Bag of Beans

Quite an incredible story about a powder being developed that can regrow body parts.

“I put my finger in,” Mr Spievak says, pointing towards the propeller of a model airplane, “and that’s when I sliced my finger off.”

It took the end right off, down to the bone, about half an inch.

“We don’t know where the piece went.”

The photos of his severed finger tip are pretty graphic. You can understand why doctors said he’d lost it for good.

Today though, you wouldn’t know it. Mr Spievak, who is 69 years old, shows off his finger, and it’s all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print.

• Link (via Digg)

A nice memorial for the first dog in space.

Stories about how she was selected varied: Some said Laika was chosen for her good looks — a Soviet space pioneer had to be photogenic. Others indicated the top choice for the mission was dropped because doctors took pity on her: Since there was no way to design a re-entry vehicle in time for the launch, the flight meant a certain death.

“Laika was quiet and charming,” Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky wrote in his book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine. He recalled that before heading to the launch pad, he took the dog home to play with his children. “I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live,” Yazdovsky said.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

This post contains a cool optical illusion and a detailed explanation. The centres of the two circles are actually changing colour in synchrony, but your perception is quite different.

This simple relationship between the colors used to create the illusion and the perception of the illusion has helped Shapiro come up with a model of how we perceive it. We see the illusion because our visual system relies not just on color information, but also on contrast information to make judgments about what we are seeing. When color values are plugged into Shapiro’s mathematical model, when the difference between the color angle of the surround and center equals 90 degrees, then the plot of contrast for the left (red) and the right (blue) disk becomes identical, so the centers are seen changing together, while for all other values we see them changing out of phase.

• Link (via Digg)

This article gives some interesting tips on making the most of your caffeine intake.

A landmark 2004 study showed that small hourly doses of caffeine (.3mg per kg of body weight [approx 20 mg per hour; thanks digg!]) can support extended wakefulness, potentially by counteracting the homeostatic sleep pressure, which builds slowly across the day and acts preferentially on the prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain thought responsible for executive and “higher” cognitive functions).

• Link (via Lifehacker)

The Möbius Strip: Dr. August Möbius’s Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology
by Clifford Pickover.
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006

As the title implies, The Möbius Strip explores the strange characteristics of Möbius strips and other related one-sided or single-surface constructs, like Klein bottles and real projective planes. It delves into a wide range of topics like topology and higher-dimensional mathematics, as well as introducing places where they might naturally be found in chemistry and cosmology. While there are a small number of places where formulas are presented, they are not completely essential to enjoying the book. This is a worthwhile read on a truly mind-bending topic.

Rating: 7/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Popular Science has a great article and gallery of some of the tools used in molecular gastronomy.

A kitchen equipped for “molecular gastronomy”—gourmet cuisine as cooked by Mr. Wizard, basically—is all about the tech. Devices that wouldn’t be out of place in a chemistry lab fill the kitchens of some of the world’s most adventurous chefs, enabling far-out dishes like whipped-cream pancakes, lobster sorbet (shells and all) and meat-flavored mushrooms. Wiley Dufresne, head chef at one of molecular gastronomy’s Meccas, WD-50 in New York City, is so protective of his machines that he wouldn’t allow them out of his kitchen to be photographed for this piece, insisting that we get our own. And so we did.

• Link (via Boing Boing Gadgets)
• Article
• Gallery

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has written an interesting and amusing article on why swears carry such an impact.

But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are not triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and activities they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they triggered by the words’ sounds, since many of them have respectable homonyms in names for animals, actions, and even people. Many people feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.

• Link (via reddit)

Scientists have discovered lifelike inorganic particles. Implications of this discovery include non-carbon-based life, and an extraterrestrial origin for life on earth from inorganic interstellar dust.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.

• Press Release
• New Journal of Physics paper
• (via Boing Boing)

Karl Schroeder has written an interesting article arguing that we should look at colonizing our own planet the same way we would colonize Mars and other planets so that we can reduce our impact on its ecosystem.

Look at the difference between what we do when we settle a new area on Earth, compared to what we’d do on a planet like Mars. On Earth we’d take advantage of the free air and water, ready-made soils provided by local fauna, pollination provided by the local bees, all to minimize the costs of building and maintaining our colonies. This process is documented expertly by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel; he points out that the conquest of the Americas was really the invasion of one ecosystem by another, rather than a simple matter of moving human populations. North America is the greatest success story of European expansionism because its ecology was most similar to that of Europe, more than for any political or social factors.

• Link (via Boing Boing)

Well this is the first time I’ve ever heard of this.

If it seems Canadians weigh less than their American neighbours, they do – but not for the reasons you might think. A large swath of Canada actually boasts lower gravity than its surroundings.

Researchers have puzzled for years over whether this was due to the crust there rebounding slowly after the end of the last ice age or a deeper issue involving convection in the Earth’s mantle – or some combination of the two.

Now, ultra-precise measurements taken over four years by a pair of satellites known as GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) reveal that each effect is equally responsible for Canada’s low gravity. The work could shed light on how continents form and evolve over time.

• Link (via mental_floss)

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
by Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

Neurologist Oliver Sacks gives us a memoir of his childhood and, at the same time, a brief history of chemistry. Oliver describes how he became interested in science and chemistry through the inspiration of his relatives. As the book moves through Oliver’s early life and his fascination with scientific experiments, we get to follow his path, learning about famous scientists and their importance in history. This is both a personal and an educational account of a perpetually curious experimenter.

Rating: 7/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

National Geographic has published an interesting article on how swarm behaviour models can help create smart, distributed problem-solving systems.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group’s success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

• Link (via Mind Hacks)

Cool visual illusion. It may be difficult to make the mental switch at first, but it is quite intriguing.

If you look at the spinning girl’s silhouette below, you will think it is spinning clockwise, probably. When you check her shadow below, momentarily the spinning direction changes in your mind, and now the girl is spinning counter-clockwise. It can be quite hard at the beginning to notice switch of the spinning direction, but eventually you’ll manage.

• Link (via Digg)

Hard science-fiction author Charles Stross has laid out his argument for why space colonization is basically impossible.

And I don’t want to spend much time talking about the unspoken ideological underpinnings of the urge to space colonization, other than to point out that they’re there, that the case for space colonization isn’t usually presented as an economic enterprise so much as a quasi-religious one. “We can’t afford to keep all our eggs in one basket” isn’t so much a justification as an appeal to sentimentality, for in the hypothetical case of a planet-trashing catastrophe, we (who currently inhabit the surface of the Earth) are dead anyway. The future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern.

Historically, crossing oceans and setting up farmsteads on new lands conveniently stripped of indigenous inhabitants by disease has been a cost-effective proposition. But the scale factor involved in space travel is strongly counter-intuitive.

• Link (via Slashdot)

This is absolutely baffling. Check it out!

Technically the mechanism at work here is known as “motion binding”. When the edges of the diamond are covered by occluders with the same colour as the background (here, white) there is no information on the vertices of the square. Now the ends of the line become a property of the line and there is insufficient information to detect the circular movement.

The reappearance of the diamond (with occluders invisible) on eccentric viewing is probably caused by blurring the distracting line ends.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)

Here are the top 10 finalists in the Neural Correlate Society’s annual contest.

The contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community. Visual illusions are those perceptual experiences that do not match the physical reality. Our perception of the outside world is generated indirectly by brain mechanisms, and so all visual perception is illusory to some extent. The study of visual illusions is therefore of critical importance to the understanding of the basic mechanisms of sensory perception, as well as to cure many diseases of the visual system. The visual illusion community includes visual scientists, ophthalmologists, neurologists, and visual artists that use a variety of methods to help discover the neural underpinnings of visual illusory perception.

• Link (via Digg)

Decoding the Universe
Charles Seife
Viking, 2006

This book looks at how physicists are using information theory to further our understanding of universe. The book begins with an introduction to how communications and cryptography lead to the field of information theory. From there, we see how information theory and thermodynamics are closely related through the concept of entropy. The bulk of the book looks at how both relativity and quantum mechanics are actually theories of information transfer. By far, the most enlightening part of the book is the explanation of how one particular interpretation of quantum mechanics–the many worlds interpretation–influences the structure of the universe.

Throughout this book, the author provides the clearest explanations of the bizarre and seemingly paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics and relativity that I have read. It tells us how some of the paradoxes in those theories can be resolved with information theory. The writing manages to give you a great high-level understanding without getting too bogged down with the details. Anyone curious about the nature of the universe needs to read this book. Highly recommended.

Rating: 9/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Related:

• Book: Programming the Universe

Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos
Seth Lloyd

This book from Seth Lloyd, a Professor of Quantum-Mechanical Engineering at MIT, aims to promote a quantum computational model of the universe. He argues that using information theory, we can resolve the problems that currently exist between Einstein’s theories of relativity, and quantum mechanics. By thinking of the universe as a very large information processing system, i.e. a quantum computer, we may be able to create a new Theory of Everything that unifies all of physics. Of course, this work is relatively new, so many details still need to be worked out. While the first half of the book does a great job of explaining quantum mechanics, the latter half of the book wanders into hand-waving territory when trying to explain the new model. However, the writer’s explanations are clear and concise and I found it hard to put this book down.

Rating: 8/10

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas Hofstadter

This latest book from cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, while not quite as much fun as his mind-bending classic, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, in some ways goes further and is more focused in explaining how consciousness might arise as an emergent property from the chemistry and biology of the brain. The author’s tone here is much more contemplative, philosophical and personal, while the previous work explored many diverse topics including mathematics, art, music, language, illusions, computational theory, and of course intelligence and consciousness. I would recommend reading the earlier work first, which has become a true classic, but this latest book is probably much more accessible to a general audience.

Rating: 8/10

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing

Can a cat parasite infect humans as well? An article on Discover suggests that Toxoplasma gondii is altering the behaviour of its human hosts, and can even cause a shift in the sex ratio of their babies in favour of males.

Five years ago, Oxford University zoologists showed that the parasite Toxoplasma gondii alters the brain chemistry of rats so that they are more likely to seek out cats. Infection thus makes a rat more likely to be killed and the parasite more likely to end up in a cat—the only host in which it can complete the reproductive step of its life cycle. The parasite also lives in the brain cells of thousands of species, including about 60 million supposedly symptom-free Americans. Studies over the past few years have suggested that toxoplasmosis infections in humans, too, may cause behavioral changes—from subtle shifts to outright schizophrenia. Two studies this year add even weirder twists.

• Link (via Boing Boing)
• Parasites on the Brain [damninteresting.com]