Science Odds and Ends

Nails on a blackboard, sirens and heavy drilling: none come close to whining for being the most annoying sound, a study has suggested.

The high-pitched, cat-like sounds that infants begin to make between two-and-a-half and four years of age, otherwise known as whining, were shown to be the most distracting sounds by the study, at least in comparison to other infant cries and “motherese” — the exaggerated baby speak adopted by adults.

A simple recall drill may be the best way to solidify new information in your memory, according to a study pub­lished online January 20 in Science. Many teachers encourage students to use elaborate conceptual methods to learn complicated material, but psychologists at Purdue University found that practice at retrieving facts works better.

But sometimes all that studying is for naught when a test or a big performance rolls around and you choke. It turns out that focusing on your worries by writing about them before a test can boost your scores, according to a different paper pub­lished in January in Science.

The ability to see Earth’s magnetic field, thought to be restricted to sea turtles and swallows and other long-distance animal navigators, may also reside in human eyes.

Tests of cryptochrome 2, a key protein component of geomagnetic perception, found that its human version restored geomagnetic orientation in cryptochrome-deficient fruit flies.

Flies are a long, long way from people, but that the protein worked at all is impressive. There’s also a whole lot of it in our eyes.

The number of confirmed cases of measles in the United States stands, as of this moment, at 152.

That’s twice as many cases as usually seen in a year, and it’s only June.

Why so many? In the article linked above, it’s made clear: parents aren’t vaccinating their kids. The reasons for that are numerous: religious exemptions, anti-vaccination propaganda, ignorance, or perhaps even just laziness. But the bottom line is that kids are getting sick.

And if you don’t think measles is that big a deal, watch this:

A dishwasher makes a nice addition to any home. But the appliances also make a nice home for a number of fungi, some of which are pathogenic, according to a new study .

The study's authors note that no dishwasher-caused infections were reported in the studied households, but the fungi are not entirely benign, either. Fungi of the Exophiala genus, which were found in 35 percent of dishwashers tested, can colonize the airways of cystic fibrosis patients. Other, less prevalent fungi were also found that can cause infections in individuals with weakened immune systems.

The fungal prevalence in dishwashers varied widely from place to place, and the water supply appeared to play a role in the rate of colonization. The Exophiala fungi, for instance, were mostly found in places with hard or medium-hard water—that is, water high in dissolved minerals such as calcium and magnesium. Beyond that, the researchers do not go into much detail about why dishwashers in certain countries seem to be more hospitable than others. For whatever reason, North America was especially fungi-friendly, with all six U.S. dishwashers sampled testing positive for fungi, along with six of seven Canadian dishwashers.

University of Minnesota engineering researchers in the College of Science and Engineering have recently discovered a new alloy material that converts heat directly into electricity. This revolutionary energy conversion method is in the early stages of development, but it could have wide-sweeping impact on creating environmentally friendly electricity from waste heat sources.

Probing colons has never been this much fun. Japanese researchers have developed the world’s first self-propelled endoscopy device, a remote controlled tadpole-like camera that can “swim” through the digestive tack gathering imagery along the way.

The device is just 0.4 inches in diameter and just shy of two inches long, and uses magnetic machinery to control its movement and location. Doctors pilot the endoscope with a joystick, watching its progress on a monitor. All said, it takes only a few hours to traverse the whole system from esophagus to colon.

AMAP’s new assessment of the impacts of climate change on Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic (SWIPA) brings together the latest scientific knowledge about the changing state of each component of the Arctic ‘cryosphere’. It examines how these changes will impact both the Arctic as a whole and people living within the Arctic and elsewhere in the world.

...this month NIH Director Francis Collins unveiled something fresh: an effort to persuade drug companies to open up their troves of abandoned drugs to academics, who would look for new uses.

The drug rescue and repurposing project, Collins told his advisory committee earlier this month, is a concrete example of what the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will do. The project shows how NCATS could be “quite game-changing,” he added. It would be a “comprehensive effort to identify appropriate abandoned compounds,” “match partners,” and “make data and resources available,” Collins explained in a comment in the June issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

Finding new uses for drugs is not a novel idea, however.

But NIH officials think there's merit in a more systematic effort. One reason is efficiency, NIH Associate Director for Science Policy Amy Patterson explained to the NIH board this month. Although only 1 in 10,000 potential therapeutic compounds will become a drug, the majority fail in late trials because of lack of efficacy, not safety. That means toxicity often isn't a barrier, Patterson said. She cited an estimated success rate of 30% for repurposed drugs. And NIH says that genomics projects have yielded a wealth of new disease targets.

Like daily commuters, Adélie and emperor penguins are up at dawn, catching krill and fish in Antarctic waters, and back home to shore at dusk. Yet the food they prefer to dine on is easiest to catch after dark. Most researchers assumed that penguins had poor nighttime vision, which was why they stayed out of the water after dusk.

But in a new study , two marine ecologists argue that the penguins actually have no trouble seeing in the dark. Instead, they say, penguins head for shore at night because they cannot gauge the risk of being eaten by leopard seals or killer whales.

To show that the penguins can see in the dark, Ainley and his colleague, Grant Ballard, a marine ecologist at PRBO Conservation Science, a conservation organization in Petaluma, California, outfitted 65 adult Adélie penguins with time-depth recorders. The devices, which register depth and light every second, were taped to the lower back, so that they caused the least amount of drag. Data collected on nearly 22,000 of the birds' foraging dives showed that most were hunting prey at 50 to 100 meters below the surface, where the water is quite dark—akin to early night. The birds also made a significant number of dives into deeper, darker waters, where they can forage successfully.

So why won't the penguins hunt at night? Ainley and Ballard note that leopard seals, which regularly kill both species of penguins, rest at midday, making it safer for penguins to hunt during this time.

So what better way to celebrate our nation's independence than aiming a Phantom v641 from New Jersey's Vision Research at all manner of explosives, resulting in high-definition footage of fireworks going off at a glorious 2,000 frames per second?

Not so much the celestial dazzling burst kind of fireworks -- you'll get plenty of those this weekend regardless -- but a serious investigation of what exactly happens when you stick firecrackers in, for instance, a jar of mayonnaise.