Category: Science

Following on the theme of pointers to your personality, there is apparently some evidence that parasites can affect personality.

It’s long been known that certain parasites affect the behaviour of their hosts in ways that tend to ensure the success of the parasite’s survival. For example there’s a fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum, that will make its intermediate host, an ant, climb up blades of grass and stay there until the grass, and the ant, is eaten by a grazing mammal.

And research into the cat parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, seems to indicate that it has an effect on the behaviour of intermediate hosts. Rats, for example, are afraid of cats – for entirely understandable reasons. However, researchers at Oxford University demonstrated that rats that were infected by Toxoplasma appeared to lose their fear of cats. This is good news as far as Toxoplasma is concerned (but obviously not for the foolhardy rat) as it increases the chances that the infected rat is eaten by a cat, so that Toxoplasma ends up in its final host.

You will be delighted to hear that Toxoplasma is also very common in humans – some authorities think that half of all the people on earth carry its cysts in their brains (yup, that’s where Toxoplasma lives in its intermediate hosts).

So, if Toxoplasma affects the behaviour of rats, what does it do to us? Well, parasitologist Jaroslv Flegr has been looking at this. And it does appear that there is a statistically significant difference between people who are infected and the control group. Infected women are said to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, whereas infected men are more insecure with proneness to feelings of guilt.

While such behaviour differences may not matter while you’re around the domestic cat, I wonder if it could be significant if you’re on safari?

Being an increasingly grumpy old man, I take a positive pleasure in reading stories such as "What a Way to Go", in today’s Guardian. I can spend many happy hours ruminating on the chances of each of the ten threats to human existence listed. My money’s on number 9: the Super-Volcano.

As a friend once remarked to me: "You have to remember that we live at the bottom of a gravity well, on a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball. I’m not sure if this is the stable set of parameters that we think it should be…"

Although I’ve categorised this post as "Science", it could equally have been "Society" or even "Art".

What it is, is a reference to a beautiful and thought-provoking essay: The proper reverence due those who have gone before, written by Paul Z. Myers and posted on his Pharyngula blog. It is a wonderful example of the essayist’s art.

An example of the beauty:

That’s another thing; a bone isn’t just beautiful operational engineering, it’s a trace of a person. It’s a melancholy memento of all that’s been lost…here is this human being who struggled and loved and dreamed and hurt for sixty years, and all that I had of her was a few exquisitely patterned swirls of hydroxyapatite. So much was gone, so much lost, and that’s the fate of all of us—all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that’s left is abstractions. For most of us, there won’t even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we’ll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered.

And to get our brains thinking, Myers points out that if you take the Bible to be the record of the history of a people (hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals) covering a span of 2,000 years, then you would need 1,600 Bibles to cover the span of time that lies between us and Lucy.

Do your brain a favour – go and read his post.

I hope that this particular robot found on Gizmodo is a joke.

I don’t think I would be prepared to trust myself to its tender ministrations.

Marcel Duchamp – eat your heart out!

Aargh! I missed the first of this year’s Reith Lectures yesterday! Oh well, I see that the Beeb is offering both the chance to listen to it again via Internet radio and the chance to download it as an MP3. The Beeb is even getting into podcasting – perhaps I should too…

When I, and my fellow IT architects, designed a taxonomy for Shell’s IT architecture, we included Haptic devices in the class of input devices. A haptic device is one that provides feedback to a human via the sense of touch. An example that many gameplayers are becoming familiar with would be a joystick that provides force feedback. In Shell, we were thinking that in 3D virtual reality environments (used to simulate and explore underground oil reservoirs), then Haptic devices such as cybergloves would become readily available at affordable prices. The added dimension of the sense of touch might give new avenues to explore when interpreting data.

Of course, the human mind is an ingenious thing. While it was to be expected that given the human race’s propensity to pursue sex in all its forms that Teledildonics would emerge, some of the new uses of Haptic technology are, shall we say, a little more esoteric in nature.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The Bovine Palpation Rectal Simulator! The saviour of timid veterinary students everywhere.

Those good people at Sony are researching into how to improve their robotic pets. Scientists at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory in Paris (now that sounds a fun place to work in) have been looking at the interactions between real live dogs and Aibo, Sony’s robot dog.

My favourite is the Dog Attack Movie. Warning, don’t be drinking a beverage while watching this…

Thanks to the Language Log, I came across a new example of psychological interference today: the Stroop Effect. Try it – although if you suffer from colour blindness, it may not work…

Coincidentally, the word "stroop" in Dutch means syrup – and that aptly sums up the feeling of trying to walk through a vat of syrup when doing the Stroop test.

That’s the headline of a story carried by the London Times about research that has been carried out by the University of East London that seems to show that gay men and women (both straight and lesbian) share the same strategies in map reading, and that these are different from those of straight men.

Personally, I think that the sub-editor responsible for this headline has an agenda. It’s a crap headline – we just use different strategies from straight men. Actually, reading the story, we (gay men) appear to adopt the best of both approaches, so far from being "as bad as", we are, in fact, better than straight men, straight women, and lesbians. So there!

The Guardian has a weekly supplement devoted to the Life Sciences. This week it has an interesting article about why people have religious faith – suggesting that it may be a survival mechanism. Being atheist myself, I’ve long been intrigued by the religion meme.

The article mentions Professor VS Ramachandran, who is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and adjunct professor of biology at the Salk Institute. The good professor is one of those people who can convey complex scientific concepts with clarity – a trait that is not as common as I would wish. He also is a natural wit, and does irony beautifully. An example: he was featured in a recent Horizon programme on synaesthesia (Derek Tastes of Earwax), and talking of the origins of language, with a completely deadpan face, he came out with: "How do you start with the grunts and groans and howls of our ape-like ancestors and then evolve all the sophistication of a Shakespeare or a George Bush?"

A couple of depressing items on the pseudoscience front today. First, the Guardian reports on how the Religious Right is fighting Science for the heart of America. It follows the debate currently going on in Kansas, where state educators are to decide on curriculum changes for high school science teaching. As the article says: "If the religious right has its way, and it is a powerful force in Kansas, high school science teachers could be teaching creationist material by next September, charting an important victory in America’s modern-day revolt against evolutionary science." 

And in another newspaper, this time the New York Times, Michael Behe has an opinion piece, Design for Living which has as its opening sentence: "In the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design." Er, excuse me? "Rival theory"? – that’s like saying a gnat has the same weight as an elephant. The Panda’s Thumb web site carries a good refutation of this piece from PZ Myers: Behe Jumps the Shark.