Science link round-up (just cleaning up unread stuff in my RSS subscriptions):
After a lot of silence, a pile of articles from Carl Zimmer’s The Loom site showed up, including:
- The Unwritten Self, about some new research that shows how our self-image is distinct from our memories, and how the two things are handled by seperate systems in the brain. The description of the self-image system
it is an intuition network, tapping into regions that produce quick emotional responses based not on explicit reasoning but on statistical associations
…The Reflexive system is slow to form its self-knowledge, because it needs a lot of experiences to form these associations. But it becomes very powerful once it takes shape.
reminds me of spam-filtering systems, or perhaps of how the immune system develops its own sense of self/not-self. - Adam and His Eves talks about the disrepancy between the calculated ages of "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-chromosome Adam": several studies have shown that Mitochondrial Eve (the common female ancestor of all the people in the sample) is usually about twice as old as Y-chromosome Adam (their oldest common direct male ancestor, assuming they are all men). The latest study suggests Polygyny as an explanation.
- This item basically points to a cool 3D animation of a Bacteriophage in action.
- Finally, this is an article about altruism and spite in bacteria. The lovely thing about the bacteria used in the study described is that helping or harming your neighbour boils down to making the effort to secrete some chemical into the growth medium (and removing this behaviour is usually as simply as mutating a single gene). Apparently, the studied bacteria will help their relatives more than strangers (kin selection), except when things get too crowded and then it’s every bug for himself.
Is that too much? Because I’ve got New Scientist stuff to link to now:
- Like, scientists that want to replace the naming system for species ( introduced by Linnaeus in 1758!) with something hip called a
PhyloCode
. -
Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.
Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study. -
Synaesthesia, a condition in which people make weird sensory associations, may rely more on the plasticity of the brain than on any genetic predisposition. This might mean that all of us are capable of having a synaesthetic experience.
-
Significant structural differences in the brains of males and females may result from selective cell death orchestrated by just a single gene during early development, according to a new study. (done in mice).
- In the dope-fiend-friendly-news dept:
A cannabis-like substance produced by the brain may dampen delusional or psychotic experiences, rather than trigger them.
and
Cannabis may loosen the stiff and spastic muscles of multiple sclerosis sufferers, and not just their minds, a follow-up study has found.
The results contradict findings from the first phase of the study, where improvements seemed to be largely due to "good moods".
The weird gadget digest:
An unmanned spinning spy plane that can hover for days (the prototype is known as "the Whirl"), a fly-eating robot (that is powered by digesting the insects!) and an inflatable space re-entry vehicle (the last one from Nature news).
(Nothing about the SETI@Home message, or the new "super-earth" extra-solar planets. Because that’s old news)