a gene treatment to block a key brain compound, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
…
Monkeys and humans both tend to wait until the last possible minute to finish up the work, and become very adept at estimating how long they have.
…

Nature has another rewrite of the same press release.

Update: More discussion on Gaal’s LJ, with my reaction to his comment below, noting that (in the Nature version, at least), it explains that this "gene theraphy" is temporary.

Oddities

Locusts Collision controls

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date August 11, 2004

Locusts Inspire Technology That May Prevent Car Crashes is an article about research into how locusts avoid collisions, using techniques such as studying the activity of a large neuron called the locust giant movement detector (LGMD)… as locusts watched action scenes from the movie Star Wars…
[ link via Futurismic ]

Oddities

Sexy names

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date August 11, 2004

New Scientist: Pleasing names make faces sexier

Linguist Amy Perfors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, US, placed photos with fake names on a website called “Hot or Not”, which allows viewers to rank strangers’ photos for attractiveness.

She found that men labelled with names including “front vowels,” such as the “aaa” sound in Matt were rated as more attractive by website viewers than photos labelled with “back vowel” names, such as the “aw” sound in Paul. The opposite was true for women’s names.

Oddities Science Fiction and Fantasy

Move to Cable is Hiding Earth

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date August 09, 2004

New Scientist: Chances of aliens finding Earth disappearing

A pioneer of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has warned that for any intelligent aliens trying to search for us, “the Earth is going to disappear” very soon.

Frank Drake’s point, made at a SETI workshop at Harvard University on Friday, is that television services are increasingly being delivered by technologies that do not leak radio frequencies into space.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

What if we could talk to Whales?

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date August 09, 2004

Peter Watts (the science fiction author I mentioned last week; today I went back and read the interview I linked to) has a lovely site, with a blog (personal news side-by-side with science news; no feed, so go read it all), and stories and background on his books.
The story currently featured on his site, Bulk Food (coauthored with Laurie Channer), is a funny and chilling story in classic 2000AD Future Shocks style, dealing with the topic in the title of this post, and drawing on his harrowing real-life experiences as a credentialed whore at UBC’s Marine Mammal Unit.