Science Odds and Ends

http://skepticblog.org/2010/12/28/top-1 ... s-of-2010/
From the Founder and Publisher of The Skeptic, Michael Shermer, his list of Top 10 Science Books of 2010

10. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
9. The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
8. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
7. How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom
6. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
5. What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
4. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
3. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris
2. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
1. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Which way do you see her spin?
http://skepticblog.org/2010/12/27/the-s ... revisited/
The Spinning Girl Illusion Revisited
by Steven Novella, Dec 27 2010

Three years ago I wrote a post about a popular illusion – the spinning girl or silhouette illusion. This is a popular online illusion, and also remains my most popular post. (Original illusion by Nobuyuki Kayahara here.) http://www.procreo.jp/labo/silhouette.swf The popularity of this illusion seems to be tied to the fact that it is used in many online quizzes, with the claim that the direction in which you see the girl spin will tell you which side of your brain is dominant. In my prior post I primarily addressed that claim – explaining that the “left brain – right brain” thing is all nonsense, and which way the girl appears to spin tells you nothing about your personality or talents. (Briefly – while many neurological functions are lateralized to one side of the brain or the other, both hemispheres are massively connected and work together to form your abilities and personality.)

The real question prompted by this illusion is why do we perceive it as rotating one way or the other, and is there a preference. It turns out, most people will see the girl spinning clockwise. You can get her to switch and spin the opposite way to your original perception – but when first looking at the illusion most people will see her spinning clockwise.

(I first saw it as spinning counter-clockwise, scrolled it out of screen view, brought it back and saw it clockwise. Tried that a few more times and saw it mostly counter-clockwise.)

Our visual system has many such biases and preferences. In effect, our brains process visual information with many default assumptions that are true most of the time. Many optical illusions are based upon creating a special situation in which one or more of these assumptions are false. For example, our visual system has a bias for lighting from above, assumes that smaller objects are farther away, and assumes that if one object overlaps another it must be relatively closer.

Troje and McAdam did some experiments with 24 subjects, playing with the apparent camera angle of the image. They found that there does not appear to be any rotational bias (preference for clockwise or counter-clockwise). The only bias they documented was the viewed from above (VFA) bias.

Another explanation can be found here: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/sze_silhouette/index.html

Optical illusions detail the mechanisms by which our brain interprets visual signals - fascinating stuff!

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... iagra.html
A Woman's Tears: The Anti-Viagra?
by Jennifer Carpenter on 6 January 2011

For many a man, few things deflate his passion faster than the sight of a woman crying. But tears may do more than visually tell a man it's not time for romance. A woman's tears contain substances that reduce men's sexual arousal, a new study indicates. It's the first evidence that human tears contain chemical signals.

...the men found the women less attractive after smelling the tears, the researchers report online today in Science. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early ... ce.1198331

The men's heart and breathing rates, skin temperature, and testosterone levels also sank, indicating a drop in sexual arousal. Peering into the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers found that on average the regions of the brain that usually light up when an individual is aroused, the hypothalamus and fusiform gyrus, responded normally to moderately erotic images. However, this neural activity was dampened when the men were exposed to the tears.

Shedding tears is just another way, along with pheromones and body language, that the sexes can communicate, says Sobel. Women shed tears significantly more often during menstruation, when there is a low chance of conceiving, he notes. "This makes perfect sense because it is signaling that sexual activity is inappropriate from an evolutionary point of view," says Sobel.

Blood tests for additional diseases - no more expensive or invasive tests needed if proven accurate and precise!
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp
Is Alzheimer's Disease Written in Blood?
by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel on 6 January 2011

A team of chemists and other researchers now propose a new way to pick up biomarkers with a blood test: by screening for antibodies that the body makes in response to particular diseases. So far, the group has reported results for only a small number of Alzheimer's disease patients. But they are hopeful that the approach will hold up and could be used for everything from lupus to cancer.

Scientists don't know that every disease elicits antibodies, but some diseases certainly do. "Antibodies are the rocks of the protein world," not easily damaged when studied in the lab, says Kodadek. This made the idea of measuring them in blood appealing.

Many other researchers had considered the value of antibodies as biomarkers, but they were stymied by the common strategy used to test for them. To know which antibodies to look for, you have to determine which molecules stimulate the immune system to produce the antibodies. This requires "a phenomenal understanding of early disease progression," says Kodadek, something we don't have for most diseases.

Forget megapixel - we're going gigapixel!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... a-revealed
Draw the Curtains: Gigapixel Cameras Create Highly Revealing Snapshots [Slide Show]
Researchers are developing cameras that can take digital snapshots made up of more than a billion pixels
By Larry Greenemeier | January 6, 2011

Advances in technology tend to spoil us. PCs just a few years old have nothing on today's smart phones, and, whereas megapixel images were once the state of the art in digital photography, gigapixel images (composed of at least one billion pixels, or picture elements) are beginning to show up on the Web in vivid detail.

Gigapixel images also hold tremendous potential for providing law enforcement and the military with detailed reconnaissance and surveillance information. Long-distance images taken today by satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can capture detail down to a license plate number while flying at altitudes too high for these drones to be spotted from the ground.

Through its Advanced Wide Field of View Architectures for Image Reconstruction and Exploitation program, DARPA has for the past year been working on ways to develop a camera that can take a gigapixel-quality image in a single snapshot. This approach is novel, given that today's gigapixel images actually consist of several megapixel-sized images pieced together digitally to provide a high level of detail over a large area.

For those of you with kids who have testing anxieties - try this next time!

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/211.abstract
Writing About Testing Worries Boosts Exam Performance in the Classroom
Gerardo Ramirez and Sian L. Beilock*
Science 14 January 2011:
Vol. 331 no. 6014 pp. 211-213
DOI: 10.1126/science.1199427

We tested whether having students write down their thoughts about an upcoming test could improve test performance. The intervention, a brief expressive writing assignment that occurred immediately before taking an important test, significantly improved students’ exam scores, especially for students habitually anxious about test taking. Simply writing about one’s worries before a high-stakes exam can boost test scores.