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July 08 2011
Scent-Gland Bacteria Help Hyenas Identify Friends, Strangers, and Pregnant Females
Spotted hyenas are sometimes portrayed as cowardly scavengers, always laughing, always up to some kind of mischief. If you’ve ever seen Disney’s The Lion King, then you may already have that image in your head. Here in the non-Disney universe, spotted hyenas are actually fascinating creatures. For example, they hang out in matriarchal “clans,” and the females, with their aggressive behavior and pseudo-penises (large clitorises), are very difficult to tell apart from the males. But it turns out that spotted hyenas may be even stranger than we initially thought: they may use bacteria to help communicate with one another, suggests Michigan State University zoologist Kay E. Holekamp in a recent, amusing New York Times blog post.
Unlike many other carnivorous species, spotted hyenas do not mark their territory by lifting their legs and peeing. Instead, the animals produce a yellowish paste in their scent glands located above their anuses. The paste accumulates in adjacent pouches, which the hyenas then rub on grass stalks. In previous research, Holekamp and her students learned that the paste odor provides a wealth of information to roaming hyenas, such as the sex of the paste owner, ...
May 12 2011
Henry the Seal Can Discern Shapes Using Just His Whiskers
Blindfolded and fitted with noise-canceling headphones, this seal might better fit a marine-creature hostage crisis than a scientific study. In reality, it’s making history by showing for the first time that the whiskers of harbor seals are so sensitive that they can discern the shapes of objects by the ripples they make. Marine biologists have known for a while that seals use their whiskers to find fish in dark, murky waters, but as lead researcher Wolf Hanke told LiveScience, whiskers had “never been shown to analyze things” beyond that. Being able to discern shape and size means that seals may use their whiskers to pick out the fattest fish.
Henry, a 12-year-old harbor seal, was plopped into an open-air pool in a Cologne zoo to put his whiskers to the test. Researchers blindfolded and placed headphones on him so that he could only use his whiskers to sense underwater objects. In the pool, the researchers placed a plastic box containing an assortment of variably-shaped paddles. Because they trained Henry to touch his nose to a small plastic sphere whenever he thought a paddle’s ripples were different from a control paddle’s ripples, the ...
February 15 2011
Mmm, These Vibrating Molecules Smell Wonderful
The humble fruit fly is overturning the science of smell. Using the fruit fly’s sensitive schnoz, scientists now have evidence that the sense of smell isn’t only a matter of molecular shape–it might also have something to do with how the molecules entering the nose vibrate.
Previously, scientists thought that we perceive a particular smell when an olfactory molecule’s shape matches the shape of receptors in our nose. The molecule enters the receptor, and so we perceive the particular smell triggered by that lock-and-key scenario. But in 1996, MIT Biophysicist Luca Turin suggested that the patterns in which molecules vibrate are what control odor.
So Turin teamed up with Efthimios Skoulakis, a researcher at the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center in Vari, Greece, to test the theory. They did this by harnessing the power of isotopes: deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, has the same shape as a regular hydrogen atom, but it vibrates at a different frequency because of the added neutrons. If a fruit fly can tell the difference between an atom and its isotope, it suggests that vibrations influence the sense of smell.
Fruit flies, it ...
January 06 2011
Your Morning Toothpaste: Now With Weather Reports!
Mmmm… it tastes like rain today. Or at least this toothpaste tastes like it’s going to rain today.
The toothpaste in question was created by the MIT Media lab as your own personal early morning weather station–it changes flavors based on the day’s forecast. So when you’re half asleep and drooling white toothpaste foam out of your mouth onto your clean shirt, at least you know which jacket you should bring to cover that toothpaste stain.
Researchers Henry Holtzman and David Carr designed the toothpaste, which mixes different flavors to alert you to the weather outside. More cinnamon means it will be warmer, more mint means colder, and a blue stripe means it will rain. Brilliant, guys, but who wants to have mint and cinnamon toothpaste mixed together? That’s just wrong.
A computer checks the weather, then regulates the amounts of each of the toothpaste components. Every day is a flavor adventure! (Unless you live in Los Angeles.) Both this toothpaste and the “proverbial wallet” the team invented that made headlines a few weeks ago belong to a new category of “super-mechanical” products, which take something mundane and give it ...
November 12 2010
What Does Your City Smell Like? DARPA Wants to Know
How could the government know about a chemical attack before it wreaks havoc? By smelling it.
But the problem is, to detect an abnormal stench, the government first needs to know the city’s normal aroma, to have an idea of its “chemical profile.” To that effect, DARPA just released a solicitation looking for suggestions on how to best build chemical composition maps of major United States cities. Spencer Ackerman over at Wired’s Danger Room t0ok a look at the solicitation and explained what DARPA is looking for:
The data Darpa wants collected will include “chemical, meteorological and topographical data” from at least 10 “local urban sources,” including “residences, gasoline stations, restaurants and dry cleaning stores that have particular patterns of emissions throughout the day.”
Then, subsequent chemical readings from the area could be compared to the “map” to check for abnormal chemicals in the air. Since many chemicals that can be used in a terrorist attacks are normally found around our cities, it’s difficult to just screen for them without having an idea of their baseline levels, explains Wired:
In theory, chemical attacks can be detected before they happen. Even trace amounts of chemicals give off specific signatures that tools like sorbent tube samplers can register. But in order to figure out if dangerous chemicals are stockpiled somewhere or are floating through the air, the government’s going to have to know the baseline level for those chemicals wafting near your trash receptacle.
DARPA is looking for proposals on how best to collect data while spending less than 30 minutes doing it. They also want to collect information on the two-day fluctuations in chemicals, and take readings at different times of the year, says Wired.
Then they’ll adjust for atmospheric and environmental variables like wind speed, humidity and time of day–when, say, the dry cleaners’ is open to spew perchloroethylene vapor into the air–to account for the impact on chemical potency. They’ll use that data to “predict concentrations down to trace gas concentrations of 10 parts per trillion” across a whole city.
I wonder if they could pick up the maple syrup smell in NYC.
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Discoblog: Beware, Bomb-Makers: This Worm Has Your Number
Discoblog: Genetically Engineered Bugs Can Smell Blue Light
Image: Flickr/Save vs Death
November 05 2010
Beware, Bomb-Makers: This Worm Has Your Number
By Rose Eveleth
Bomb squads have long used metal detectors, x-ray machines, and dogs to uncover threats. Without these tools, authorities may not have intercepted some of the thirteen homemade explosives that froze Greece’s outgoing mail earlier this week. But soon they may have a new tool to help find the bad guys and their bombs: microscopic worms.
In a paper published last month, researchers at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization described the effectiveness of Caenorhabditis elegans–a millimeter-long, mud-loving nematode–in detecting chemicals associated with explosives. If they’re right, bomb detection could get cheaper and easier. But not everyone is convinced.
This nematodes isn’t the first organism investigated for its keen sense of smell. Dogs, rats, pigs, cows, insects, bacteria, and even plants have been used to find explosives. So far, nothing has worked as well as the trusty canine snout.
But according to lead researcher Stephen Trowell, a machine that uses his worms could surpass all these in sensitivity. “All signs are that it’s as good as it gets,” he said.
The nematodes smell chemicals like nitroglyceride and cyclohexanone—both found in the air around homemade C4 explosives—through tiny scent organs on the sides of their mouths called amphids. Each amphid has twelve different kinds of receptors that relay signals to the brain.
Trowell thinks he can extract these receptors from the nematode and incorporate them into a portable testing device, removing the organism from the process entirely. To do so, researchers will have to couple the receptors to an electric signal, so their response would be readable by the machine. The specifics of the apparatus are still under wraps; Trowell won’t give any details until a paper describing the mechanics is published.
So should bad guys really be worried? Glen Rains doesn’t think so. “There’s always talk about doing this electronically eventually,” said Rains, a biological and agricultural engineer at the University of Georgia in Athens, who has been working on training wasps to detect everything from explosives to crop disease. But, he said, the mechanization of these odor responses “will be further down the road than some people realize.”
One of the roadblocks Trowell and his team might encounter is that the receptors they extract have to keep working outside of the worm. That’s not always the case, said Jeffrey Tomberlin, an entomologist at Texas A&M in College Station. Tomberlin, who trains flies to detect odors, worries that proteins removed from the worm might stop sniffing all together. By taking the components out, he said, “you could lose the true essence of the response.”
The nematodes’ sense of smell is not only highly sensitive, but also specific—they can’t detect everything. In Trowell’s first study, published in PLoS ONE in early September, they only responded to compounds associated with homemade and commercial explosives, and not high-end military bombs. Still, Trowell said, “many of the things that are available to people with bad intentions, we can detect.”
Despite skepticism from others in his field, Trowell’s lab has found no shortage of interest. The Australian Department of Defense recently gave the lab a grant to build a prototype of their bomb-sniffing machine, and the team filed for a patent on similar technology in January. It remains to be seen, however, if their device will actually work.
This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
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Image: Wikimedia Commons
October 26 2010
What Neuroscience Has to Say About Gap’s Logo Disaster
The abysmal flop of the Gap logo redesign has prompted a flurry of critique from marketing experts, branding consultants, as well as the inner critic in each of us that wants to explain what, exactly, went so wrong.
Now another group is chiming in: neuroscientists. NeuroFocus, one of the leading neuromarketing firms in the country, just released an analysis of why our deep subconscious rejected the Gap logo with such finality. Here are some of their findings:
1. When words overlap with images, as in the unsuccessful Gap logo, our brain tends to bypass the word and focus on the image. So we ignore the “p” when it’s placed over the blue box (for the Gap name, that’s a big fail).
2. We’re hardwired to avoid sharp edges because in nature they represent a threat. The sharp edge of the box cutting into the curved “p” is unappealing for that reason.
3. Being a little funky appeals to the brain. The original Gap typeface was unusual enough to stand out from the crowd. The new one, on the other hand, is boring old Helvetica (which really is taking over the world).
4. The brain loves high contrast. In the original logo, white letters “pop” against a dark blue background. In the new logo, the blue box weakens the black/white contrast.
Cool, huh? I guess… although neuromarketing is a fledgling science–some would even hesitate to call it a science–and graphic designers could have told you the same thing all along (without all that fancy brain equipment).
Point number 1 says image and color are supreme. Number 2 says shape and proximity are key. Number 3 says be unique and number 4 says contrast, contrast, contrast. The Nike, Lacoste, and FedEx logos are all great examples of these rules in action. The importance of color, shape, proportion, simplicity, contrast, and uniqueness are some of the foundational principles of graphic design, and clearly the new Gap logo violated many of them.
For the designers who want it, they now have some neuroscience to back them up. But I’m not sure they ever really needed it.
By Lena Groeger. This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
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Image: Wikimedia Commons
October 04 2010
AAAAIIEEE! Tennis Players’ Grunts May Help Their Game
Those unearthly hows, shrieks, and grunts that burst out of tennis players’ mouths may do more than just fill the silence of tennis stadiums. A new study suggests that a player’s grunt might slow down the response time of her opponent, giving the grunter an advantage.
For the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers asked students to watch videos of a tennis player hitting a ball; some shots were accompanied by a soft grunt, others were performed in silence. For each shot, the student had to indicate which side of the court the ball would land on by hitting a keyboard key.
According to the study, “The results were unequivocal: The presence of an extraneous sound interfered with a participants’ performance, making their responses both slower and less accurate.”
Of course, highly trained, professional tennis players might be less thrown by the noises than college students sitting in a lab; the researchers say the next step is to try some experiments on the court. But the findings do strengthen the case of the anti-grunting brigade:
Grunting tennis players made the news during the 2009 Wimbledon Championships, when tennis officials announced that they were considering fines for serial grunters. Referees can currently award points against players who seem to be deliberately disturbing their opponents, but many players have said that they simply grunt to focus their energy during a swing.
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Image: flickr / alphababy
August 20 2010
“Kids Can Be So Cruel” Science: Squinting Kids Get Fewer Party Invites
Whom would you invite to your birthday party? If you’re a six-year-old, probably not the kid with an eye disorder.
Shown pictures of other children and asked to pick birthday party attendees, six- to eight-year-olds did not care about gender or shirt color with any statistical significance. But they did care if a possible invitee had strabismus–a condition when a child’s eyes don’t line up while focusing, often resulting in crossed eyes or squinting. This heart-breaker brought to you by the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
The photographs included identical twins: children in four pairs of pictures looked the same, except for their digitally altered shirt colors and eyes. Given four chances to pick children with strabismus, 18 of 48 children did not select any child with the disorder. None picked the child with the eye disorder on all four opportunities.
The researchers say the study indicates that parents may want to consider corrective surgery before children with strabismus turn six–apparently the age when kids take a turn for the shallow.
Younger birthday boys and girls appear to care less about what their invitees eyes looked like: Of 31 children between the ages of four and six, the researchers found that 9 children picked kids with strabismus three or four times. Only one meanie didn’t pick any children with an eye disorder.
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Image: flickr / Spojeni
August 17 2010
For the Aging, Four-Eyed Astronaut: Fancy Space Bifocals
One of the requirements for flying in a spaceship used to be near-perfect vision. When NASA relaxed its vision standards (to 20/200 or better uncorrected, correctable to 20/20 each eye for a mission specialist) they in turn created a new requirement–for near-perfect astronaut eyeglasses.
TruFocals (made by Zoom Focus Eyewear, LLC) might improve current astronaut spectacles by allowing space-travelers to focus mid-float on both near and far objects, whether they’re dealing with experiments or cooling loop warning indicators. As Scientific American reports, the glasses are currently undergoing NASA evaluation for space readiness–tests that include burning. The lenses will correct the condition known as presbyopia, in which aging people’s eyes lose focusing ability, making it difficult to see near objects. That’s the condition that causes people with good eyes to pick up reading glasses, and those with glasses to turn to bifocals.
These space glasses aren’t much like your grandma’s bifocals. TruFocals have two lenses for each eye: the outer lens uses the person’s usual prescription and the inner lens (closer to the the eye) is flexible and controllable by a slider on the eyeglasses’ bridge. With a little slide the shape of the inner lens changes, allowing the wearer to adjust their focus. That could be handy in an environment like the International Space Station, where floating astronauts may be trying to focus on things from odd angles.
The round shape is a necessity for the glasses to work best, Stephen Kurtin the glasses’ inventor told Scientific American, not a fashion decision:
“Some people say they’re cool, and some say they’re butt ugly.”
NASA may approve the glasses in time for the next space mission, though, as shown in the target-practice video below, the lenses are already available for planet dwelling four-eyes.
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Image: ZOOM FOCUS EYEWEAR LLC
July 02 2010
How to Build a Car for Blind Drivers: With Vibro-Gloves and Air Puffs
A group of new drivers may never watch where they’re going. They won’t need to: Instead, they’ll listen and feel. The National Federation of the Blind and Virginia Tech are developing a car for the blind, and hope to demonstrate a prototype in January of 2011.
Don’t be fooled: Unlike like the do-it-themselves cars that compete as part of the DARPA Urban Challenge, this car will actually let the blind driver take control and drive, and will require the same quick judgments needed by sighted drivers. The only difference will be how these drivers sense what’s around them.
Instead of looking at the car cutting them off or the pedestrian about to step into traffic, the blind drivers must feel them or hear them. Though the final design is still in the works, the car may communicate an obstacle’s presence by audio instructions, vibrating gloves (called DriveGrip), and puffs of compressed air (called AirPix). AirPix is sort of like a map of the road, a flat board with different air jets corresponding to different obstacles.
This vehicle is the next step in an ongoing project at Virginia Tech. Last summer, mechanical engineering professor Dennis Hong and his team unveiled a buggy that used laser tracking systems, audio commands via headphones, and a vibrating vest to tell blind drivers where to go. Several blind volunteers successfully steered the buggy through an unfamiliar obstacle course (see video below).
Mark Maurer, the president of the National Federation of the Blind, came up with this challenge about a decade ago. Even after this new car’s unveiling next January at the Daytona International Speedway, it may still be a long while before blind drivers take to the road. But, Maurer says, that’s not the point. Instead he wants to show that blindness is a difference rather than an insurmountable impairment. He told The Telegraph:
“We’re exploring areas that have previously been regarded as unexplorable. . . We’re moving away from the theory that blindness ends the capacity of human beings to make contributions to society.”
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Image: iStockphoto
June 21 2010
E-focals: Electric Eyeglasses Are the New Bifocals
Benjamin Franklin would be proud. The tinkerer who loved playing with electricity and allegedly invented the bifocals might have been glad to know that one company has now brought the two things together: PixelOptics has designed a pair of powered specs that can track users’ eyes and automatically adjust the glasses’ focal length, depending on if the wearer needs to see close-up or far-away.
The glasses use liquid crystals, which can change how much they bend light when an electrical current runs through them. A video demonstration of what a wearer might see is available on PixelOptics’ website, and the company hopes that the glasses will be available in the United States before the end of 2010.
Peter Zieman, director of European sales for PixelOptics, said the device uses motion tracking software similar to the iPhone, and told The Telegraph:
“In essence, glasses haven’t changed all that much since they were first invented. The most recent development was transition lenses that tint in sunlight, but even that was 15 years ago…. Our glasses bring modern technology to an old solution.”
Perhaps Zieman doesn’t give other eye-wear inventors enough credit; for example, in 2008 a retired physics professor Josh Silver created a pair of fluid-filled spectacles that could change strength when the amount of liquid inside varied.
Still, as Star Trek fans might agree, electric eyeglasses really are more futuristic.
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Image: flickr / Franklin College
June 07 2010
World Science Festival: Listening to Illusions of Sound
Do you see a hovering white triangle in this picture?
This optical illusion employs “illusory contours”–pieces of an image purposefully arranged to trick your brain into seeing the whole thing. Neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha says that we play similar tricks with our ears: “The brain is basically a pattern-recognition machine. We are desperate to find patterns.”
Bharucha spoke on a seven-person panel last Thursday at “Good Vibrations: The Sound of Science,” a World Science Festival event in New York.
Bharucha asked a crowded auditorium at Hunter College to identify a sound. Shouts of “birds” rang out. One person yelled, “R2D2.” Bharucha followed the clip with a similar sounding song, and then another. After playing a combination of the three, whispers rose from the audience. From disparate bird noises came recognizable speech: “Where were you a year ago?” Some applauded.
To make this aural illusion, Bharucha first looked at a spectrogram of the spoken question. By picking out only three of the most energetic pieces–harmonics–of the speech, he could use a synthesizer to create the three bird-song cues. Like the dark portions of the optical illusion above, these sounds are incomplete pieces of the whole, but important triggers. Looking for a message in these songs–especially when nudged to look for speech–we can find it as the crowd did. “Suddenly, whoa, you hear it,” Bharucha said.
We learn to search for the patterns in our native language even in the womb, Bharucha says. He cites studies showing that eight-day-old infants have a preference for their mother’s language, clearly before they have developed spoken-language skills, and even when that language is spoken by someone other than the child’s mother.
Other patterns emerged in the other panelists’ works. Moderated by WNYC’s John Schaefer, the discussion also included biophysicist Christopher Shera, astrophysicist Mark Whittle, and composer Jacob Kirkegaard. Shera described otoacoustic emissions–when the mechanical workings of our inner ears echo into something we can record and listen to. He records these emissions in humans and animals, including anesthetized tigers. “It’s very useful,” he joked, “that the ear is is not immediately adjacent to the teeth.” Kirkegaard uses tones in his music to incite these emissions, so that our own hearing contributes to his melodies.
Whittle ended the talk with the “sounds” of the Big Bang, a mapping of background radiation from the universe’s creation onto frequencies we can hear. He described the early universe as a pipe organ with pipes 400,000 light years across, and said that if we had actually been there to listen, we wouldn’t have heard anything, since the pitch was too low and the melody would have taken too long to sound. In fact, too long doesn’t mean much, since he says we would have died instantly.
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Image: Wikimedia / Fibonacci
May 27 2010
Genetically Engineered Bugs Can Smell Blue Light
Do I smell a banana? Nope. It’s a blue light I’m smelling.
Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light.
The team, under the guidance of Klemens Störtkuhl at Ruhr University Bochum, is attempting to understand “olfactory coding”–how the brain transforms chemical signals into perceptible smells. Normally, a fly’s olfactory receptor neurons only send an electrical signal to its brain when the fly smells something, but by adding a protein the researchers caused a neuron to fire when the one-millimeter bug was basking in blue light.
The fly brain uses some of its 28 olfactory neurons to detect bad smells, and others for good ones. Protein puppeteers, the researchers could pick which neuron to add the light-sensing protein to. The good-smelling neurons respond to a smorgasbord of fly-friendly scents: like banana, marzipan, and glue (apparently rotting fruit gives off these scents). By attaching the light-sensitive protein to one of these neurons, researchers caused the typically light-fearing insects to crawl straight towards the blue glow.
According to a ScienceDaily article, given their successful mapping of these larvae olfactory neurons, the researchers next hope to make adult fruit flies go bananas.
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Image: flickr / Jason Gulledge
May 26 2010
A Rare Mental Disorder: The Deep Conviction That You Smell Bad
They change their clothes frequently. They shower repeatedly, sometimes using a whole bar of soap in one go. Some even swallow perfume.
They think they smell bad, but they don’t.
Olfactory reference syndrome is a rare psychiatric disorder, but it can lead to isolation, depression, and suicide. It’s also a little-noticed, little-studied syndrome. But now a study to appear in Depression and Anxiety has looked at twenty sufferers and reviewed current literature on the disorder to determine its general characteristics.
Psychiatrists have known about the disorder’s symptoms for over a century, but treatment and diagnosis are difficult, in part because the syndrome doesn’t currently have its own classification in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)–the handbook of mental health professionals. The manual combines the syndrome with other disorders, such as social phobia, delusional disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The new study gives recommendations for updating the next version of the manual, and suggests adding this disorder to an appendix of conditions that need further research.
As reported by HealthDay News, nineteen of the study’s twenty volunteers exhibited at least one compulsive behavior, like repeated self-sniffing or showering. On average, they spent eight hours a day thinking about their smell. Fearing social interactions, forty percent had been housebound for over a week.
Many patients thought the smell came from their mouth, but they were also concerned with their armpits, genitalia, anus, feet, and skin, according to a MedPage Today article.
Katharine Phillips, a coauthor of the study and a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, presented these and other findings on Tuesday at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting. She told Reuters Health:
“I think it’s a very secret and hidden disorder, because these patients tend to be very ashamed of themselves…. I have been so struck by the intense suffering that the patients experience.”
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Image: flickr / mysza831
May 07 2010
Penn State’s Football Stadium: Now 50% Louder!
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