27 Apr 2007
by ryanin General, News, Pets, Science
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
…
It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.
Sounds like a good candidate for an Ig Nobel prize.
Link
05 Jan 2007
by ryanin Cool!, Science
Holy bloody huge! Check out this “colossal” squid.
Calamari jokes aside, the article mentions they think this thing is only two-thirds is full size. Yowza. Suddenly some those sea monster stories start to make sense.
BBC [via Neatorama]
03 Jan 2007
by ryanin News, Science, Technology
“You hear only one note, and you already know who it is,” he said. “So what I want to know is: how we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?”
Short on science but long on interest, this article explores the work of Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist at McGill University.
Link [via Dvorak]
29 Nov 2006
by ryanin Cool!, Science, Technology
What’s that phrase about necessity and invention? Check out this nail (yes, a nail) that has twice the “uplift capacity” of standard nails. That means it can hold something down twice as well as a standard nail in, say, a storm.
Link [via Neatorama]
24 Oct 2006
by ryanin Cool!, Science
Holy. Frakking. Cool.
(click for larger)
[via warrenelliscom ]
01 Oct 2006
by ryanin Science, Signs of the Horsemen
I only ask because it might be important to know in the future. Seems that some paleontologists (that would be smart people who play in the dirt) found a friggen huge Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in Montana a couple months ago. Unfortunately, when they tried to stuff the bone in their chopper, it wouldn’t fit. So, after spending what was likely weeks dusting off this bone to preserve it, they very scientifically broke it in two.
Luckily, this paid off as they found soft tissue in the middle of this bone. What kind?
This tissue, including blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells, was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible.
If someone teaches Wayne Knight to use bash, we’re in big trouble.
Link [via Digg]
21 Sep 2006
by ryanin Politics, Religion, Science, Signs of the Horsemen, Uhm... yeah
And another interesting race became a moot point. It’s too bad because DeVos had everything going for him: he wasn’t Jenny, he was a DeVos, and he wasn’t Jenny. But then he had to go and do something stupid like this.
“Lots of intelligent people can disagree about the origins of life. In the end, I believe in our system of local control,” he said in a news release Wednesday afternoon. “Local school boards should have the opportunity to offer evolution and intelligent design in their curriculums.”
Sigh. Sorry Dick, not even Lee Iacocca can pull you out of this stupid, stupid maneuver. You just lost my vote.
Let’s say this one more time: Intelligent Design is religion. As someone from the unbelievably religious West side of this state (which is the only reason DeVos made this statement, sucking up to the old, Dutch protestants), I know religion’s effects on a young mind. Note to all you old (and not so old) Dutch protestants: not everyone believes what you believe and you have zero right to force them to hear your cosmological views, especially in a science class.
You can read all the ass-kissing at the Freep; hat tip to Stupid Evil Bastard for the link.
23 Aug 2006
by ryanin Science, Signs of the Horsemen, Uhm... yeah
At some point, I believe I heard or read that the human mind has a certain capacity for retaining information, sort of like a hard drive. At some point, you have kick out data in order to accommodate new data.
Which makes reading articles like this so damn infuriating. BBC NEWS | UK | Cows also ‘have regional accents’
First, let me get this out of the way: Who effin’ cares? How, in any way, shape, or form, does this improve the life of anyone? A university in the UK paid someone to research this. The stunning conclusion was expressed by a local farmer:
I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl
Lloyd Green
Farmer
Wow. Assuming it’s true (and, let’s just say it is), this idea wasn’t valid until some professor pronounced it so. Only then does it get a BBC story.
Second, I read this due to the car-accident effect; the article simply couldn’t be about actual cows with actual accents. But, oh yes, it was. And now some fact which will be important to me in the future has been kicked out of my head to make room for the fact that cows have accents.
And now you have experienced the same joy as I have.
04 Jul 2006
by ryanin Science, Signs of the Horsemen, Uhm... yeah
Mark this one down as questionable. With a lead off paragraph like this one, it’s got to be hard science, right?
People who have been drinking may miss objects that appear unexpectedly in their field of sight, even when their blood alcohol levels are just half the legal driving limit.
Pretty bold statement. There must have been some serious research behind this.
To investigate, the researchers had 47 volunteers watch a video of two teams passing basketballs back and forth and asked them to count how many times the team wearing white T-shirts passed the ball. During the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit appeared among the players, stood in the middle of the screen and beat her chest, and then walked away.
The subjects were given a beverage and instructed to drink it over a 10-minute period five minutes before watching the video. After viewing it, the researchers interviewed them to determine if they’d seen the gorilla.
Ok. Interesting technique. What were the conclusions?
Overall, one third of the study participants didn’t notice the gorilla. Among those who were sober, 46 percent spotted the gorilla, compared to 18 percent of the intoxicated group.
Notice there are no hard counts here, only statistical numbers (percents, not numbers of people). Any other observations from the study?
This phenomenon, known as inattentional blindness, occurs commonly among people who are sober, Clifasefi and her team note
Wait, wait just one cotten-pickin’ minute. Sober people exhibit this behavior, as well?
Let’s review the methodology here. People are shown a video of basketball players passing the ball and asked to count the passes. No indication is given of how intensely one would have to watch that video in order to fulfill that directive. People in studies are paid to do what researchers tell them to do; if I’m a paid subject told to count passes in a basketball video, you can be damn sure I’m going to be concentrating pretty hard on the ball moving around.
Here’s some interesting questions not addressed; how accurate were the counts of the “drunk” people? Did they perform as well on the task given to them as the sober people? Was the level of cognitive involvement (watching the basketball passes) equal to or less than the cognitive involvement of a seasoned automobile driver? Because, let’s face it, what else would a study on perception and drinking be aimed at besides drivers?
Repeat after me everyone; language matters. And when researchers–sorry, I can’t call them that–when grant seekers spew out crap like this “research”, it makes you wonder just what their agenda is. Leading off with laughable conclusions that don’t even pass the Smell Test doesn’t exactly give your work much credance either.
One strong drink can make you ‘blind drunk’ | Reuters.com
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