Mad Science Monday, 2/21/2011

Sometime around the time it came out in 1996, I saw Project Grizzly, the documentary about Canadian inventor and awesomely crazy person Troy Hurtubise. Troy doesn't have a whole lot of scientific training, so he didn't immediately come to mind when I started Mad Science Monday... but I think he might really be a mad scientist (or at least a mad engineer with thoughts of mad science). I can't remember the exact quote, but he has a monologue in the doc about how his suit will let NASA study hibernating bears, which they can't do because the bears might wake up and rip the researchers to shreds. That argument made all of the madness he expresses in the rest of the doc, trying to build his bear-proof suit, seem worthwhile.

Today's research isn't as mad as Troy, but it enhances his madness (and has some mad applications of its own), so it fits the theme.

Mad Reference! "Hibernation in Black Bears: Independence of Metabolic Suppression from Body Temperature." Øivind Tøien, John Blake, Dale M. Edgar, Dennis A. Grahn, H. Craig Heller, and Brian M. Barnes. Science 18 February 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6019 pp. 906-909 (via National Geographic). That might not sound all that mad, but the National Geographic title made it more sensational: "Hibernating Bears Keep Weirdly Warm." Yes, that sounds deliciously mad indeed!

Mad Background and Observations! When most things hibernate, their bodies get cold, sometimes really cold. For example, when frogs hibernate in cold climates, parts of their bodies freeze solid under the snow. Even hibernating mammals allow their body temperatures to drop several degrees during their torpor.

Mad Hypothesis! Bears hibernate, so presumably they get chilly like everything else that hibernates, right?

Mad Experiment! This was the part that made me think of Troy. Surely to test this, the scientist had to suit up in a Mark V Anti-Bear Super Suit and get lowered by a crane into a hibernating bear's cave, ready to quickly read a well-placed thermometer and bolt, right?

It turns out it's much simpler than that. The researchers rescued four "nuisance" bears, which presumably had been stealing picnic baskets and/or making bad movies, and were slated to be euthanized. They rigged the bears up with various sensors to record their vital statistics, and placed them in artificial dens to hibernate. And that's all. I'm beginning to think maybe Troy was making up the whole "NASA would love this thing" explanation for his suit (or I guess it's possible nobody had thought to do things this way, since they didn't know until now how cool bears got while hibernating).

They All Laughed, But! This is one of the (many) cases where disproving the hypothesis is what makes things interesting. While hibernating, these black bears held their temperature between 30 °C and 36 °C (86 °F to 97 °F). To put that in perspective, normal human body temperature is 37 °C (99 °F, or, if you insist on too many sig figs, 98.6 °F). If you snuggled up against a hibernating black bear, it wouldn't feel particularly chilly. That's a big difference from the frogcicles hibernating near their dens.

Mad Engineering Applications! Troy wasn't completely wrong that NASA would likely be interested in better understanding hibernation. Hibernation for long space voyages is a staple of science fiction, because it's a good way to avoid many of the problems of long space flight. However, significantly cooling (or even freezing) tissues presents other challenges. If we can figure out how the black bears do it, we might not have to protect the astronauts' bodies from freezer burn (although we would, of course, have to spend a lot of energy keeping them warm in the coldness of space). To the terrestrial mad engineer, this could be even more useful. Cooling your clone armies for storage could be very expensive, particularly if your lair is hidden inside a volcano. Using the black bear hibernation techniques, you might be able to simply fatten them up for storage, and then let them hibernate at non-freezing temperatures.

Have you seen any other useful research for clone army construction and storage? Let me know in the comments.

Mad Science Monday, 2/14/2011

Happy Valentine's Day! I almost didn't get a post up today, but then I saw the perfect article to fit the holiday. Without further ado, I give you:

Mad Reference! "Extreme Aggression in Male Squid Induced by a β-MSP-like Pheromone." Hanlon RT, et al. Current Biology (online) February 10, 2011 (via National Geographic). Pheremones that induce aggression in a phallic animal during mating? Sounds like a Valentine's Day Mad Science Monday to me!

Mad Background and Observations! When longfin squid (Loligo pealeii) get together to breed, the females lay egg sacs. The males rush in and touch these sacs, and go into full-on pon farr rage.

Mad Hypothesis! A protein in the eggs acts as a pheremone, sending the males into this rage. Even without females present, this pheremone would set male longfin squid into gladiator mode.

Mad Experiment! The experiments are laid out really well in the apparently non-embeddable video at the top of the National Geographic article. They basically performed four trials (plus probably more trials with other proteins before they settled on the main candidate, but those aren't covered in this particular video and paper):

1. Trial with no stimulus (to establish baseline behavior of a group of male squid in their tank)
2. Trial with natural eggs (to establish what aggression looks like)
3. Trial with flask streaked with recombinant Loligo β-microseminoprotein (β-MSP, their candidate pheremone)
4. Trial with flask with no Loligo β-MSP (to make sure the pheremone matters in trial 3)

They All Laughed, But! β-MSP appears to be the thing that's necessary to piss off squid. The flask had eggs inside (to get the males to touch it), and I would've liked to see a trial without the eggs, but it'd be hard to isolate that it was the chemical doing the angering, not, say, poking them with a pheremone-tipped stick. The controls also established pretty well that β-MSP was the factor causing the aggression, although a sealed flask of eggs did produce a little more aggression than the stimulus-free control.

Mad Engineering Applications! This quote from the NatGeo article is what made me consider this research for Mad Science Monday: 

"We don't know of anything like this that exists in humans," Hanlon added. "But when we researched microseminoproteins in the literature, we found that they occur in mammal semen and, more importantly, that nobody has looked at what functional effect they have.

"We hope that our discovery stimulates research in that direction."

So they found a protein that turns male squid into gladiators, and a similar protein in humans... and they're hoping their research stimulates research. Clearly these guys are working on breeding their minion army.

Have any suggestions for Mad Science Monday (particularly articles published with full text in free online journals)? I'd love to read them in the comments!

Mad Science Monday, 2/7/2011

Ok, I really like writing these things. I think I'll try to do this weekly again.

Mad Reference: Josh Bongard. "Morphological change in machines accelerates the evolution of robust behavior." Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. January 25, 2011 vol. 108 no. 4 1234-1239. (abstract)

A lot of my random reads come from "cool" via Recommendations, a Google Reader list of things that other people have shared. As far as I can tell, this one mostly made that list because the title was cool, but the research is pretty neat.

Mad Background: Evolutionary algorithms are just about my very favoritest of things. Basically, computer scientists, inspired by the simplicity and elegance of biological evolution, have started using reproduction (of code fragments), mutation (of the specifics of the code), and selection (of the code fragments that are most successful at whatever task the programmers give them) to evolve programs. Such evolutionary algorithms often find solutions that the programmer might not have thought of, and do so faster than would occur if the programmer directly designed the solution. In other words, evolutionary algorithms flip the bird to intelligent design "theory" (which is only a theory in the colloquial sense of "guess;" there's no science there to actually make it a scientific theory).

Evolutionary algorithms are often used to design robots, both real and simulated (as shown in the video above).

Mad Observations: Real biological systems don't start out even crawling; they go through various body plans through their lifetime, and through the many lifetimes that take them from one species to another. For example, life has, multiple times, gone from a snakelike slithering form to legged walking form, both over many generations and within the lifetime of single organisms.

Mad Hypothesis: A robot that starts in a snakelike ("anguilliform") body plan before progressing to a four-legged walker can figure out how to walk faster and better than a robot that starts out up on four legs.

Mad Experiment: This experiment was mostly virtual. The experimenter set up digital "robots," some of which started out with legs, and some of which started out down on their belly. He then allowed them to search for a control mechanism for their four limbs that would get them from one corner of the simulation to the other. He also ran trials in which the belly-walkers gradually stood up on their legs (by slowly increasing the angle between the legs and the body), and then ran trials where robots pre-loaded with the slithering programs started out up on their legs. He even built Lego robots similar to his digital creatures, which just makes it all cooler.

They All Laughed, But: It worked. Robots that started out up on their legs took several hours to figure out how to walk, while the slitherers (and their progeny) figured it out in seconds. Even the Lego bots, which were slowly changed from slitherers to walkers, were able to figure out how to walk in the real world really fast, much faster than their always-walking cousins.

Mad Engineering Applications: When you're building your robot death army, don't start them out as bipedal killing machines. Sure, give them arms and a desire to rip things to shreds, but start out forcing them to use those arms to slither, then walk, and then finally they can stand erect and use those arms for their intended purpose.

This would probably also be useful for less destruction-focused robots, but that wouldn't be nearly as Mad.

Mad Science Monday, 1/31/2011

It's been a long time since I've written one of these, but this story is too mad sciencey to pass up.

Mad Reference: "Can Our DNA Electromagnetically 'Teleport' Itself? One Researcher Thinks So" by Clay Dillow at Popular Science, about work by Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier. Uh-oh, the work hasn't been published yet, and apparently first appeared in New Scientist. Going to the press first is a bad sign. Going to New Scientist first (the magazine that reported that SETI had found concrete evidence of alien intelligence, causing SETI scientists to reply "We did what now?") just might mean even you know what you're peddling is nonsense.

Mad Background: Quantum teleportation is a real phenomenon, and it's really interesting to read about. But it has nothing to do with what happened here, so I'm not going to go into detail about it. If you're interested, I recommend the Wikipedia article I linked as a good primer.

The more interesting (and relevant) background is that of Luc Montagnier, the scientists whose lab is reporting this finding. I was first introduced to Dr. Montagnier through the excellent 1993 HBO movie And the Band Played On. And the Band Played On tells the story of the discovery and characterization of AIDS and HIV, and the political nonsense that slowed down the progress of those discoveries. I changed my major to biology shortly after first seeing that movie, in part inspired by it. In the movie, Luc Montagnier (played by Patrick Bauchau) is one of the good guys, fighting against the egomaniacal American biologist Dr. Robert Gallo (played by Alan Alda). The film shows how Gallo pretty clearly (in the movie, not in reality) stole a sample of HIV from Montagnier's lab, and used the sample to fake results showing that he had discovered HIV.

However, around the same time the movie first aired on HBO, a group looking into those allegations published their report. They found that a sample sent by Montagnier's lab to Gallo's had been accidentally contaminated with the sample, and then Gallo legitimately used that sample in his studies. Evidently, Montagnier's lab still has issues with contamination.

Mad Observation: DNA is complicated. People understand very well how it gets copied in cells, but maybe they're wrong. Also, quantum teleportation is really cool (honestly, that's the best set of observations I can come up with to explain what Montagnier did).

Mad Hypothesis: Maybe DNA undergoes quantum teleportation in cells! We have no reason to think this, but let's devise an experiment to test it anyway!

Mad Experiment: Montagnier's lab put two test tubes, one containing a known DNA sequence and the other believed to contain pure water, in a straight-up mad scientist contraption meant to "mute the earth’s natural electromagnetic field to keep it from muddying the results," according to the Popular Science article. They then subjected these tubes to a weak electromagnetic field, because, hey, why not? After several hours, they performed PCR on the pure water tube to see if it contained any DNA.

They All Laughed, But: Holy crap, the tube of pure water totally contained DNA! It must be that quantum stuff! We're geniuses!

We're Still Laughing: From every report I've read, Montagnier's lab didn't do the control experiment, in which both test tubes contained "pure" water. Chances are very good they'd still get the same result.

PCR amplifies any trace of your target DNA. Modern PCR can amplify as little as a single strand of the target DNA. Add to that the fact that DNA is very stable, and thus easy to contaminate your lab with.

I often cook with jalapeños. After slicing them up, I'm careful to wash my hands. But sometimes, even after washing my hands, I touch my eye, and it starts to burn. Were I in Dr. Montagnier's lab, I guess I'd assume those muddying effects from Earth's natural magnetic field were causing bits of the jalapeños on the counter to quantum teleport into my eyes. Since I don't work in Dr. Montagnier's lab, I just assume there was a trace contaminant (jalapeños) left on my fingers, and that got into my eye.

Mad Engineering Applications: Since this research is nonsense, there aren't any. However, were it correct,  there would be all kinds of applications. We'd probably have to stop working on all of the antiviral agents that block them from entering cells; surely viruses could just quantum teleport their DNA into our cells, skipping all the bother of physically entering cells. I'm sure other people could also find uses for this research.

The last time I wrote one of these, the mad scientist I wrote about had a clear claim to that title, but only tongue-in-cheek. Sadly, I think this week the scientist in question may really be mad.

Today in Geek, 20091221

Today we reaffirm that we are living in the future. Hurray!

Politics

Mexico City Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage. Mexico City just legalized abortion two and a half years ago, but now they've jumped ahead 30 years to leapfrog over most of the United States. At least DC managed to pass it a few days before. Supporters of the Mexico City bill were chanting "Yes, we could!" That makes me smile a lot.

Entertainment

Focus on the Action to Avoid Headaches During 3D Movies. When you go see Avatar (if you haven't already), keep this in mind. Your brain really doesn't like stuff being 3D but out-of-focus, and trying to get around that gives bad headaches. Trust me on this one; I spent too much time on my second viewing looking at stuff in the background, and it played havoc on my head and stomach. I may have to go see it in non-3D so I can look for those extra little details (for example, that it takes place over several months leading up to August 24, 2154; Wikipedia says that's the anniversary of the patenting of the motion picture camera, I'm guessing that isn't a coincidence).

Astronomy

Video: The Asteroid That Will Almost Hit Earth. NASA produced a video of Apophis passing Earth on April 13, 2029. It'll pass just 18,300 miles above the planet's surface. Assuming we pass peak oil and civilization has fallen by then, I plan to remember that date to use it to secure a following in my post-apocalyptic cult; an asteroid passing that close should be interesting in the sky.

Medicine

Color-Shifting Contact Lenses Alert Diabetics to Glucose Levels. Soon diabetics will have a heads-up display of sorts, allowing them to see when they need a shot of insulin or a candy bar. Today diabetics, tomorrow killing machines sent back from the future!

Science

Groovy Teeth Suggest Dinosaur was Venomous. The story itself is cool, but it's also sort of an example of a (probably intentional) "crash blossom," a word I just learned this morning meaning "a headline that can be misconstrued." The New York Times claims that's a buzzword of 2009, but I think it's possible only the New York Times staff have heard that term.

Mad Science

Our of the Blue, DARPA Seeks Means to Manipulate Lightning. They all laughed when DARPA put giant red balloons all over the US, but DARPA's going to show them! It's going to show them all!! Muahahahaha!

Did I miss any geekery? Let me know in the comments.

Today in Geek, 12/15/2009

I have been terrible about blogging. Wow. Let's just put this shameful period behind us, shall we?

To do so, I'm going to start a new tradition by revising an old tradition. The title pretty much explains it. Here are the geekly stories that piqued my interest today:

Politics

D.C. Council Approves Gay Marriage. There's a good chance D.C.'s overlords in the US Congress will overturn this law, but the Washington, D.C., City Council passed a measure today to legalize same-sex marriage in the District. Strong work, D.C.

Medicine

Locked-in man controls speech synthesizer with thought. Locked-in syndrome is the condition where a person is completely paralyzed (unable to move any muscle and thus unable to communicate), but completely aware of their surroundings. I know I'd heard of it before they featured it on House, so I think at least two medical dramas showed how terrifying it would be. That might change soon, now that a locked-in man has controlled a speech synthesizer with thought. That's just unbelievably awesome. Such technology will also come in handy in the construction of my mecha, so that's good news, too.

Mad Science

Swiss Geologist On Trial For Causing Earthquakes. An experimental geothermal energy project triggered earthquakes in Switzerland, so now the guy in charge is being tried. Sure, they're spinning it more as an industrial responsibility kind of thing, but it sounds to me like they may have caught a real mad scientist (it was an experiment to see if this process would work for energy production, so he wasn't just a mad engineer).

Tech Tips

Create Instant Navigation Shortcuts from Android's Home Screen. Someone at Lifehacker noticed that we can create one-touch shortcuts for turn-by-turn navigation on our Android phones now. For example, I have a button on my home screen to navigate from wherever I am to my house. Neat.

Entertainment

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Hits Blu-Ray April 6. Dammmmmit. I don't think I'll be able to hold out until they put out the extended editions months later (my guess: just before The Hobbit comes out in December 2011). How many times are they going to convince me to buy these movies???

That's it for today. Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.

Mad Science Monday, 9/7/2009

I'm under the weather today, so I'm going to keep this week short. This week's article also isn't "mad science," per se, but simply "science" that makes me mad. It also happens to be about drug studies, so I thought it was fitting to give it a look while I'm sick.

What makes me mad isn't so much the study, but that it gets worse every time it's passed through another filter on the web. Today's "Placebos Are Getting More Effective" headline on Slashdot drove me over the edge.

Placebos are not getting more effective. Several factors are combining to make the placebo effect larger compared to the "real" drug in the same studies, but it isn't that something magical is happening with placebos.

First, the studies are getting better. For example, imagine if you were studying a drug in the 1930s (in a world where 1930s researchers knew to do placebo-controlled studies), and this drug was supposed to decrease the incidence of lung cancer. You would create two groups, a placebo control group and an experimental group, making sure to balance for factors you expected to affect the results--age, gender, etc. By chance you might end up with more smokers in your control group than in your experimental group (because why bother controlling for that, if you don't think it has anything to do with cancer?). After your study, you'd likely find that your experimental group had a lower incidence of lung cancer, and thus that your placebo had very little affect compared to your drug. Of course, if you did that same study today, you'd be able to balance your groups for all kinds of known factors, including genetic risks for lung cancer, not just for the smoking bit. More and more, any improvement in your experimental group vs the random improvement of your placebo-controlled group would decrease, which you could choose to see as your placebo magically getting stronger. That's not what it is, though; you're just doing better science. See this great article over at Mind Hacks for more on this side of the effect.

Second, we're getting better at making placebos. We know strange things about human psychology, such as the wondrous bits in the graphic about half-way down the page on Wired's version of this news. We can make the placebo green in an anti-anxiety study, for example, because green pills work better for anxiety medicine (or we can at least make the placebo and the real drug the same color). That doesn't mean something magical is happening, either; it means we know how to harness psychology to boost the effectiveness of the pills, even if the medicine doesn't actually do anything beyond what the placebo does.

Third, the medicines being tested are, very often, just marginal improvements (or potential improvements) on existing drugs. We don't see as much of an effect because there isn't much of an effect to see.

So, if you see the headline I'm expecting this to morph into, something about placebos proving that medicine is unnecessary or some other similar nonsense, be sure to take it with a grain of salt. The pharmaceutical industry is still making improvements to our health, it's just doing so with better scientific practices.

Mad Science Monday, 8/31/2009

I live in Austin, TX. Not only do we have confirmed record-setting zombie hordes, but we also have a populace ready to warn one another of outbreaks of zombiism. So of course I'm interested in knowing whether we (or anyone else) will be able to survive an actual bout with zombies. Thankfully, a group of certified mad scientists have figured this out for us.

Mad Reference: Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad, and Robert J. Smith?. (2009) "When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress. (full text available free online [PDF])

Mad Background: First off, that isn't a typo in the name of the lead researcher. His last name is "Smith?" with a question mark. In addition, from his homepage at the University of Ottawa (emphasis added), "People kept asking if I'll be getting US citizenship next and I kept laughing at that. Somewhat hysterically, it must be said." Your last name is "Smith?", and you talk about your hysterical laughter on your homepage? You are an inspiration for all would-be mad scientists, Dr. Smith?!

As far as the science, the background you need is that mathematical models are used in fields like epidemiology to help predict the spread of diseases under various conditions, and thus to plan out the best way to combat those diseases. For example, mathematical models can help predict what will happen if only a limited number of vaccine doses are available for a disease, or what will happen if people infected with a disease are quarantined. But can they predict the outcome of a hypothetical disease that follows a pattern very different from known real-world diseases?

Mad Observations: Especially in modern movies and video games, zombiism spreads like a disease. If it spreads like a disease, it should be possible to model it the same way we model diseases.

Mad Hypothesis: If a zombie outbreak occurs, mankind can survive. At least, that's what they're pretending to test. What they're really testing is whether mathematical models can be put together for a "disease" as strange as zombiism, in particular the strain of zombiism in which the dead can become "infected" with the disease and come back to terrorize the living.

Mad Experiment: The researchers built five mathematical models for zombie outbreaks: a basic model, a model with an incubation period, a model in which the unaffected attempt to quarantine the infected, a model in which a treatment for zombiism is available, and a model in which humanity fights back. They then used each model to predict the equilibrium; in other words, to predict whether humanity would survive. Each model had some assumptions in common:

• The particular form of zombiism being modeled is the "slow zombie" style. "Fast zombies," like the things in 28 Days Later, were not studied. I'd be interested to see what would change in such a model, but, alas, that will require further research.
• As I mentioned in the Mad Hypothesis section, the strain of zombiism being modeled also infects the dead (including dead zombies), allowing the dead to join the population of zombies. The whole point was to model something far from known diseases to see how the models held up, so it made sense to include the truly undead in the model.

They All Laughed, But: We are all screwed. Unless we get infrastructure in place to quarantine zombies and zombies-to-be, or are able to quickly develop a cure when an outbreak occurs, or are able to successfully coordinate zombie-eradication attacks, zombies eventually wipe us all out. The eradication model was the only one in which we eventually won, and it seems likely to me that this would require military involvement. If you've ever seen a zombie movie, you know that involving the military is a terrible, terrible idea, so our best hope is also the one that, the "literature" shows us, is empirically shown to lead to a society in which the living envy the dead.

The treatment model was also unique in that, at equilibrium, a large zombie population survived in addition to a small human population. Note that this human population would remain at a certain size, but would not always contain the same individuals; you might become a zombie for a while, then get treated, then die, then rise as a zombie, then get treated again and rejoin the human population. This wouldn't necessarily be a fun existence, although it would definitely be interesting. This model is the only one in which pet zombies, like in Fido and Shaun of the Dead, are even slightly possible. And it looks far more likely that zombies would have pet humans (for a few minutes, before eating their brains and/or infecting them).

The quarantine model seems like our best bet, but, alas, assuming we don't have a massive infrastructure already in place for such quarantine, even then zombies eventually kill us all off.

Mad Engineering Applications: As it turns out, Dr. Smith?'s page indicates that a mad engineer has already expressed interest in this research, in that someone wrote to Dr. Smith? asking for help engineering a zombiism virus. Presumably that evil genius plans to control the treatment of his strain of zombiism, thus ensuring that he is (at least occasionally) a member of the small surviving human population. In case that nutjob is able to design such a virus, I guess the rest of us need to be ready to work with the military to make sure his plan isn't successful.

Of course, the other point of all of this was that the models seemed to work. The real application is to, essentially, not be afraid to try to model things that don't follow traditional disease models. The paper mentions the examples of allegiance to political parties or diseases with dormant infection, but there are definitely other things that can be modeled much like diseases.

It's hard to pick a favorite part of all of this, but, if you get a chance, I strongly recommend at least reading the last two pages of the PDF (the references). I couldn't stop laughing (maniacally, of course), seeing things like "Capcom, Shinji Mikami (creator), 1996-2007 Resident Evil" listed alongside "van den Driessche, P., Watmough, J. (2002) Reproduction numbers and sub-threshold endemic equilibria for compartmental models of disease transmission. Math. Biosci. 180, 29-48."

If you'd like to continue to study zombie survival tips, I recommend my friend Jon's weekly Zombie Friday! You can probably guess on which day you should check his site for said column, unless, of course, you're already safe from zombies.

Mad Science Monday, 8/24/2009

Today I'm taking part in a blog hop to wish a happy birthday to UnderstandBlue. I met UnderstandBlue through my sister, Stampin Libby. We took part in the first ever "This Is What a Tweetup Is, Libby" tweetup at Phil's Icehouse (warning: that site makes annoying noises).

So, given that I met UnderstandBlue through Twitter, and I'm taking part in a blog hop, it seemed like a good day to look into the science behind how crap spreads around the internets.

Mad Reference: David Liben-Nowell and Jon Kleinberg. (2008) "Tracing information flow on a global scale using Internet chain-letter data." PNAS 105(12): 4633-4638. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0708471105 (full text available free online)

Mad Background: In 1976, Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene as a way to describe the cultural equivalent of a gene. A meme is a a replicator, like a gene; it carries an idea, but must be copied to be transmitted. While genes copy through DNA replication, memes copy by being repeated. They still seem to evolve by natural selection, though; as they're copied, sometimes they change a little, and the ones that "work" better (from the meme's perspective, at least) spread.

Mad observations: The word "meme" is, itself, a meme, and has gotten a lot of use lately, specifically in the form of Internet memes. It seems entirely random, though, which things take off on the internet, and which fizzle. But science has a knack for finding patterns and explanations in the seemingly random. Maybe models developed for the spread of diseases will work.

Mad hypothesis: Perhaps internet memes spread "with a rapid, epidemic-style fan-out." If internet chain letters spread like disease epidemics, most people should spread it to several people, most of whom spread it to several people, etc.

Mad experiment: The researchers used an online petition that spread mainly in 2002-2003. Each recipient of this petition was asked to add their name to the end of the petition, and then forward it on to their friends. They collected 637 copies of the petition from mailing-list archives, each representing a distinct chain of participants, totaling 18,119 distinct signatories. They repeated this procedure for another petition that circulated in 1995. They used the multiple copies of each petition to construct a tree diagram, tracing the routes that the letter traveled. This was complicated by "noise," such as rearrangements of the list of names, deletions, insertions, mutations (changing a name on the list to a political figure, for example), and even hybridization when a user apparently received two copies of the petition and merged them together (interestingly, these are all things that happen with genes). Both petitions resulted in similar structures. They then followed all of this up by computationally modeling different patterns of forwarding (including modelling different patterns of the information being posted in a form that they could evaluate, ie taking into account the fact that they couldn't see everything), and seeing which pattern matched the observed trees (if any).

They all laughed, but: The hypothesis that these internet memes would spread in a similar manner to disease epidemics was (at least for these two examples) disproven just from the initial tree constructions. The trees were much longer than they would be for disease epidemics (the average distance between a given individual and the "root" of the tree was much longer than for diseases), and more than 90% of the nodes had exactly one child (ie, most people only spread the meme to one person).

The modeling experiments showed that two parameters had to be added to the disease model in order to get results that matched the petitions. First, not all recipients respond in the same amount of time. Some respond right away, and some take months to respond. This would be similar to a disease with a very widely varying incubation period (the memes don't match real diseases because real diseases don't have such widely varying incubations). Second, some recipients would send the meme back to either the person they got it from or the people the original person sent it to. This also doesn't happen in quite the same way for real diseases, and thus doesn't match known disease spreading patterns.

Of course, this was just a model. It would take more research to determine if the model was correct.

Mad follow-up: Researchers in Spain did the additional research. They started a meme through the IBM company newsletter, and were able to more exactly track its spread, and they found that the spread matched the model's prediction. Moreover, given a small set of initial data on the spread, they were able to predict how far and fast the information would spread (by calculating the parameters used by the model).

Mad engineering applications: Combined with the Spanish research, this is getting close to a way to construct messages to spread far and wide (such as, for example, your Manifesto on Why Everyone Should Bow to Your Will). It definitely isn't there yet; they can predict how far it'll spread given initial information about its spread, but they can't predict it before it's released into the wild. But, given that ability, more experiments are now possible; they don't have to wait until the meme has spread to see how effective it is, they only have to know initial information, so now they can construct slight variants of memes and see what makes different ones spread. Perhaps soon we will know what to include in your Manifesto to get it out there.

BTW, if you want to see the rest of the UnderstandBlue Birthday Blog Hop, start here.

Mad Science Monday, 8/10/2009

Sorry that I missed last week's post. To make it up to you, I've found a paper just dripping with mad science (and bad puns!). Enjoy!

Mad Observations: Many organisms (ranging from apples to mammals) use chemicals called pheromones to communicate. As you'll see if you follow that link to Wikipedia, these signals are used to communicate many different things, from "follow me" to "look out!" The "look out!" class, better known as alarm signals, had been well-established in mammals. And humans are mammals...

Mad Reference: Mujica-Parodi LR, Strey HH, Frederick B, Savoy R, Cox D, et al. (2009) "Chemosensory Cues to Conspecific Emotional Stress Activate Amygdala in

Humans." PLoS ONE 4(7): e6415. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006415 (full text available online)

Mad Hypothesis: Humans, like other animals, have alarm pheremones. Those pheremones invoke an alarm response in humans (for example, the known responses associated with fear). In other words, humans produce something that makes other humans scared when they smell it (or at least makes other humans behave in ways that scared humans behave).

Mad Experiment: The researchers collected sweat from two groups: first-time tandem skydivers (the experimental group), and people exercising (the control group). They then had people smell this sweat to see if they could tell the difference (ie, they asked people which sample smelled worse), to rule out a noticeable difference in smells (the subjects couldn't tell the difference). They then had subjects breathe in this sweat (one sample or the other) while undergoing an fMRI (the test where they look at what part of your brain lights up in response to different stimuli). They also had the subjects identify whether faces looked frightened or not (we'll get into why they did that below).

They All Laughed, But: Actually, it turns out nobody was laughing. The most interesting thing I learned by reading this paper is that there had already been six studies published about a human alarm substance transmitted via sweat. In two, subjects were able to identify whether the sweat came from someone watching a scary movie or a "benign" film. Another study found that subjects were better able to complete a word-association task when they smelled scary-movie sweat (again vs "benign film" sweat). The remaining three found that stress sweat caused subjects to interpret expressions as more fearful, to be less likely to judge a face as positive, and to be more likely to be startled by "auditory stimuli" (that last one, which I like to think of as the "boo!" study, makes me laugh somewhat maniacally). If you're interested, all of those references are in the paper (linked above); I don't want to repeat them all here.

However, this new study did find two new things:

1. The previous studies had used scary movies or preparation for difficult exams to provoke the stress in the experimental groups. By using first-time skydivers, this one provides us a different variety of stress, broadening the range of where we can expect to find this signal.
2. The previous studies had looked at whether subjects could identify sweat from stressed people, or what subjects' psychological responses were to the fear sweat. This study showed a physical response to the fear sweat, specifically activation of the amygdala (the part of the brain associated with emotion), just as expected.

This new study also threw in an "is this face scared?" test, but that was just to confirm that those results agreed with the previous results (they did).

Mad Engineering Applications: This area of research positively screams to be implemented by mad engineers. You might not be able to make a fear gun, per se, but it just might be possible to make a fear bomb. And, combined with other research (including a piece in an upcoming Mad Science Monday), a good mad engineer could even use this to make his or her henchmen more effective (I mean, sure, your henchmen should already be afraid of you, but with this you could make sure they're working scared even when you aren't around). There simply have to be at least a few DARPA projects associated with this.

Do you have any other ideas for how to apply this? Let me know in the comments.

Mad Science Monday, 7/27/2009

If you've been reading this blog, you might have found yourself wondering, "What exactly makes science mad?" Even if you haven't, I have quite a bit recently. I've been reading papers, searching for things that are suitably mad, and nothing seems to be up to snuff. So, both to let you know my process and to work it out a bit for myself, I decided this week I'd present:

Meta Mad Science Monday: Defining Madness

There's one definite requirement for a paper to make the cut for Mad Science Monday: it has to clearly be science, not engineering. The researchers have to be testing a hypothesis using controlled experiments, not piloting new technology.

Beyond that stipulation, there are a lot of signs that a study might be mad. Here are some of them.

1) Use of Mad Engineering as a Research Tool

When I saw a study involving implanting lasers in rat's brains, I knew there was a strong possibility that I was reading about mad science. Frikkin' laser beams are often mad engineering, and implanting them in rat's brains (and using viruses to alter those rat brains) cements that definition. Robots also often fit this rule. If the researchers are using mad engineering, there's a good chance they're doing mad science.

2) Mergers of Man and Beast

A lot of biological research involves human genes, or cognates of human genes, being tested in non-human models. But when researchers implant human genes into mice to test something unquestionably human—speech, in this case—there's a good chance we're looking at mad science. That particular paper also has another defining characteristic of mad science, which is why it launched this project.

3) Mad Quotations from the Researchers

If I see a story about some research in which they say, for example, "We will speak to the mouse," I know there's a good chance I'm looking at mad science. If you can imagine lightning flashing as the researcher shouts the quote, it's probably something I need to write about.

4) Quantum Entanglement

Any paper about quantum entanglement is mad science. Some of them are too thick to boil down into something fun to write about, but they're still mad science. That shit is just weird.

5) Research Involving Fear, Pain, Etc.

If the subjects of the research have to be scared, or pain has to be inflicted upon them, or otherwise the research sounds like it's on questionable moral standing when I first hear about it (before, inevitably, reading about the very humane protocols used in the research), it's probably mad science. This even works if the subjects aren't human, but the research has potential human applications. That borders on the next requirement.

6) Research with Clear Mad Engineering Applications

Clear applications usually aren't present in my favorite research, but if they're mad applications, they can make me take notice. If the research is aimed at, say, finding the formula for taking over the world, that's probably mad science. Research on weather control, giant weapons, doomsday devices, etc would also qualify as mad science, but I have yet to find anything good in this arena.

Those are the criteria I use right now. Right now I have a Rule 5 and a potential Rule 1 on deck, but they both look like weak applications of those rules. If you notice anything else fitting these criteria, or notice a criterion I missed, let me know in the comments.

Mad Science Monday, 7/20/2009

Are you a mad engineer looking to take over the world (or even a small section of it)? Do you also have a powerful, supervillainous ability to extend a simple example into a general principle? If so, this research is for you.

Mad Observations: In widely varying areas, animals follow leaders. This behavior ranges from ants seeking food, through birds and butterflies migrating long distances, to human politics. In all of these cases, the followers have a strong tendency (and motivation) to keep following the established leaders; if they didn't, particularly in the non-human examples, things would quickly be very bad for them.

Mad Reference: Note: This is a not-yet-published letter, not a peer-reviewed paper. It's basically raw presentation of research, which is what arxiv.org is for. "Effective leadership in competition." Hai-Tao Zhang, Ning Wang, Michael Z. Q. Chen, Tao Zhou, and Changsong Zhou. Full text available from arxiv.org.

Mad Hypothesis: As the authors state it, "is it possible for the minority later-coming leaders to defeat the dominating majority ones and how?" In other words, the hypothesis they're attempting to disprove is "It is impossible for minority later-coming leaders to defeat the majority leaders." If they manage to disprove that, they'll also have the how covered.

Mad Experiment: The researchers used a "generic model of collective behavior, the Vicsek model." As far as I can find, this is a widely used model for motion. Specifically, in this model individual motions are aligned to the average of their neighbors. In other words, if you want to think of this research in a more global context than just motion, you have to make the assumption that the individuals you're targeting will tend to follow along with whatever the people near them are doing. However, "near them" could mean "politically near them," for example, so it's not necessarily a bad assumption. Remember that translation of "near them" when pondering the rest of the findings, though.

In this model, the researchers introduced "leaders," which were simply individuals that did not simply align themselves to their neighbors. The followers obeyed the "follow your neighbor" rule, but the leaders were set to either move right (the established leaders) or left (the newcomer leaders).

After establishing the model with the right-leaders + followers, the researchers introduced late-coming left-leaders in various patterns and with various distributions. They measured how well these patterns of left-leaders were able to overcome the movement direction established by right-leaders.

They All Laughed, But: The researchers found that the late-comers were able to change the direction of the group, but that their ability to do so could be predicted based on two factors: the spatial distribution of the leaders (how far apart groups of leaders were) and the clumping of the leaders (how close together the members of a group of leaders were). Higher values for either of those factors increased the chance that the left-leaders could overtake control of the group. And, of course, it helped if the right-leaders had lower values for those factors.

Mad Engineering Applications: What these researchers found is that two factors help in taking over control of a group: wide distribution of the individuals working to change the group, but tight clumping of change-introducing individuals. In other words, it's good to spread out your leaders, but give them allies to work with locally.

It's easy to accidentally keep too much of the geographic part of this model, though. For example, if you translate the findings to politics, you should translate all of the model to politics. If you want to spread an idea throughout a group, you need people idealogically clumped to help each other influence others who are close to them idealogically, but it helps to also have such groups spread out to different places on the idealogical scale.

I'd be interesting to see other ways mad engineers could find to adapt this model to other scenarios. If you think of any, let me know in the comments.

Have a Horrible Day!

Today is the one-year anniversary of the release of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. If you have not yet seen it, watch it now. If you have seen it and love it like I do, show them some love in return.

Remember: It's not about making money, it's about taking money.

Mad Science Monday, 7/13/2009

Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit.

You might think from that intro that I'm writing about one of the more widely talked about science stories from this week. I may get to that one eventually, but the actual source of my frustration is the realization this morning that I had gotten the wrong paper for this week's entry. Sure, the one I got is mad, but I didn't get the one by the same group that involves rats with frikkin' laser beams attached to their heads. I'm going to try to give as much of an overview of all of that group's research as I can, but I can't for the life of me figure out how they made the stuff work in the laser rat story.

Update: I got the other paper in the middle of writing this, but I'm still focusing mostly on the newer paper; the one with the actual laser beams appears to use many of the same techniques, and I haven't had as much time to digest it, so I'll stick to the one I'm mostly grokking.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First you're going to need some...

Mad Observations: A lot of observations are necessary to culminate in this level of mad science. There's too much to cover it completely, but let's see what I can get.

First, there's an archaebacterium, Natronomonas pharaonis, that makes a protein that pumps ions across the cell's membrane in response to light (specifically certain wavelengths of orange light). This pump is called the Natronomonas pharaonis halorhodopsin chloride pump, or NpHR. This pump has been adapted to be expressed in mammalian cells.

Next, there's the known mechanism of epileptic seizures, namely that the'rey caused by cascades of electrical potentials; basically, one cell has more positive charge inside than outside, and that causes it to induce the next cell to switch to the same condition, etc down a line.

Mad Reference: "Optogenetic control of epileptiform activity." Jan Tønnesen, Andreas T. Sørensen, Karl Deisseroth, Cecilia Lundberg, and Merab Kokaia. PNAS, published online before print July 6, 2009.

Mad Hypothesis: This paper even included a direct reference to the hypothesis they were testing: "Therefore, we tested a hypothesis that epileptiform activity can be optically controlled by selective expression of NpHR in principal cells." In other words, they thought screwing with the potential differences across membranes (by pumping chloride ions into those cells) would stop the epileptic cascade, and they figured they could induce that change with light by putting those pumps into the right cells. They also tested whether putting in the pumps (but not inducing them with light) caused any changes in the behavior of brain cells, and whether turning on the pumps caused any other problems (like sucking up too many chloride ions, stopping other things that need them from functioning properly).

Just to make sure that's clear, what they were testing is whether shining a laser beam inside a brain would work to stop seizures. Obviously.

Mad Experiment: It just keeps getting better. To test whether shining a laser on brains might be useful for treating epilepsy, they infected rats with a virus. Ok, this sounds all kinds of mad scientist, but it's actually a fairly well-established technique. This virus, technically a lentivirus, was modified to incorporate the gene for NpHR into cells that it infected. That gene was put under control of the calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IIa (CaMKIIa) promoter, meaning that, no matter what cells the gene might get inserted into, the protein would only be expressed in certain cells--namely, brain cells. They also put the enhanced yellow fluorescent protein (EYFP) in the same virus, also under control of that promoter. That let them cut up some of the rat brains (and other rat bits) and confirm that the technique had worked to get the protein expressed in the right place, and not in the wrong places (because it'd be bad for light-sensitive proteins to be expressed on, say, the skin, where they'd be doing their thing all the time, not just in response to a frikkin' laser beam).

Most of the research, unfortunately, was done in cultured rat brain cells, using that same basic technique as I described above. But they showed that they could get the protein expressed in rat brains. That's important, since they'd already done other research with implanting frikkin' laser beams in rat brains, to stop Parkinson's tremors.

Yes, that's a photo of a rat having light beamed into its brain through a fiber optic cable attached to a laser. We truly live in amazing times.

So anyway, they got their protein into cells (both in rat brains and in cultured cells), and then they tested the cultured cells using established epilepsy tests. They did these tests on unaltered cells, altered cells without light, and altered cells with the correct wavelength of light shining on them.

They All Laughed, But: It worked. When they shined lasers on the altered cells, their idea worked; the seizures (well, technically simulated seizures, since it was just a plate full of cells) stopped. It looks like this would actually work. But the whole time I was reading it, I was thinking, "Um, so. You need a frikkin' laser beam implanted in your brain." But then I found out I was missing half the story, since they'd already implanted frikkin' laser beams in rat brains. So this whole thing would totally work, and all it takes is:

• infection by a virus to put an archaebacterial protein into your brain,
• glowing proteins engineered from jellyfish thrown in to make sure it worked,
• surgery to implant a laser (or lasers) in your head, and
• potentially a fiber optic system following you around (although I guess we're bigger than rats, so maybe the lasers could be worn directly).

I say this all jokingly, but apparently that's way better than the current system of curing intense seizures, namely cutting the hell out of the affected area, hoping you don't get too much that's useful.

Mad engineers: This one's all yours now. We scientists have shown it would work. Implementing this is all you.

Mad Science Monday Coming Soon

I'm trying to get another paper before writing this up. If I don't get the paper in time, I'll cover what I can from the one paper and the abstract of the other. In either case, I'll be back in a few hours with this week's Mad Science Monday. It's a crazy one, so stay tuned...

Mad Science Monday, 7/6/2009

It's Monday again (already!), so that means it's time for some mad science. It might not be immediately obvious how this week's article fits the theme, but I have one mad science stereotype stuck in my head now about this one, so hopefully I can get you there, too.

Mad Observations: Despite portrayals in media, scientists are human beings. Sometimes decisions made by human beings are clouded by emotion.

Mad Reference: "Large-Scale Assessment of the Effect of Popularity on the Reliability of Research." Thomas Pfeiffer, Robert Hoffman. PLoS ONE 4(6); e5996. 2009 June 24.

Mad Hypothesis: Research is not impacted by the trendiness of the subject of that research. Yes, I know; this is one of those hypotheses that is pretty much obviously untrue once you say it, but it's something nobody had said scientifically (and followed up with experimentation), and thus it was tacitly accepted as truth.

Mad Experiment: This is what's known as a meta-analysis paper. The researchers didn't perform experiments, per se. Instead, they analyzed over 60,000 published statements about 30,000 unique interactions between yeast proteins. This data set was drawn from papers focusing on specific interactions; each paper from which the 60,000 statements were drawn focuses on one or a few interactions, investigated using small-scale, focused experiments. They evaluated the "popularity" of the proteins involved in these interactions by how many times those proteins were mentioned (ie, more mentions = more popular).

They then compared that first data set to a second data set, gathered using high-throughput, mostly automated techniques. These high-throughput techniques don't focus on one or a few interactions, but instead test pretty much everything simultaneously. In other words, these techniques don't focus on anything in particular, so they don't "care" whether the interactions they're looking at are "popular" or "interesting."

They All Laughed, But: The reason this research seems mad sciency to me is that I keep imagining these researchers giving their speech about the popular researchers laughing at them. Well, who's laughing now?? It turns out, when you compare the results from the specific data with the results from the high-throughput data, popular proteins seem to get by on their looks. Specifically, interactions involving unpopular proteins tend to agree in the data sets more often than interactions involving popular proteins. Popular proteins have a higher proportion of likely incorrect interactions published than do unpopular proteins.

When I first read the summary of the research, I thought this might be an example of damned lies; I figured it wasn't necessarily that the unpopular protein research was correct more often, it was just that nobody bothered disproving statements about those losers. But the methodology here seems sound; it looks like the popular proteins really are getting treated differently. This points out a possible large flaw in current research, and a need to put more safeguards in place to prevent this stuff from getting through. Strong work, mad scientists. You have successfully exposed the flaws in the work of your enemies.

Mad Science Monday, 6/29/2009

I'm a little late today (which is to say, I didn't write this over the weekend and schedule it to release at a seemingly random time during the day), so, to make up for it, I'm offering a twofer; one experiment that tested two hypotheses. They even threw in a little mad engineering to spice things up even more.

I first mentioned this story back in April, but it deserves a closer look. I really think it's going to end up being the biggest science story of the year.

Mad Observations: With things like the Human Genome Project and the other genome projects that preceded and followed it, we are gathering reams of data, more than we'll be able to fully investigate any time soon. At least, more than we can investigate by hand. But hey, computers are pretty advanced these days...

Mad Reference: "The automation of science." King RD, Rowland J, Oliver SG, Young M, Aubrey W, Byrne E, Liakata M, Markham M, Pir P, Soldatova LN, Sparkes A, Whelan KE, Clare A. Science. 2009 Apr 3; 324(5923): 85-9. I also recommend the excellent write-up on the research in Wired.

Mad Hypotheses: The first hypothesis was chosen by the researchers (who were bordering a bit on mad engineering, so the hypothesis is pretty close to "Let's see if we can do this"). It's along the lines of "It is possible for a properly programmed robot to investigate data, make a hypothesis, and test that hypothesis."

But then we get into the first experiment, and get the cooler hypothesis. The researchers programmed a robot, named Adam, to perform science. Without help, just looking at the data from the Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast) genome project and other genetic databases (plus a model of S. cerevisiae metabolism), Adam hypothesized that certain genes in the yeast genome coded for an enzyme that had a certain function in metabolism. These genes were there in the data, but had not yet been characterized. So Adam set out to characterize those genes, hypothesizing that they would produce an enzyme that would catalyze a certain reaction in yeast metabolism.

Mad Experiment: Unfortunately, I don't have full access to the article, and both the abstract and the Wired article are sketchy on the details here. I'll lay out a couple possibilities, though, for people interested in how a researcher (including a robotic researcher) might figure something like this out.

Put simply (but close enough to give the idea), Adam knew that yeast used an enzyme to turn compound A into compound B, and another to turn B into C, and yet another to turn C into D, etc. He just didn't know for sure what those enzymes were. Let's say he was hypothesizing that the enzyme he was looking at turns A into B.

One way to figure out if he's right would be to create a yeast cell that lacked the genes he was looking at (likely one at a time plus all three); the yeast cell would be exactly like a normal yeast cell, just missing the one gene he was looking at. If he fed normal yeast cells A, they'd grow and produce B, C, D, etc. If he fed his modified yeast cells A, if he was right, they wouldn't produce B, C, D, etc. He could then feed his modified cells B, and they'd then be able to produce C, D, etc. If any step of that didn't work as expected, his hypothesis would be false.

The other possibility would be that he directly characterized the genes, creating copies of the genes he was looking at in a test tube, supplying them with the components necessary to translate those genes into proteins, and seeing what happened when he put A into those test tubes. That sort of research is less reliable, though (if it doesn't work, it could be because you're missing some factor necessary to make the protein, not because the proteins are important in what you're looking at), so I think it's more likely that he used the first approach.

All this time, all the researchers did was supplied him with the chemicals he needed, and emptied out wastes. He did all the rest, designing and performing over a thousand new experiments a day.

They all laughed, but: Since I'm writing about it here, you've probably already figured out that it worked. He was able to identify that three previously uncharacterized genes in the yeast genome code for an enzyme that catalyzes a certain step in yeast metabolism.

The particular discovery made by Adam wasn't particularly Earth-shattering; he found something that would have otherwise have been assumed to be true, but he verified it. The next step is the cool part. Robots like Adam can now dig through the genomes that we've sequenced, making similar hypotheses and performing similar experiments. Now that we know that they work, the interesting part comes when they fail to verify what they're looking at. On top of verifying and adding to the body of science, they would then find something for us to look at more closely.

Mad Engineering Applications: Since this all started with a dose of mad engineering—specifically, making robots to analyze data, make hypotheses, perform experiments, and analyze their results—there isn't much left in this particular area for mad engineers to do. For a while now, this one's pure mad science. Hopefully they'll make us some more robots capable of performing other experiments, but, once they give us our army, it's scientists that will utilize that army. And hopefully more scientists (mad or not) will come up with more ways to apply this research, potentially dramatically increasing the rate of increase of the sum of human knowledge. "What we know" already increases dramatically every year, as does the rate of discovery of new information (so if it doubled last year, it's likely to more than double this year). If robot science catches on, the rate of increase is likely to go way, way up.

Have any ideas for what tasks we should set our army of robot scientists on? Let me know in the comments.

Mad Science Monday, 6/22/2009

Boo!

Are you scared? I hope so. Apparently that will help you grasp the broad details of Mad Science Monday #3!

Mad Observations: Studies had shown that emotion (particularly fear) makes people see better, but the details of this sensitization were not investigated.

Mad Reference: "Emotion Improves and Impairs Early Vision." Bocanegra and Zeelenberg. Psychological Science Volume 20 Issue 6, Pages 707-713 (5 May 2009).

Mad Hypothesis: The emotional benefit to vision is limited in scope; some things will be easier to make out while in a state of enhanced emotion, other things will be harder to make out.

Mad Experiment: I had high hopes going into this one that the experiment might be truly mad, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it might have been. The researchers briefly showed people pictures of "fearful" faces and "neutral" faces, and then showed those people other images for the people to evaluate. This methodology relies on our mirror neurons causing us to feel a little bit of the fear we observe being experienced by a fellow human, without requiring that the test subjects actually get scared themselves. Again, I'm very disappointed; this was so close to really being mad.

They all laughed, but: The researchers found that the "scared" group had higher sensitivity to the orientation of "low-spatial-frequency stimuli" (ie, figuring out whether thick stripes were vertical or slightly tilted), but lower sensitivity to the orientation of "high-spatial-frequency stimuli" (figuring out whether thin stripes were vertical or slightly tilted).

The team's interpretation for this makes sense. When we're scared, we can notice details about coarse-grained features (things like movement of large objects), but noticing the exact texture of those large objects, for example, or the color of their eyes... that's less important.

Mad Engineering Applications: I could see a mad engineer using this to create some sort of invisibility-to-people-who-are-afraid device, although it'd probably only "work" in a TV movie vaguely referencing this research.

If you have any other ideas for mad engineering applications, let me know in the comments.

Mad Science Monday, 6/15/2009

It's Monday, and scientists are still studying strange things. Today (probably not for the last time) I bring you a paper on quantum entanglement, what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance."

Mad Background: Quantum entanglement involves creation of two particles with linked quantum states. It's all very complicated (I don't understand it completely, and the explanation of it depends on what turns out to be the correct explanation of quantum behavior as a whole). The "spooky" part about all of this is that it appears that information can be transmitted instantaneously between two entangled particles, regardless of distance, which defies the speed-of-light barrier.

The other important piece of background for this is the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment. One of the hard-to-grok concepts implied by quantum mechanics is that a system exists with all possible states of the system until that system is "observed" (by a human or by other particles interacting with that system); this is called quantum superposition. Schrödinger devised an experiment in which a cat is placed in a shielded box with a "diabolical mechanism" that poisons the cat under certain quantum conditions. Until the box is opened, if superposition is correct, the cat is both alive and dead.

Mad Reference:* "Entangled mechanical oscillators." Jost, Home, Amini, Hanneke, Ozeri, Langer, Bollinger, Leibried, & Wineland. Nature 459, 683-685 (4 June 2009).

Mad Observation: Researchers have created entangled particles, such as photons and individual atoms. The way this paper words the observation that led to their experiments is what makes this science mad:

Hallmarks of quantum mechanics include superposition and entanglement. In the context of large complex systems, these features should lead to situations as envisaged in the "Schrödinger’s cat" thought experiment (where the cat exists in a superposition of alive and dead states entangled with a radioactive nucleus). Such situations are not observed in nature.

In other words, things equivalent to Schrödinger's thought experiment should happen. Why don't we see any of that quantum strangeness in the natural world? What stops us from setting up a Schrödinger's cat experiment?

Mad Hypothesis: According to the authors, there are two possible explanations for why we can't have alive-dead cats: technical and physical. It could be that we haven't been able to isolate things sufficiently to see this strangeness (technical), or there could be some undiscovered mechanism that "prevents the formation of macroscopic entangled states" (physical). With that in mind, these researchers decided to test the hypothesis that something stops systems with more degrees of freedom than single particles have from becoming entangled (ie, they sought to set up a pair of more complicated entangled systems).

Mad Experiment: The lead author on the paper has a couple very helpful videos over at his portion of the National Institute of Standards and Technology page. Basically, a pair of interacting atoms can form a mechanical oscillator. If you could make two of these pairs, and entangle one atom in each, the oscillators would be entangled if nothing stops them from becoming entangled.

They All Laughed, But: They succeeded in setting this up, thus moving us one step closer to macroscopic entanglement. This should eventually make mad engineers very happy.

Mad Engineering Applications: There are several possibilities envisioned for quantum entanglement, but the idea that fascinates me the most is something I first read about in the science fiction books of Orson Scott Card (who, more and more, I hate to recommend, but dammit his Ender's Game books are good; check them out of a library or buy them used, so he doesn't get anything for it). In Ender's Game, Card explained that the military communicated over the long distances needed for space combat using systems of entangled particles; when the sender changed something, it was immediately experienced by the receiver's half of the entangled pair, thus transmitting the distance instantaneously. I assumed that was just science fiction science when I first read it, but it might actually be possible. That might not seem very mad engineery, but if you set your sights high enough for even a multi-planet empire (let alone multiple star systems), you need faster-than-light communication to keep your subjects in line. If you don't hear about uprisings until after they occur (possibly even years after they occur), you'd have to trust your underlings to take care of them, and that hardly seems like a winning proposition.

Oh, and quantum entanglement would also allow for faster computers and more secure communications. Those aren't entirely mad, though, unless of course you make those faster computers self-aware.

That's it for this week. Next week it looks likely that I'll either be discussing brains or branes. Stay tuned to find out which!

* I almost called this "Mad Props," but couldn't bring myself to do that. Back to where you were.

Mad Science Monday, 6/8/2009

Mad Hypothesis: If I put off Mad Science Monday, and then get sick, people will accept the lack of a real Mad Science Monday, as if the sickness is the reason I never got around to writing it.

Mad Experiment: Do so.

I'll be back next week. I'll try to get full-text access to a fairly insane but possibly awesome article to make up for this.