The crew invents a new form of inter-species prejudice, declares their willingness to do stupid things in the name of science and then goes metaphysical.
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A newly discovered African primate who lived 37 million years ago, is baffling researchers who can’t seem to classify it among any known family tree. The biggest mystery? The primate’s weird teeth.
“It comes as a bit of a shock to find a primate that defies classification,” said study researcher Erik Seiffert of New York’s Stony Brook University.
The 12 fossil teeth, the only remnants the paleontologists have of this primate so far, were found in northern Egypt. The new species is called Nosmips aenigmaticus.
During the last 30 years or so, three major primate groups have been established as being present in Africa some 55 million to 34 million years ago: early monkeys, lemur-like primates, and an extinct group called adapiforms, Seiffert said.
Nosmips’ teeth place this primate in Africa at the same time. What’s more, its teeth suggest it could be an evolutionary oddity that is not closely related to any of these groups.
Good luck on the Molar Mystery!
What is Transcranial magnetic stimulation?
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an extraordinary technique pioneered by neuroscientists to explore the workings of the brain. The idea is to place a human in a rapidly changing magnetic field that is powerful enough to induce currents in neurons in the brain. Then sit back and see what happens.
Since TMS was invented in the 1980s, it has become a powerful way of investigating how the brain works. Because the fields can be tightly focused, it is possible to generate currents in very specific areas of the brain to see what they do.
Focus the field in the visual cortex, for example, and the induced eddys cause the subject to ‘see’ lights that appear as discs and lines. Move the the field within the cortex and the subject sees the lights move too.
This has led some researchers to think about taking the technology from the lab and into the field where it could have all sorts of uses from the heat of battle to office Christmas party shenanigans.
Science may now confirm what the dude screaming on Venice Beach has theorized for years. The center of the Earth is made of crystal.
The outer core is composed mostly of liquid iron. The inner core is solid ball about 750 miles in diameter, or a little less than the maximum width of the state of Texas, which formed as the Earth cooled over geologic time, said David Stephenson, a geologist at CalTech.
“The center of the earth is literally a crystal,” said Stephenson. Over time, it grew and now is no longer a single crystal but an aggregate of them.
In the mid-1990s, geologists began to notice an interesting thing. Seismic waves traveling north-south were reaching their destinations about 3 percent faster than waves moving along east-west paths.
“It’s one of these things that’s been detected for some time but kind of why it occurs has been somewhat of a puzzle,” Sleep said. They didn’t know why, but then again, the middle of the globe is perhaps the most difficult place to gather data on Earth.
At least we’ve now locked in on the new status symbol soon to be draped around the neck’s of rappers and heiresses.
[Wired]
College football is a loud sport and in a game as verbally-dependent as football if a visiting team can’t relay their plays effectively or make last minute adjustments, it can be huge advantage for a home team. So it is no surprise that Penn State has not only done scientific research to determine the veracity, direction and variability of you and your hammered dorm friends screaming obscenities at the opposing quarterback and his dumb face… they plan to make it louder.
Next season, the university’s athletic department will put into play a new strategy to make its field even louder thanks to a team of acoustic scientists. The goal is to send a deafening wall of sound at the opposing team’s offensive line.
“We’re not going to let visiting teams get comfortable, and if you can’t get comfortable, you’re probably not going to perform as well,” said Guido D’Elia, director for communications and branding for Penn State football.
Working with D’Elia in 2007-08, Penn State graduate student Andrew Barnard recorded crowd noise during three home games. Using 11 sound meters strategically placed around the field, he compared volume levels when each team had the ball.
When the Penn State’s Nittany Lions were on the offense the noise levels inside 107,282-seat Beaver Stadium reached 75 decibels on the field. That’s about as loud as a car radio playing at a reasonable volume.
But the noise skyrocketed to 110 decibels — 50 times as loud — when visiting teams were on offense, drowning out the calls of the quarterback and making last-minute adjustments at the line of scrimmage very difficult.
We are guessing the exact strategy for amplifying the sound in the direction of the quarterback and offensive line is something they are going to keep close to the vest. However, if an Ohio State left guard passes out on the field whilst blood spills from his ears, you’ll know it’s working.
We told you about this yesterday… but be prepared to witness the heart that was restarted 24 hours after it died in a Harvard laboratory.
Behold, the heart that lived outside a human for 10 days but WOULD NOT DIE! (thunder clap!) It could revolutionize those who are relying on organ donations! (organ music!) It hopes to be on the open market soon! (maniacal laughter!)
[Pop Sci]
Could this microbe be discovered under any less awesome conditions?
Researchers have discovered some of the tiniest and weirdest microbes ever seen growing in a copper mine sludge that is as acidic as battery acid.
Theses ultra-small microbes were first discovered four years ago, but now scientists have reconstructed their genomes (an organism’s genetic material) and found that they are among the simplest ever described for a living organism.
Named ARMAN, or archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganisms, as a nod to the mine’s owner, Ted Arman, these Archaea (the domain of life that groups together once-celled creatures) are rivaled in size only by a microbe that survives solely as a parasite attached to other cells. ARMAN, however, appears to exist largely as a free-living organism, but oddly, researchers discovered up to ten percent of their specimens impaled on needle-like protuberances originating from another microbe, Thermoplasmatales.
“It is really remarkable and suggests an interaction that has never been described before in nature,” said Brett J. Baker of the University of California at Berkeley.
Awesome.
Autopilot!
As it turns out, flies aren’t just super apt daredevils buzzing around your mighty hand as try to crush the winged pest. Nope, they just have a built in sense of autopilot that adjusts to changing wind currents faster than it would take for them to make a conscious decision to act.
The researchers glued tiny steel pins to the backs of the flies, allowing them to gently nudge the insects off course with a magnetic pulse as they buzzed about. As can be seen in the video, which is slowed down to 1/300th of actual speed, the flies reorient themselves quickly in response to the magnetic pulse (about 7 seconds in)—too quickly, the researchers report, for them to have responded consciously to the change. And that may explain why they’re so hard to swat.
Shoo fly! Or just wait until the wind blows another direction and you move that way without thinking, moron.
In an effort to make a super soldier, the Indian military has turned to a holy man who claims to have not eaten in over 70 years since he was blessed by a goddess.
India’s Defense Research Development Organization thinks it may have found a new secret weapon: an 82-year-old holy man named Prahlad Jani. His tactical advantage: longevity. Jani claims via the UK’s Telegraph that he has not consumed food or drink for 70 years, and military authorities are conducting a rigorous study to see if he’s onto something they could use.
Skeptical? You should be. Medical science says — and there’s some variability here based on differences in metabolism, environment, etc. — that after 3 to 5 days of fasting your glucose levels get seriously out of whack. If you’re still hanging around at day 50, you’re tougher than most. That’s if you’re drinking water. If not, “your body can survive a maximum of 3 days without the intake of water, assuming you are at sea level, at room temperature, and a relative humidity,” says Bruce Zawalsky of the Boreal Wilderness Institute. That’s a far cry from seven decades.
Jani is currently under military observation.
[Pop Sci]
Study gave test subjects fake mustaches and wicked amish beards to see how much visual speech recognition was affected.
Investigating the interference of facial hair with visual speech intelligibility poses the problem of accurately controlling the amount and shape of facial hair across several speakers while keeping the recording situation constant. Since it is difficult to find participants willing to grow and then cut their beards as needed, we decided to use artificial beards made from natural hair. Two different types were chosen: mustache and long chin beard.
This explains why understanding hockey players en route the Stanley Cup because more and more of a chore
From Scientific American.
The largest trial to date of “brain-training” computer games suggests that people who use the software to boost their mental skills are likely to be disappointed.
The study, a collaboration between British researchers and the BBC Lab UK web site, recruited viewers of the BBC science program “Bang Goes the Theory” to practice a series of online tasks for a minimum of ten minutes a day, three times a week, for six weeks…
“There were absolutely no transfer effects” from the training tasks to more general tests of cognition, says Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, who led the study. “I think the expectation that practicing a broad range of cognitive tasks to get yourself smarter is completely unsupported.”
Take that, rest of the body!
Here on Weird Things, we’ve talked quite a bit about the strange history of animal (and human) experimentation for the benefit of medical science. But it would be silly to suggest that there aren’t strange trails that persist to this day.
For example, Taser International is seeking to test how harmful their products are when law enforcement uses them on subjects with elevated heart rates after methamphetamine intake. The solution? Find a bunch of sheep, jack ’em up on speed and taze them ’till they bleet.
Because of the prevalence of methamphetamine abuse worldwide, it is not uncommon for subjects in law enforcement encounters to be methamphetamine-intoxicated. Methamphetamine has been present in arrest-related death cases in which an electronic control device (ECD) was used. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the cardiac effects of an ECD in a methamphetamine intoxication model.
The results? Smaller animals saw more of an effect when zapped while high but larger sheep did not. None died.
However, this surely won’t stop someone from writing “Don’t Taze Me, Baaaaaah!” on a sandwhich board and while handing out literature in front of Taser International HQ in the next two weeks.
[io9]
Western scientists have officially catalogued animals on the islands of the Phillipines for over a century and a half and yet, a 6-foot-long, gold flecked, colored lizard just happened to escape their attention. Until last summer.
Rumors of the lizard’s existence floated among biologists for the past 10 years, Brown explained.
“People had taken photographs of hunters from the resident tribespeople as they were carrying the reptiles back to their homes to feed their families in 2001,” Brown said.
In 2005, two different groups procured juvenile specimens. “However, both of those efforts didn’t collect genetic samples, so we couldn’t yet prove that it was genetically distinct and didn’t just look different,” Brown said. “Also, we wanted a full-sized adult to see how big it got in life.”
A team went on a two month expedition to track the animal down in 2009 and only found one adult male after all of their food and money had been exhausted. One possible theory while the particular lizard is scarce? Local tribesman prefer their meat to other monitor lizards.
Yummy.
The always provocative h+ magazine surveyed the experts at the Artificial General Intelligence Conference to get a grasp of when they though machines would get really smart.
The results are very interesting:
While the median guess is the 2020’s, some are saying we won’t see any robo super geniuses for a century or more. While we can appreciate their optimism in the delay of our demise, it feels a little bit like surveys of physicists in the 1920’s about the use of atomic energy as a weapon. That was considered a far off thing too…