Desuetude

Every year around 400 people die from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in the US, often resulting from cars left running in closed garages.  Now, for much the same reason, carbon monoxide poisoning is a suspect in a rash of pilot blackouts and other incidents involving the $377-million, radar-evading F-22 Raptor — including a fatal crash in November [2010].  Raptor pilots had been reporting memory loss and disorientation during flight, pointing to a shortage of breathable air inside the cockpit.  In July, the Air Force narrowed its focus to the F-22′s On-Board Oxygen-Generation System, or “OBOGS,” a filter that removes nitrogen from thin, high-altitude air.  Oddly, no other airplanes fitted with similar, even identical, oxygen systems are having problems.  Noting that most of the blackouts happened in Alaska, as did November’s fatal crash, Air Force sleuths took a hard look at procedures at Alaska’s Elmendorf Air Force Base.  To keep out of the Alaska cold, airmen at Elmendorf routinely start up their F-22s’ engines while the jets are still parked inside sealed hangars.  In essence, Raptors are like cars dangerously left running in closed garages.  Investigators suspect exhaust gases are trapped in the building and subsequently sucked back into the engines where they enter the bleed air intakes that supply the OBOGS.  Fix?  Open garage (or hangar) doors when an engine is running inside.  [The same goes for all of us.]  But wait…

...Not so fast.  The article above was published July 2011.  By December 2011, the Air Force changed position on what happened.  It seems Captain Jeffrey Haney caused the crash that cost him his life.  The then 170-strong Raptor force was grounded for 4 months in May 2011 following more than a dozen reports of blackouts and disorientation by pilots, possibly due to oxygen shortages.  When no one could find a cause, the Air Force ordered the F-22s back flying — only to briefly sideline them in October following yet another complaint by an out-of-breath pilot.  Haney’s problem had started when a system that channels air from the engines began leaking, initiating an automatic safeguard that shut down the OBOGS.  Haney tried to turn on his emergency oxygen, contained in a bottle wedged beside the ejection seat.  (When the OBOGS shuts down, shouldn’t oxygen flow access be automatically facilitated?)  Apparently, while fumbling with the small green ring that a pilot must pull, Haney didn’t notice that his aircraft had rolled and was now pointing towards the ground.  Three seconds before impact, Haney apparently realised the problem and tried to pull up — too late.  While the Air Force blames the accident on pilot error, they also praised Haney as “one of the top pilots in the squadron.”  The Air Force has paid F-22-maker Lockheed Martin $24 million to, among other things, figure out the Raptor’s oxygen problem and fix it.  (So far, no luck.)  In the meantime, Lockheed has finished the 196th and final F-22 after 14 years of production.  If you can’t breathe while flying yours, well, that’s your fault.

A Thomas Cook flight with 223 passengers aboard narrowly averted disaster after a pilot miscalculated the aircraft’s weight by 17 tons.  The Airbus A321 was flying from Manchester in the UK to Heraklion in Crete on 29 April.  The incident was revealed recently in an accident report, which stated that the pilot forgot to account for the fuel when calculating the plane’s weight for take-off.  The weight of the plane dictates the speed required to become sufficiently airborne; too little speed could have caused pilots to lose control of the aircraft.  Luckily, the captain realised something was wrong and compensated before the plane ran off the runway.  According to the report there have been “a significant number of reported incidents and several accidents resulting from errors in take-off performance calculations around the world in recent years.”  [Something isn’t adding up here.  Do pilots use calculators?  Shouldn’t an adequate computer app have noticed that no fuel weight was being added in?]

In 2009, roughly 1 in 4 (24.8%) of American households had zero or negative net worth, up from 18.6% in 2007, and 37.1% of households had net worth of less than $12,000, up from 30.0% in 2007.  Wealth is always more unequally distributed than income.  And it isn’t even true that all of those households with zero or negative wealth are what we would call poor.  It’s possible to have no net assets while having a good income, even a high income.  All you need is debts higher than your assets — something that will almost certainly be true of anyone with student debt and fresh out of college for example.  Fresh out of grad school you might well have $100,000 or $200,000 of debt; out of medical school you might possibly even carry $500,000.  None of us are actually going to weep all that hard for you though, not you with that associates job at a Wall Street law firm on $100,000 or more; not a newly qualified doctor on hundreds of thousands a year.  Certainly not all those with negative net household value are in a promising situation: there are an awful lot of people who are “properly” poor in the way that we all usually understand it.  But if you’ve no debts and have $10 in your pocket, you have more wealth than 25% of Americans.  More than 25% of Americans collectively have, that is.  [Why is a medical degree or a law degree not considered an asset?]

The Secret Service was the USA’s first domestic intelligence agency, started by the Treasury to investigate those kinds of crimes that Treasury would be interested in — such as counterfeiting.  Over time, the agency accumulated many and various tasks, but most responsibilities eventually transferred to new agencies as they formed.  FBI, IRS, ATF and others took over areas originally the responsibility of Secret Service.  This ended with them having a grab bag of roles, though most related to either counterfeiting or protecting members of the executive branch.  The counterfeiting role, however, sometimes extends into fraud or computer hacking because, while the Secret Service is charged with investigating counterfeiting, they don’t care about knockoff Rolex watches or Gucci bags.  They specifically care about counterfeiting US currency or US treasuries.  This is close enough to bring them in on a number of major financial crimes — especially involving computers.  (After all, if money is represented via computer bits, altering those bits to create more money is essentially counterfeiting, hence a Secret Service role.  On the other hand STEALING money via a computer is an FBI matter.)  This helps explain one of the more infamous cases involving the Secret Service in modern times: the raid on Steve Jackson Games (SJG).  SJG is a role-playing-game developer — then, they made card games and pen-and-paper role-playing games, where players took on roles not of wizards and barbarians (as in Dungeons & Dragons) but secret agents, aliens, agents of the Illuminati, and — crucially — computer hackers.  SJG was working on a supplement to their GURPS role-playing system called GURPS Cyberpunk, with the aid of Loyd Blankenship, a bona fide hacker, former member of the Legion of Doom, involved with publishing Phrack magazine, and so forth.  All this involvement apparently led a confused Secret Service to raid SJG in 1990 and sieze all their computers, files, and documentation.  A subsequent lawsuit was won by SJG wherein the judge reprimanded the Secret Service, made them pay $50,000 in damages, and found no basis for suspecting SJG of wrongdoing.  Oops.  The Secret Service raided a game company because they mistook a sci-fi role-playing game for real life.  Since 1 March 2003, the Secret Service is part of the US Department of Homeland Security rather than Treasury.

Say you have a little country of your own.  Your treasury issues bonds.  A bond is like a very ritualised loan.  You sell bonds with the promise to, after a set amount of time, buy them back for more than what you sold them for.  Say you sell a bond for $100, with the promise to buy it back in a year for $110.  The difference between how much you promise to buy the bond back for and how much you are selling it for, expressed as a percentage, is called interest, and the date on which you promise to buy it back is called the maturity.  Who buys bonds?  Anybody with money.  Maybe private citizens in your country, maybe your central bank (that’s how you create money in your economy in the first place), or maybe private citizens or other concerns in other countries.  Point is, you offer bonds for sale; people buy them.  Thus you get money in your treasury.  People will only agree to buy your treasury’s bonds if they think there’s a good chance your treasury will buy them back when it promises to.  If there’s reason to doubt your treasury’s willingness or ability to buy the bonds back, people who buy them will demand a higher interest rate to justify the higher risk.  An impossibly high rate makes it effectively impossible for you to sell bonds, so you can’t fund your government’s activities.  When a government activity you can no longer fund is redeeming previously issued bonds, you have a sovereign debt crisis.  When it’s really bad, it becomes a sovereign default situation.  Then one of two things can happen.  Sovereign debt restructuring is rearranging the terms to reduce the debt burden.  A guarantor, on the other hand, is somebody that injects capital into the treasury to cover bond repayments.  Having a guarantor is good, because it raises market confidence in your ability and willingness to buy back new bonds, meaning you can get money flowing through your treasury again, which is how you climb out of a debt crisis.  Otherwise, you can just not pay — only don’t expect to borrow more money anytime soon.

Organ “harvesting” is (oddly) the subject of a lot of jokes around the internet.  The photograph on the right was apparently derived from the XKCD cartoon shown on the left.

The Israeli government is facing an unusual backlash from major US Jewish organisations after launching an advertising campaign essentially urging Israeli expats not to marry clueless American Jews nor raise their children in the US.  The first ad shows a young Israeli woman wincing after her boyfriend mistakes candles and music marking Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s memorial day, for a romantic night in.  The words “They will always remain Israelis.  Their partners won’t always understand what that means.  Help them return to Israel!” are read by a somber narrator and scrolled across the screen.  The second ad strikes at an even more sensitive fear — disappointing your parents.  It shows a little girl sitting on her parent’s lap during a video chat with her grandparents in Israel.  The girl speaks good Hebrew, but when her grandmother asks what holiday it is the girl shouts “Christmas” in English despite the Hanukkah menorah in the background.  The words “They will always remain Israelis.  Their children won’t.  Help them return to Israel!” are again read by a somber narrator and scrolled across the screen.  The Jewish Federations of North America sent a letter of protest to the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption calling the campaign’s “messages that American Jews do not understand Israel deeply insulting.”  [It’s the intentional sense of exclusivity being imparted by Israel that bothers me — institutionalised racism.]

Vietnam’s prime minister says more than 42,000 people have been killed by bombs, mines and ordnance left from the Vietnam War, and more continue to die 36 years after the war ended.  Nguyen Tan Dung told a mine action donors’ conference Monday that more than 62,000 others have been wounded by accidental explosions of weapons from the war.  US Ambassador David Shear told the conference that the United States has provided $62 million to help Vietnam deal with “this painful legacy.”  The US Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund says more than 350,000 tons of land mines and explosives remain scattered across the country.

Look at them — a perfect couple (at least at that point in time).  Fate had other plans.  The girl is none other than Aung San Suu Kyi, heroine of Myanmar, with her husband, Dr Michael Aris, and her eldest son, Alexander.  Michael learnt he had terminal cancer in England, but Suu was under house arrest in Myanmar, so he immediately applied for a visa so as to say goodbye in person.  When his application was rejected, he reapplied over 30 more times as his strength dwindled.  A number of people (including the Pope and President Clinton) wrote letters of appeal, but in vain.  A military official told Suu she could go see him but she would never be allowed in the country again.  She stayed where she was.  She really wanted to help her country and I guess for any hero there are unpleasant decisions that must be made.  If someone is doing what they want, is the determination of whether it is selfish or selfless based only on externalities?  Is it luck of the draw that really makes heroes?  Furthermore, a “good story” may not make the subject a good leader further down the road.  The decision of what’s best for Burma (a rich and diverse culture) should be made dispassionately, not as a reward for martyrdom.

There is a crucial gap in knowledge between what goes on at the smallest levels of genetics (the double helix of DNA and base pairs) and the largest levels (the way DNA is gathered up into the 23 chromosomes that contain much of the human genome).  The intermediate level, on the order of thousands or millions of base pairs, has remained murky.  As the genome is very closely wound, base pairs in one end can be close to others at another end in ways that are not obvious merely by knowing the sequence of base pairs.  Borrowing from work begun in the 1990s, Harvard Fellow Erez Lieberman Aiden and others have been able to figure out which base pairs wind up next to one another.  From there, they can begin to reconstruct the genome in 3 dimensions.  The configuration of genetic information within any given cell may be arranged in essence like a newspaper.  All the information is contained inside, but certain headlines have been chosen for the proverbial front page.  So a liver cell’s genome would have made the most important and relevant information the most accessible, whereas a cell in the cornea would be folded differently.  Through their research over the past few years, Aiden and his colleagues have discovered that at the level of a megabase (1,000,000 base pairs) the human genome has wrapped itself into a structure known as a fractal globule.  Although the spherical globule might look a mess, he discovered by analysing proximity data that it is in fact an elegantly organised structure, which can unfurl without getting tangled.  The way the genome is folded determines which genes are on and which are off.  Via The DailyMail.  Genetic Code Untangled (video).

The guiding idea of plant neurobiology is that first, plants do in fact act, and they act in ways which, when animals act that way, we are disposed to think of as signs of intelligence.  Some examples: plants orient and react appropriately not only in response to light, but also wind, water, predators, quality and volume of available soil, among many other factors.  Plants reshape themselves — extending, growing, opening, closing, altering leaf size, et cetera — in direct response to what they need, what they have good reason to shun, and to a broad range of local conditions.  In developing underground networks of roots, they show sensitivity to obstacles in the ground, and there is evidence that they differentiate their response to the roots of other plants from their response to their own roots.  Granted, by human and animal measures, plants are very slow.  Wittgenstein once remarked that it is only of what looks and acts like a human being that we say that it thinks, it sees, it wants.  Wittgenstein was not advocating chauvinism; he was calling attention to the ways in which our conception of intelligence — of mind — is bound up with ways of acting, coping and responding.  Indeed, we see this idea at work in discussions of plant intelligence.  Scientists are assembling cases that bring out clearly the ways in which plants do look and act like human beings.  A second guiding idea of plant neurobiology is the idea that plants can be viewed as complex information processing systems in the way that computers are.  Plants, the thinking goes, build models of themselves and their environment, and compute courses of actions and possible outcomes.  The study of plant minds, like the study of human and animal minds, is shaped and guided by the computer model of the mind, the idea that to have a mind is, in effect, to be a computational system that takes data received by receptors, builds representations of the environment and on this basis computes what to do.  Living beings, even the simplest ones like a cell, are already engaged in an autonomous struggle to maintain themselves and survive.  Even the simplest ones already have something like a rudimentary mind with motivated sensitivities and useful interests.

The original Constitution of the United States that was ratified in 1789 had only one reference to religion: [Article 5] No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.  The de facto motto, adopted as part of the Great Seal of the US by an Act of Congress in 1782, was E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One).  Congress changed it 174 years later (1956) to “In God We Trust.” The original Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Baptist minister Francis Bellamy who did not include the words “under God.” Those were added by Congress 62 years later (1954).  The US didn’t issue paper currency until 1861, and “In God We Trust” didn’t appear on it for 96 years (1957).  Just after the Red Scare in the 1950s, Congress changed the Pledge of Allegiance and the nation’s motto over fear of communism.  But the US was not founded on fear, but on hope for a world where all people were created equal and each of them is One from Many.

Christopher Hitchens’ version of The Ten Commandments:

• Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or colour.
• Do not ever use people as private property.
• Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.  Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
• Do not condemn people for their inborn nature — why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?
• Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature; think and act accordingly.
• Do not imagine that you can escape judgement if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
• Turn off that cellphone — you have no idea how unimportant your call is to everyone else.
• Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
• Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.
• Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Cognitive empathy is the drive to identify others’ thoughts and feelings, being able to put yourself into their shoes to imagine what is in their minds.  Affective empathy, in contrast, is the drive to respond to someone else’s thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.  People with autism typically have difficulties with the cognitive component (they have trouble inferring what other people might think or feel), but have intact affective empathy (it upsets them to hear of others suffering).  In contrast, those with antisocial personality disorder (including psychopaths) typically have the opposite profile: they have no trouble reading other people’s thoughts and feelings (intact cognitive empathy) but other people’s suffering is of no concern to them.  Psychopaths have reduced connections between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the part of the brain responsible for sentiments such as empathy and guilt, and the amygdala, which mediates fear and anxiety.  Diffusion tensor images (DTI) show reduced structural integrity in the white matter fibers connecting the two areas, while a second type of image that maps brain activity, a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), shows less coordinated activity between the vmPFC and the amygdala.  There are both structural and functional differences in the brains of people diagnosed with psychopathy.  Those two structures in the brain, which are believed to regulate emotion and social behaviour, seem to not be communicating as they should.  Recognising this dysfunction allows for the development of strategies for treating the problem.  It also calls into question notions of culpability.

Senescent cells have lost the ability to divide, though [something like the elderly] they linger long in the body.  Why?  Fifty years ago biologist Leonard Hayflick found that human cells cultured in glassware do not multiply indefinitely, as was then assumed, but can divide only 50 or so times before lapsing into senescence.  If you purge the body of its senescent cells, the tissues remain youthful and vigourous (at least in mice).  Could this postpone the diseases of ageing and let people live out more of their life spans in good health?  Simple organisms live short lives and do not need cell division.  More complex animals live longer because their tissues are renewable.  In humans, the cells lining the gut are renewed every 5 days.  Red blood cells last 120 days.  Even bone cells slowly turn over, with the result that the entire skeleton is renewed every 10 years or so.  But the price for renewable tissues is cancer: If cells are capable of division, any damage to their control systems can lead to unconstrained growth.  The body has therefore evolved two major systems to curb the risk of cancer — cell senescence and cell death.  Both systems are set in motion by illicit cell divisions, like those caused by a virus; by damage to DNA; or by activation of tumour-causing genes.  Senescence can also be caused when cells run out of telomeres, the caps at the ends of the chromosomes that get shorter at each cell division.  Senescent cells accumulate throughout life, probably because the immune system sweeps them away less efficiently as a person ages.  Larger and flatter than normal cells, they are especially common in tissues showing signs of ageing, like arthritic knees or plaque in arteries.

Swiss "jetman" Yves Rossy flies using a tailor-made jet pack.  The aviation enthusiast leapt from a helicopter and performed a series of aerial acrobatics above the Alps, then joined two jet planes in a synchronised flight.  (The jets reduced their speed to 220 kilometres per hour — 137 miles per hour — which put their engines at a point close to stalling.)  Rossy’s previous aerial feats include flying the English Channel and looping-the-loop around a hot-air balloon.  In November 2009 Rossy attempted a crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar, hoping to be the first person to fly between two continents using a jetpack.  He leapt from a small plane about 1,950 metres (6,500 feet) above Tangier in Morocco in the direction of Atlanterra in Spain.  The flight was expected to take about a quarter of an hour but, due to strong winds and banks of cloud, Rossy ditched into the sea, to be picked up 10 minutes later by his support helicopter 3 miles from the Spanish coast.  Yves served as a fighter pilot in the Swiss Air Force flying Dassault Mirage IIIs, Northrop F-5 Tiger IIs, and Hawker Hunters.  He flew Boeing 747s for Swissair.  As of 2008, he was flying for Swiss International Air Lines.  (More.)

Cutting trees on steep slopes may increase the risk of not only landslides but earthquakes in heavily deforested places such as Haiti, which suffered a devastating magnitude 7 quake in 2010.  Geologists have previously discounted the idea that low atmospheric pressure associated with tropical cyclones can influence the timing of earthquakes.  But a new study suggests a different mechanism based on changes to the weight of soil and other ground material bearing down on a geological fault under seismic stress.  Very wet rain events induce thousands of landslides and severe erosion, which removes ground material from the earth’s surface, releasing stress and encouraging movement along faults.  The 2010 earthquake in Haiti occurred 18 months after the same area was hit by two tropical storms and two hurricanes.  An analysis of the timing of earthquakes and cyclones in Taiwan over the past 60 years has demonstrated a statistical correlation, with a significant number of quakes bigger than 6 occurring within 4 years of major cyclones.  An independent analysis of ground movements caused by summer monsoons in the Himalayas also suggested a link between extreme weather and earthquakes.  (Not all scientists agree with this.)

After 15 years of drug addiction – cough syrup and pot at high school, heroin and acid at Berkeley in the late 1960s, opium in India and all that plus methamphetamine as a 30-year-old graduate student – he was finally caught in the act and sentenced to months of probation.  Only then – ashamed, ditched by his girlfriend and finally crushed by a life of substance abuse – did he set off to try to understand the workings of the mind and what lies at the heart of addiction.  He eventually wrote a book that’s a picture of addiction as an unavoidable urge of human nature.  The human brain is a sucker for pleasure, driven by the desire for relief from the watchfulness of being human.  With naturally-occurring anxieties – loneliness, randomness, death – compounded by non-stop technologies, it’s a wonder only 10-20% of us (Dr Lewis’s estimate) are functionally addicted to something or other.  Dopamine makes us long to feel good, and opioids actually provide the good feeling we anticipated (and produce more dopamine, just to keep the cycle going).  Dopamine’s flame of desire unleashed by the “ahhh” of opioids causes animals to repeat behaviours leading to satisfaction.  This, in one neat package, is the chemistry of learning.  The slippery slope is the repetition compulsion that constitutes addiction.  In other words, addiction may be a form of learning gone bad.  But a cure for addiction may be impossible.  If addictive tendencies are universal, there’s no such thing as an addict, only more and less extreme cases of neurological longing.  Desire – the foundation of human choice and therefore of human dignity – is actually most of what we are as human beings.  Because of the way cortical dopamine works, the prospect of feeling better (the thought of that dose, that hamburger) is even more motivating than the reward itself.  Anticipation is all.

We believe that alcohol has magical powers – that it causes us to shed our inhibitions and become aggressive, promiscuous, disorderly and even violent.  But we are wrong.  In high doses, alcohol impairs reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly.  But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules.  It does not cause us to say, “Oi, what you lookin’ at?” and start punching each other.  Nor does it cause us to say, “Hey babe, fancy a shag?” and start groping each other.  The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol.  There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol.  In the vast majority of cultures, drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours.  Alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life – about on a par with, say, coffee or tea.  When people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.  Even when people are very drunk, if they are given an incentive (either financial reward or even social approval) they are perfectly capable of remaining in control of their behaviour – of behaving as though they were sober.

Novices are more motivated by positive feedback than experts, who prefer a harsh critic, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.  Consumers commonly receive both positive and negative feedback on their actions or habits.  For example, doctors advise patients on how to improve their health or praise them for healthy habits; the beauty industry provides feedback to consumers on what products and services they could use to improve their appearances; and fitness trainers give tips and praise to their clients.  Novices seek more positive feedback than experts and they respond more to this feedback as measured by their willingness to pay for future beauty services, donate to environmental organisations, and even in their evaluations of a media message.  Experts seek, and respond better to, negative feedback.  Findings suggest that to promote motivation and change attitudes, marketers should differentially target novices and experts.

Devil’s Pool is a natural rock pool at the very top of natural Victoria Falls, height about 100 metres, located between the countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe.  From September to December, due to low water levels, it is possible to swim at the edge of the falls in a naturally formed safe pool, accessed via Livingstone Island.  From Devil’s Pool, you can get close enough to lean over the edge.  This makes for fantastic photo opportunities.

Scientists at the University of Missouri have invented a way to apply fillings that is completely painless.  It uses a new plasma brush that disinfects and cleans out cavities, killing bacteria and forming a better bond for the fillings — and it does it in less than 30 seconds.  According to the scientists, “the chemical reactions involved with the plasma brush actually change the surface of the tooth, which allows for a strong and robust bonding with the filling material.”  About 200 million tooth fillings occur in the US every year, with a total price tag of $50 billion.  The inventors say that their plasma brush will reduce the economical cost and eliminate pain altogether.  In addition, a tooth can only support 2-3 restorations before it must be pulled.  Fillings are 60% stronger with the plasma brush, which would increase the filling lifespan.  [I wonder if there’s a subset of people who would find this procedure not completely painless?]

Predictions by Americans in the 1920s and 1930s as to what the future would be like.  The section where fashion designers of the 1930s predict what well-dressed men and women would be wearing in the year 2000 actually foresaw Lady Gaga quite well.

Word clock.  I want one.  You can buy a kit or else have one made up ready to go.

Scientists have discovered that Polistes fuscatus paper wasps can recognise and remember each other’s faces with sharp accuracy.  For the study, researchers put wasps in the long stem of a T-shaped maze.  Each wasp in the maze was shown two images of faces of other wasps of the same species — one image to the wasp’s left and another to its right.  The images acted like signposts, telling the subjects wasps which way to go to get their reward, a safety zone.  Though images and safety-zone locations were constantly changed, one particular image — Face A versus Face B — was always associated with the safety zone.  The wasps learned much more rapidly than when simple shapes or other images instead of faces were used, emphasising the insects’ special response to facial recognition, a capability likely tied to the insects’ multicolony social structure.  Single-queen colonies don’t need to be able to tell each other apart so those wasps all look much more alike and individuals don’t show the same ability for face-learning.

The Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus, also known as the sleeper shark, gurry shark, ground shark, or grey shark, is a large shark native to the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean around Greenland and Iceland.  These sharks live farther north than any other shark species.  They are closely related to the Pacific sleeper shark.  This is one of the largest species of shark, with dimensions comparable to those of the great white shark.  Large Greenland sharks grow to 6.4 metres (21 feet) and 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds), and possibly even larger.  There are no reliable data on their lifespan, but fully grown Greenland sharks have been recaptured 16 years after being tagged.  It has been observed at depths of 2,200 metres by a submersible investigating the wreck of the SS Central America.  Pups are born alive after an undetermined gestation period, with 10 per litter the norm, each some 90 centimetres in length.  The flesh of a Greenland shark is poisonous due to the presence of the toxin trimethylamine, which produces effects similar to extreme drunkenness.  Occasionally, sled dogs that eat the flesh are unable to stand up due to neurotoxins.  However, it can be eaten if it is boiled in several changes of water or dried or fermented for some months to produce Kæstur Hákarl, often Hákarl for short.  Traditionally this was done by burying the shark in boreal ground, thus exposing it to several cycles of freezing and thawing.  It is considered a delicacy in Iceland and Greenland.

Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats don’t have much flavour in their natural state.  That’s why we cook them, season them, transform them — to make them more appealing.  But sometimes we can get food to make itself more delicious, creating favourable conditions for the enzymes already present to work.  Enzymes can transform the taste.  Dry-ageing, ripening, and fermentation are all processes that use enzymes to make foods delicious even before cooking.  Most meat is prepared for the market very quickly — the animal is slaughtered and various parts of the muscle system are separated, packaged, and distributed; that’s about it.  Dry-ageing beef means that once the animal is slaughtered and butchered, portions of the carcass are allowed to rest in carefully-controlled conditions (cool temperatures, relatively high humidity) for a period of time — several weeks, sometimes longer.  It ends up with complex flavours — savoury, sweet, some bitterness — that wasn’t present before.  No cooking method can generate the depth of flavour of a dry-aged piece of meat.  What happens is that enzymes in the cells breaks down the meat’s proteins, fats, and glycogen into amino acids, fatty acids, and sugars.  One amino acid generated by dry-ageing is glutamate, a part of MSG.  Other amino acids have somewhat similar flavours, while still others are sweet.  Dry-ageing meat causes it to lose moisture.  (Meat begins at 75% water; after dry-ageing, it may go down to around 70%.  Flavours — and the tissues themselves — become more concentrated.  Dry-aged meat is still juicy when you cook it, but even the juices are more delicious than usual.

It was previously believed that zebras were white animals with black stripes, since some zebras have white underbellies.  Embryological evidence, however, shows that the animal’s background colour is black.  The stripes are typically vertical on the head, neck, forequarters, and main body, with horizontal stripes at the rear and legs of the animal.  A wide variety of hypotheses have been proposed to account for the evolution of the stripes.

1. The vertical stripes may help the zebra hide in grass.  Absurd at first glance (grass is neither white nor black), it is perhaps effective against the lion, who may be colourblind.  Plus, at moderate distances the stripes merge to grey.
2. Since zebras are herd animals, stripes may help confuse predators — a number of zebras close together may appear as one large animal, making it more difficult for a lion to pick out a single zebra to attack.
3. Stripes may serve as visual cues allowing zebras to recognise one another.
4. The disruptive colouration may effectively confuse the visual system of the blood-sucking tsetse fly.
5. The stripes may coincide with fat patterning beneath the skin, serving as a thermo-regulatory mechanism.

This is a search form for finding microchips.  Were you aware there are so many kinds of no?

1. While sitting at your desk in front of your computer, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.
2. Now, while doing this, draw the number ’6’ in the air with your right hand.  Your foot will change direction.  (And there’s apparently nothing you can do about it.)

Unsinkable Sam (also known as Oscar) was the nickname of a German ship’s cat who saw service in both the Kriegsmarine and Royal Navy during the Second World War, serving on board 3 vessels and surviving the sinking of all of them.  The black and white cat had been owned by an unknown crewman of the German battleship Bismarck.  He was on board the ship in May 1941 when it set sail on its first and only mission — it was sunk after a fierce sea-battle, from which only 115 of its crew of over 2,200 survived.  Hours later, Oscar was found floating on a board and picked from the water, the only survivor to be rescued by the homeward-bound British destroyer HMS Cossack.  Unaware of what his name had been, the crew of Cossack also named him “Oscar”.  He served on board Cossack for a few months as it carried out convoy escort duties in the Mediterranean and north Atlantic.  October 1941, Cossack escorted a convoy from Gibraltar to the UK when it was severely damaged by a German submarine torpedo and 159 of the crew were killed.  The remainder (including the cat) were transferred to a destroyer, which dropped them ashore in Gibraltar.  The Cossack sank.  Now nicknamed “Unsinkable Sam”, he was soon transferred to the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, which coincidentally had been instrumental in the destruction of the Bismarck.  However, Sam was to find no more luck there.  When returning from Malta November 1941, this ship was torpedoed by a German sub.  The carrier rolled over and sank 30 miles from Gibraltar.  The slow rate at which it sank meant all but one of the crew were saved.  Sam was found clinging to a floating plank by a motor launch, described as “angry but quite unharmed”.  They were all transferred to the same destroyer which had rescued the crew of Cossack, then IT was sunk in 1942 — but Sam had retired already.  He first lived in the office of the Governor in Gibraltar, then was sent to the UK, where he saw out the remainder of the war living in a seaman’s home in Belfast.  He died in 1955.

The eyepatch is the single most recognisable feature of a pirate — when putting together a Halloween costume, it can make the difference between “sea warrior” and “Jerk in a puffy shirt.”  In every pirate movie there’s always at least one crewmember who wears an eyepatch, usually due to some hideous disfigurement.  With all those peg legs, hook hands and eyepatches, it’s like these movies try to tell us that pirates, more so than any other group of people in history, were remarkably good at misplacing body parts.  But what was it about pirates that made them more likely to lose an eye than, say, Vikings?  Actually, the reason most pirates wore eyepatches was to keep one eye adjusted to darkness while boarding another ship.  During a raid pirates needed to be able to fight and ransack both above and below deck; with no artificial light, it could get pretty dark down there (a guy could trip on a treasure chest).  It takes the human eye several minutes to adjust to darkness, but this way pirates could simply swap the eyepatch and immediately be prepared to fight in the lower decks without constantly running into walls (something to be avoided when carrying a cutlass).  In fact, this method works so well that it’s still used by the American military today.  Nighttime survival guides recommend keeping one eye closed during bright lights to preserve night vision and the same goes for military pilots.  So all those movie pirates wearing eyepatches all the time?  Turns out they were just being extra careful.