Category: Science

Mixed-gender p0rn0graphy boosts sperm… is the intriguing headline* of a story in today’s helping of news from Nature. I note that the study involved 52 heterosexual men. The scientist in me wonders what the result would have been if they had recruited 52 homosexual men…

* I had to insert a 0 instead of the letter o in order for the title to sneak past MSN Spaces profanity filter, which tends to be a bit nannyish.

From this week’s New Scientist comes a news story about the effects of Oxytocin:

Giving people a whiff of a key chemical can make them more inclined to trust strangers with their cash, a new study reveals. Just three puffs of a nasal spray containing a hormone called oxytocin increased the chance that people would part with their money.

Raises the spectre of it being introduced at political rallies, religious meetings and pyramid selling scams…

Hopefully, at the moment:

Kosfeld doubts it, because it takes nearly an hour for the hormone to reach the brain. Nor would it be easy to make people “sniff” something unfamiliar, and it is not known whether it would work through a spiked drink.

Whaddya mean: "it’s not known whether it would work through a spiked drink"? Surely that’s part 2 of the research? Get your KoolAid here…

Following up on my post pointing out The Science Survey, I think it’s only right to tell you that now four of the survey respondents offer their thoughts on What is Science For?

I missed this when it was news earlier this month, but a group of physicists at Oxford University have published a paper on Connections, cliques and compatability between countries in the Eurovision Song Contest.

The paper is quite interesting, but what has been really fascinating are the howls of anguish from social scientists who have got quite huffy about physicists muscling in on their turf. As Henry Kissinger is reputed to have said: “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

Really, life is too short…

I’ve just come across another Blog called WorldChanging – which looks at the ongoing interactions between human culture, science, nature and politics – a heady and dangerous mix, if ever I saw one!

I started with Human Changing – the record of a conversation between James Hughes, Ramez Naam and Joel Garreau, exploring the implications of human enhancement technologies. Fascinating stuff.

Of course, the whole conversation is from a Western perspective – it would be interesting to have some views from a radically different culture that is likely to have the will and the capability to implement some of the GRIN (Genetic, Robotic, Information and Nano-) technologies – i.e. China.

Apparently, it would seem that dear Noel Coward got it wrong when he penned Mad Dogs and Englishmen back in 1932.

Scientists at The University of Manchester have unveiled new research this week claiming that going out in the midday sun, without sunscreen, is good for you.

More over at The Science Blog.

The New Scientist this week has a good article on techniques to improve and expand your mind. I must start practising…

No, not a reference to Star Trek, but the real thing.

NASA reports that Voyager has entered the Final Frontier of our Solar System. I find this amazing.

Richard Dawkins has written another good article demonstrating the flaws in the logic followed by creationists and supporters of Intelligent Design.

What is particularly galling to him, and to many scientists, is the creationist habit of "quote-mining" – taking something completely out of context and turning the sense of the original completely back to front. I am quite convinced they don’t do it out of ignorance but out of wilful deceit. I see them do it time and time again on the BBC messageboards for Evolution and Origins.   

As Dawkins writes, for supporters of Creationism and Intelligent Design: Ignorance is God’s Gift to Kansas.

Devolution – subtitled: Why Intelligent Design Isn’t – is the title of an article written by H. Allen Orr for The New Yorker. It is one of the best-written pieces of journalism I’ve yet read on why Intelligent Design isn’t science.

The noise made by the supporters of ID is growing in volume in the US (and even, heaven help us, in the usually pragmatic Netherlands*). So it is good to see some clear voices prepared to state that the emperor has no clothes and that ID is simply junk science. The sooner this boil of ID is lanced, the better it will be.

* Last Saturday’s Volkskrant carried an interview with Maria van der Hoeven, Minister for Education, Culture and Science. She wants a "broad debate over evolutionary theory" and has written in her weblog of her interest in ID. Personally, I would think holding such a view would disqualify anyone from holding a ministerial post with the words "education" and "science" in the title, but then, oxymorons seem to abound in this world.

You may recall that last week I referred to an opinion piece by Professor William Rubenstein where he demonstrated extremely convincingly why he should stick to his subject (History) and spare us his embarrassing theories on why evolution is problematic.

He’s obviously been taken aback at the amount of scorn that has been poured on his ideas, and has come back with some further comments.

Alas, he’s just digging himself ever deeper into a hole of his own making. Orac makes the only possible response to Rubenstein’s rubbish on his blog here.

I had hoped that Rubenstein was authoring some deadpan satire. Depressingly, it appears as though he is incapable of recognising that what he wrote is pure codswallop.

The BBC World Service has just started a new series to explore the science of memory.

William James (19th Century Philospher) once commented that "Memory is the other half of Self" – and indeed, the Self relies on memory for its very existence.

Just been listening to the first episode, and it’s good stuff.

…where angels fear to tread?

Professor William D. Rubenstein is a respected historian at the University of Aberystwyth. By his own admission, he posesses an enquiring mind. This led him to ponder on a field outside of his own expertise, to whit: evolutionary theory.

Either his ponderings are a truly masterful piece of deadpan satire, or he is quite awesomely unaware of the nonsense he has spouted in The Theory of Evolution: Just A Theory?

The title alone is a typical Creationist jibe, and while Professor Rubenstein may not be a Creationist, he does seem to be repeating a number of their tired arguments. He has certainly stirred up a hornets’ nest, judging by the number of comments pointing out the errors in his piece.

The many replies may seem like pounding sledgehammers all after a very small nut, considering the schoolboy howlers in his piece. But I think that would be to miss the point. In the USA, there is a very real war of words (and legal battles over what can be taught in schools) going on between the Creationists (both the original form and the newer flavour of Intelligent Designists) and the scientific community. And with the global reach of the Internet, the web site of the Social Affairs Unit may not be the quiet backwater it once was.

One of the most interesting stories (to me) is how did we become human? What were the triggers that developed our culture and set us apart from the other animals? One web site that explores these ideas in an engaging way is Becoming Human.

Check it out…

What are you going to be doing on Friday 13th, April 2029? Well, according to NASA, you may be thanking your lucky stars that the Earth did not get hit by asteroid 2004 MN4. It is, however, going to be a close call. I hope I’m around to see it.

Over on the Bad Astronomy Blog, Phil (the Bad Astronomer) gives us his paean to Science.

Wish I’d written it. It’s damn good. 

Carl Zimmer over on the Loom  blog has a nice entry that covers a fascinating aspect of evolutionary psychology: Cheating on the Brain.

This whole field of evolutionary psychology is a fascinating one. One of the books I took to Barcelona was V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain – an absolutely riveting book about the workings of the brain. Professor Ramachandran has a wicked sense of humour – but also manages to convey the sense of wonder about the workings of the human mind, and how they are tied back to the mechanisms in the brain. Brilliant book – read it and open your mind.

…What would it be? To mark the fact that 2005 has been designated Einstein Year, Sandy Starr at spiked and science communicator Alom Shaha have conducted a survey of over 250 renowned scientists, science communicators, and educators – including 11 Nobel laureates – asking what they would teach the world about science and why, if they could pick just one thing.

Professor Gerardus ‘t Hooft’s response is typically Dutch…

Today is the 15th birthday of the Hubble telescope. To celebrate, the European Space agency and NASA have released some new images of the spiral galaxy M51 and the Eagle Nebula. The images are downloadable, and they come in two flavours: high-res and huge. The latter results in a JPEG file of 42 MB for M51!

World Wind is a visualisation application that uses satellite imagery and other data to present the world in startling new ways. If you’ve got a PC with a fast graphics card, then this application is quite stunning. You can "fly" over the Earth’s surface using your mouse.

While the application comes with a fair bit of topographic data, as you zoom into points on the Earth’s surface, more detailed data is fetched from NASA’s servers to build up the picture. Add-ons such as data from scientific visualisation servers allow you to see events such as weather patterns, floods or forest fires.

It’s an incredible teaching resource that could have only been dreamed about a few years ago, and then would only have been available to a select few researchers. Now anyone with a modern PC and an Internet connection can tap into this data and display it in ways that are immediately understandable. I reckon that in under 5 years we’ll be seeing mobile phones, cameras, laptops and tablet PCs with GPS built-in as standard. Then you’ll be able to retrace your travels, or use the virtual Earth as a way of organising your holiday snaps. Simply "fly" to Barcelona and view your photos as you move through the city.