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.

Mad Science Monday, 6/1/2009

Several weeks ago (even before my last post!), I saw this comic, which points out that so-called "mad scientists" are really more like mad engineers; they aren't trying to test anything, they just want to blow stuff up. That got me to start looking for actual mad science. Since then, to my surprise and delight, I've seen quite a bit.

Assuming the world of science continues to be beautifully strange, I'm going to try to bring you news of mad science every Monday. This week, I give you talking mice.

Mad Observation: People in a certain family had "difficulties with articulation and grammar." The people in that family who had those issues all had a certain version of the gene Foxp2. The gene Foxp2 is present in many (all?) mammals, including both humans and mice.

Mad Hypothesis: Perhaps the two mutations present in human copies of that gene but missing in the mouse version are important to human speech. We have the complete genomes of people and mice (and chimps, and rhesus macaques, and a growing number of organisms), and we know that gene is different in humans than it is in other mammals. There's some evidence that gene is important to speech. Is it?

Mad Experiment: Introduce the mutations in the mouse version of Foxp2, and see what happens. If there aren't any significant changes in the mice, the mutations must not be important (at least not alone) for human speech. If something significant occurs (like, say, a slight change in brain development), the gene might really be important to speech.

Mad Quotation: At the beginning of the project, Svante Paabo, one of the lead investigators, said, "We will speak to the mouse." I'm sure he worded it that way on purpose (he never said anything about the mouse speaking back), but, if spoken with the proper flair, it's a great mad scientist quote to set the scene.

They All Laughed, But: The lab really did only expect the mice to have slightly different brain development. Certainly far too many genes are involved in speech for this to have any significant effect, right? Except, when they made the mice, they found more differences than just brain development. Sure, the mutant mice had interesting developments in the part of the brain associated with speech, probably moreso than the researchers expected. But, in addition, there were actual changes in their communication.

When a baby mouse is away from the nest, it emits chirps to let its mom know where it is. The chirps of the mutant mice were significantly different in several characteristics, including pitch and rhythm.

The mice can't speak, of course, but holy crap. This change of two amino acids in one protein had a significant effect on the way the mice communicate.

Mad Caveat: The changes in the mouse vocalizations are actually within the range of normal variation among mice. It's probably an effect of the gene, since the differences were statistically significant between the mutant pups and their non-mutant littermates, but it's possible it's just random chance. Further tests will be necessary to further characterize the effects of Foxp2, but this is an interesting step.

Now to go find more science news sources to follow, to make sure I can keep this up next week. If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/14/2009

Darnit, it took me a week to get back to my shared items from Google Reader again. Here goes...

Science:

• Bacon cures hangovers. Thank you once again, science! Is there anything you can't do?
• Scientists in Australia have apparently found a way to stop the body from attacking (and rejecting) organ transplants. This might be even cooler than the bacon thing.
• I found it utterly unsurprising that chimps have to take their lady friends out to dinner to get laid.
• If you ever find yourself back in time, it would be useful to have this sheet. He promises to fix the H-2-zero typo in the next printing, too.

Technology:

• Slashdot points us to a tutorial on putting together a multitouch "Surface PC" for far less than the $10k Microsoft wants for theirs. I have to find some money to try this...
• My iFriend David comes up with cool ideas on his blog, and then people actually make them. That is cool.
• This almost makes me want a cat.
• It's getting close. Soon something will happen with 3d printers to revolutionize the world. This is a step in that direction.

Entertainment:

• My former coworker Amanda has a new collection of short stories out. Her previous books have been awesome, so I highly recommend this one. Whoot, I just noticed she has Kindle editions now. Very nice.
• Woody Harrelson defended himself after attacking a photographer by claiming that he thought the photographer was a zombie. I blame McCarron.
• Disney reuses dances. I'm not terribly surprised, but at least a little.

The Internets:

• Google has fully integrated search-by-color into image search. Neat!
• InfoChimps is a cool website. Go vote for them.
• Microsoft did something cool. Their live search can now solve algebra equations. So far it looks like it can only handle single-variable equalities, but it's still cool.
• Amazon has almost 800 free mp3s available from their library. It's a clever trick. I'm probably going to buy at least one album based on a very good sample I downloaded.

Politics:

• This has been all over the place in the almost-week since I originally shared it, but, in case you haven't seen it, the ad by the National Organization for Marriage about big bad scary gay marriage is unintentionally hilarious.
• Gov. Paterson of New York is going to introduce a same-sex marriage bill. It's about time, New York. Iowa beat you? Seriously??

Awesome:

• PG&E is going to get power beamed down from solar panels in space. I don't know how efficient or real it is, but the idea is awesome. And, if it works, it could even be useful.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/7/2009

Holy crap, I posted shared items from Google Reader just yesterday, and here I am posting again! Woohoo!

Atheism:

• Every year, more and more people call themselves non-religious. Don't worry, we don't bite.

Green:

• I can't decide what I think about the GM/Segway PUMA.

Politics and Government:

• Yesterday I noted that Sweden's parliament had legalized gay marriage, and I pined for that sort of thing happening in America. Today, that sort of thing happened in America. Kudos, Vermont.
• Dammit, Obama administration. Stop it. Just stop it.

The Internets:

• iTunes went live with their "tiered pricing" today, which turned out to be more of a price increase than a price restructuring. Big surprise there.

Science (and Food):

• Want a better boiled egg? Try science.

Wow, that's it. These are really short when I do them daily. I should try this more often.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.

Shared Google Reader Items, 4/6/2009

Last time I posted my shared items from Google Reader, I said that maybe I'd get on a daily schedule. Oops.

Science:

• There may be a link between autism and vinyl floors. This is only an initial finding, but at least people switching from PVC floors won't doom their kids (and other kids) to die of measles.
• However, the correlation might not mean anything. Take, for example, this strong correlation between US highway fatalities and lemon imports from Mexico.
• What can happen when poorly characterized correlations are misidentified as causes: As of last week, Jenny McCarthy and other anti-vaxxers have killed 150 people.
• Looking to cut unhealthy foods out of your diet? It may be a bad idea to go to restaurants with healthy options, then. A new study found that having salad as an option for a side made people more likely to order a side of fries. Or for the more evil spin on that: If any of you own or plan to some day open a restaurant, take note. Put something cheap-but-healthy in the "extras" areas of your menus, and people are more likely to order one of those extras. I wonder if it'd also apply to other extras. Maybe we'll start seeing things that are actually useful in supermarket checkouts, to trick us into buying more candy bars.
• Want to boost your willpower? Lifehacker (and a Case Western study) says to brush your teeth with the wrong hand. Apparently this is also supposed to help you avoid Alzheimer's.
• Bad Astronomy included an announcement of a cool contest today: create a stick-figure cartoon that can be used to educate people about a false argument. Cool.
• I love this video of the Sun's surface. I mean, think about it for a minute. That's the surface of the Sun. When you watch that video, you're seeing the structure of that surface. People 100 years ago didn't even know if the surface of the Sun had structure, and now we can watch videos of it. Neat.

The Internets:

• PageZipper is a neat bookmarklet for stitching together long pages. It's particularly useful for The Big Picture. Now to learn user script coding, so I can make it auto-run for The Big Picture.
• I find it funny but unsurprising how many versions of the story about internet surfing increasing productivity showed up in various Google Reader shared lists.
• Worried that you might have the Conficker virus? Check this page to find out. I love how simple and clever that site is.
• If you use Gmail, I highly recommend turning on Search Autocomplete in Gmail Labs. I can't think of a downside to it, and the upside is that it can teach you some neat search tricks. For example, type "has" after you turn it on.
• I shared a story about Google being in late-stage talks to acquire Twitter, but it now has an update saying it's not true. Darn, I thought that could be interesting.
• The Associated Press is going to try to stop web aggregators from using their stories. In other words, the AP doesn't want anybody to read their stories. I'm going to try to avoid doing so going forward. Pssst, AP: try to find a model that works, rather than trying to sue the model that people want out of existence.
• Lifehacker pointed me to a cool pair of bookmarklets to tag things to read later and then pull one off your list. A friend pointed me to one that does the same sorta thing, but allows you to read the stuff you put on your list from other devices (or, I just noticed, by pulling them into an aggregator as an RSS feed). I need to search around each to find which I actually recommend, but for the moment Instapaper wins just because Lifehacker's recommendation got smashed into oblivion by click-throughs, and this is the sorta thing that might continue to tax a server.

Geek Culture:

• Thinkgeek made an awesome Tauntaun sleeping bag as an April Fools' prank. Now demand is so high that they might actually make it. Please please please please please. Also, please sell it in adult sizes.
• Two geeks in New Jersey made fools out of a lot of people with a simple UFO hoax. Strong work.

Politics and Government:

• Sweden's Parliament voted last Wednesday to allow same-sex marriage (226 to 22). That's like Congress voting to allow it. That's awesome, I wish we could get to that point.
• But hey, at least Iowa's Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in Iowa. It's a start. According to 538, it might even survive.
• The US government will launch Data.gov in late May to provide a clearing house of government data. Very, very cool.
• I love Obama. "I've said before that one of the great strengths of the United States is, although as I mentioned we have a very large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Green:

• Lifehacker had a video about a great trick to light things like workshops in sunny places: 2-liter bottles with water and a bit of bleach. Brilliant.
• Off-shore windpower might exceed US electricity demand. Holy crap. Let's get that figured out.

Technology:

• T-Mobile is going to launch an Android-powered tablet. I hope it's going to be actual touchscreen, like a G1 or iPhone, not stylus-based... but it'll be interesting to see how they solve screen-scratching potential in something as large as a laptop if that's the case.

Awesome:

• Sure, I could have put this in the Science block, but it really needed its own tag: a robot made a scientific discovery all by itself. To be clear, this wasn't a group of scientists deciding what the robot should investigate and using the device to test their hypothesis. The robot was given a pool of data, and software to analyze that data in order to make its own hypothesis. It then designed experiments to test that hypothesis, carried them out, and analyzed the results. That is unbelievably awesome. I, for one, welcome our new robot scientist overlords.

As always, leave your comments on these or anything else below.