60s Science---From everyday collection to environmental protection, think Green!

阿泰UID：209473

February 6, 2009  Caterpillar Does Great Ant Impression
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... t-impressi-09-02-06
It’s good to be the Queen. You get fed and cared for and generally treated like royalty. But if you’re a blue butterfly caterpillar, you can get the same benefits by just pretending to be queen. Because these crafty caterpillars trick ants into feeding them—by mimicking the sound of their queen.

Ants are social creatures whose colonies contain a queen ant, and hordes of worker ants who feed the queen and take care of all her young. Blue butterfly caterpillars have come up with clever ways to exploit that system. These parasitic caterpillars take up residence in the nests of red ants. And they mooch free meals in part by waggling their heads to beg for food like all the other ant grubs.

But that’s not all. Scientists using sophisticated recording equipment were able to listen to the caterpillars chatter. And found that the interlopers imitated the sounds of an adult queen. The report’s in the February 6th issue of the journal Science.

The reason it’s better to be mistaken for royalty and not just some other grub is that in times of stress, ants will even feed their young to the queen. So if it’s eat or be eaten, caterpillars are clearly making the sound choice.

阿泰UID：209473

February 9, 2009  Lucky Guesses Maybe More Than Luck
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... -than-luck-09-02-09
In the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire, the star answers game show questions correctly based on his life experiences. At least one right answer, however, is a lucky guess. But maybe the guess wasn’t so lucky. Maybe his brain actually knew the answer—even though he didn’t realize it.

That’s what scientists at Northwestern University are saying about so called lucky guesses. They published their research online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Study participants were shown brightly colored pictures. They had to memorize half. While viewing the other half, they had to concentrate on remembering a spoken number. So they were distracted. Later, they were quizzed on all the images. Surprisingly, they were more successful at remembering those images that they only paid half a mind to. Not only that, but they were more accurate when they said they were just guessing. The researchers say their visual systems stored memories quite accurately, even when the participants weren’t paying attention. And that what we call intuition, some of those gut feelings we get, may often be based on good information.

阿泰UID：209473

February 10, 2009 Humidity Helps Fight Flu
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... -fight-flu-09-02-10
Here’s a novel potential public health measure against the flu—kick up the humidity. The cold, dry months of winter signal the start of flu season. But previous research found only a weak correlation between the spike in flu rates and the drop in relative humidity. Now researchers from Oregon State University say that's because it's absolute, not relative, humidity that counts. Their study is in the February 9th edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Relative humidity is a function of temperature. During the dry winter, relative humidity is low in a warm house but high in the cold outside. Absolute humidity, however, is simply the total amount of water in the air. The less water in the air, the longer the flu virus survives. And that leads to a greater chance of someone catching the bug.

The scientists aren’t sure why humidity affects the flu virus survival. But they hope their discovery can be put to work. Emergency rooms and nursing homes, for example, could up their humidity during the winter. Maybe it’s time for a new health mantra: a sauna a day keeps the flu bug away.

saavedroUID：2423190

真厉害~~~   我以你为目标吧·~~

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February 11, 2009 Near Misses Motivate Gamblers
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... e-gamblers-09-02-11

The lure of gambling clearly comes from the chance of winning. But how exciting is it to almost win? A study in the February 12th issue of the journal Neuron looked at gambler’s brains’ reactions to “near misses,” such as when you get two cherries out of three at a slot machine. While gamblers describe near misses as more unpleasant than full misses, almost winning significantly increased the desire to keep gambling.

Fifteen subjects underwent brain scans as they gambled. Near misses activated the brains’ ventral striatum and anterior insula areas, which were also activated during random wins. The insula has been associated with drug craving and other addictive behaviors.

Interestingly, this effect only happened when gamblers had control of the lever. The inverse occurred when a computer took control. In that case, the near misses significantly demotivated the gambler to keep playing, and it was the complete misses that kept momentum alive. So next time, when you nearly get three cherries and you’re hyped up to try again, remember this is not like working on your golf swing—your odds at the slot machine don’t get better with practice.

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February 12, 2009 Happy Birthday, Mister Precedent
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... -precedent-09-02-12
February 12th is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. But they’re linked by something else, too. Before Darwin, natural philosophers held to a point of view called typology, or essentialism. Members of a particular class were all the same. For example, all triangles have the same fundamental characteristic: three sides.

This way of thinking, however, extended to the biological world, including humans. As the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote in an essay in the July, 2000, issue of Scientific American, “For the typologist, Caucasians, Africans, Asians or Inuits are types that conspicuously differ from other human ethnic groups. This mode of thinking leads to racism.” But Darwin replaced typology with the new concept of populations. Groupings of organisms are populations of unique individuals—who vary.

Typology offered a philosophical justification for a slave being worth three fifths of a white person in the Constitution. But now science insisted that all people, regardless of race, were fully human. A viewpoint that finally began to be put in practice in the U.S. by Lincoln.

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February 13, 2009  Envy Related to Physical Pain
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... sical-pain-09-02-13
Sometimes you want something so badly it hurts, usually something that someone else has. Now a report in the journal Science shows that the agony of envy really does ache, because envy activates a part of the brain that processes physical pain. What’s more, the brain registers pleasure when the person we envy has a bad day.

Scientists used fMRI scans to look at how the brain handles envy and its evil twin, schadenfreude, a German term for taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. In the first set of studies, the scientists asked participants to read a story about themselves and their friends. In one scenario, subjects were told that they botched a job interview, which one of their classmates totally nailed.

Reading about this classmate’s subsequent successes, both financial and romantic, caused the participants’ brains to shout pain. But then came the schadenfreude. The subjects were told that something unfortunate happened to this friend, everything from car troubles to getting cheated on. That news was received with apparent delight as it lit up the brain’s reward circuits. Then again, what looks like delight could just be the relief of no longer having to deal with the painful feelings of envy. Like a Red Sox fan contemplating A-Rod.

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February 16, 2009 Ancient Whales Birthed On Land?
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... ed-on-land-09-02-16
Expectant moms can have very different ideas when it comes to where they plan to have their babies. Some women even choose to give birth in a warm tub of water. But 50 million years ago, whales, it seems, crawled out of the ocean to give birth on land.

You’ve probably heard that whales evolved from animals that lived on terra firma. But what were things like during the transition, when early whales spent some time on shore and the rest in the sea? A new report in the journal Public Library of Science ONE offers one idea. Because scientists from the University of Michigan Museums of Natural History recently unearthed the first fossil of an ancient pregnant whale. And they found that the footlong fetus, who was probably only a day or two from being born, was positioned for a head-first delivery. That’s how land mammals tend to give birth, so their babies can breathe as soon as they arrive. Modern whales, on the other hand, come out tail-first, to make sure they don’t drown during delivery.

So it looks like ancient whales lived in the water but gave birth on the beach. Then they most likely headed back to sea for baby’s first bite of sushi. Which sounds like a whale of a birth plan.

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February 17, 2009  Monkeys Hate Others' Bonuses, Too
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... onuses-too-09-02-17
Even monkeys know when they’re getting a bad deal, said primatologist Frans de Waal at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago on February 16th: “We found that our monkeys were sensitive to the distribution of rewards.”

Give two side-by-side monkeys a piece of cucumber for performing a simple task and there’s no problem. But if one sees his neighbor get a more desirable grape—“now grapes are far better than cucumber and the monkeys know that”—for doing the same thing, “they become agitated. They don’t like this experiment anymore, even though they get exactly the same food as before. But the partner is now getting grapes. And if you give the partner a grape without any task, then they really don’t like it anymore. So this is, I usually call it an egocentric sense of fairness, it’s like resentment or envy. It’s very similar actually to the response that we have currently to Wall Street bonuses. I always say we live in Cucumberland and they live in Grapeland, basically.”

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February 18, 2009 Future Cosmologists Doomed to Err
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... med-to-err-09-02-18
Future cosmologists will get the universe all wrong, said Arizona State’s Lawrence Krauss at the AAAS Meeting on February 16th:

“All of the pillars of the big bang will disappear. The Hubble expansion is going to disappear. Because the galaxies we use as tracers of the Hubble expansion will disappear. There’ll be nothing to trace the expansion. You might say, well, look, we have the cosmic microwave background radiation. Too bad. Because it goes away. When the universe is 50 times its present age, the cosmic microwave background will not be able to permeate our galaxy. So even if observers were smart enough to measure things much weaker than we can measure today, it wouldn’t be there to measure.

“The scientific picture of the universe a hundred years ago was that it was static and eternal in which we live in an island universe, our galaxy surrounded by empty space. And that’s the picture we’ve changed radically due to all of our observations. And I want to point out the far future is going to bring a return to exactly that picture. Observers in the far future will use the best science they can come up with to determine the nature of the universe and they will come up with exactly the wrong answer.”

adagio2007UID：2451319

一般这个要听到几成IBT就没问题了啊？LZ听的一字不差？

阿泰UID：209473

February 19, 2009 Fix Congress's SciTech "Lobotomy"
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... h-lobotomy-09-02-19
Time to bring back the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA was created in 1972 to provide Congress with an objective analysis of complex scientific and technological issues. But it was killed in ‘95. Rush Holt, one of three physicists in Congress, sent a statement to the AAAS meeting in Chicago last week that said, “When the OTA was disbanded, Congress gave itself a lobotomy.” At the meeting, Lewis Branscomb, from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, offered reasons to restore the OTA:

“First obviously technical understanding is much more critical to public policy now than it was in ’94. Consider energy independence, global climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, and mutation of viruses into global disease threats—all major issues facing us today. Second, the American economy is more dependent than ever on innovation to give us a competitive advantage. Given the global competition we face, it will require the U.S. to improve more rapidly its own research and innovation capability.”

阿泰UID：209473

February 20, 2009 Count On Steves to Defend Darwin
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/epi ... end-darwin-09-02-20
Creationists often publish lists of a few dozen scientists who doubt Darwin. So in 2003 the National Center for Science Education put together a list of 200 scientists who accept evolution.

“Except that all of ours were named Steve.” That was the NCSE’s Eugenie Scott at last week’s AAAS meeting. “And now we have one thousand scientists named Steve. Project Steve has a serious message. Approximately one percent of Americans are named Steve or Stephanie, so do the math. Our one thousand Steves represents a hundred thousand scientists accepting evolution, as opposed to the rather paltry number dissing Darwin. It’s important because in states where we have major problems with anti-evolution going on, the number of scientists doubting evolution has been proclaimed to the public. I just want the press to keep asking, ‘How many Steves do you have?’”

And the thousandth Steve is: “The distinguished botanist at the University of Tulane and head of the Tulane Herbarium, Steve Darwin.”

yzgongUID：2539456

好

阿泰UID：209473

我有时候第一遍听比较生僻的东西还是会晕一下的