Frogs jump farther when competing at a county fair

This image's connection to the story is tenuous at best.

The Calaveras County Fair takes their frog-jumping contest very seriously. When researchers from Brown University wanted to analyze their contest to compare the results with more controlled frog-jumping experiments, the officials limited their observations to using video from a camera in the viewing area. Adding new equipment to the jumping area would change the circumstances of the contest in a way that could give contestants an unfair advantage. And if we can’t even apply the rule of law to a frog-jumping contest anymore, then we are truly fucked. One minute you’re letting some grad students place some digital scales in your frog-jumping contest, and the next thing you know everybody’s raping and murdering.

Anyway, the results were that more than half of the nearly 3500 recorded jumps at the contest last year beat the record in the scientific literature set under more controlled conditions. The Wired Science article linked to above offers some insights on why that might be the case. But before I quote it, you need to know that these frogs have “jockeys.” Seriously.

Most frog jockeys, as human contestants are known, compete using the American bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana), a large, voracious species that has invaded the West Coast from the eastern United States. Jockeys can touch their frogs only at the beginning of the first jump. Afterward, they rely on shouting, blowing or crouching behind the frog and doing their own startling leaps to urge the frogs on.

Anyone can rent a frog at the fair to enter the contest. But many serious competitors bring their own, inspiring rumors about secret locations in the wild for catching a top jumper.

Hey, what’re you doing this weekend? Oh, you know, I’ll be in my secret location training my bullfrog. I think I’m on to a really great, innovative startling jump that can add 2 feet to the record. What are you gonna do? Just rent one of those unmotivated slacker frogs?

Mice get real mad fighting at home

 

We have to show these mice freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them.

 

We all know that scientists just don’t like mice. But now it turns out that this long-standing hatred has somehow resulted in empirical data.

So in the usual, day-to-day, mouse-hating life of the lab geeks, one of them decided to try to measure the “winner effect,” i.e. that winners in previous contests will continue to win, perhaps boosted by the resultant testosterone. So instead of having the normal Schadenfreude-enducing random caged mice fights, the scientists decided to frame the mice fight clubs in the format of a tournament so they could study this possible effect:

We examined this issue in the territorial California mouse (Peromyscus californicus) because males of this species are more likely to win fights after accruing victories in their home territory but not after accruing victories in unfamiliar locations. Using immunocytochemistry and real-time quantitative PCR, we found that winning fights either at home or away increases the expression of androgen receptors (AR) in the medial anterior bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, a key brain area that controls social aggression. We also found that AR expression in brain regions that mediate motivation and reward, nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and ventral tegmental area (VTA), increases only in response to fights in the home territory.

So these mice basically got more pumped up from fighting, won more, and were more inclined to continue fighting when they were set up to win while on their own turf, but not when they were similarly set up to win in an unfamiliar environment. So the next time you think you’re flying into an uncontrollable rage, get out of town for a while and maybe that will make you more docile (?). I don’t know. Whatever.

The sound of the Higgs boson

All matter is made up of atoms, and atoms are made of electrons, neutrons, and protons. Peter Higgs hypothesized that all of these subatomic particles are made of one universal and uniform sub-subatomic particle which he humbly called the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the ‘God particle.’

One of the things the Large Hadron Collider is supposed to do is to find out if the Higgs boson actually exists. They still haven’t found that out yet, but what they have done is they made an audio simulation of what results from LHC experiments where the Higgs boson exists would somehow sound like. From the BBC:

The aim is to give physicists at the LHC another way to analyse their data. The sonification team believes that ears are better suited than eyes to pick out the subtle changes that might indicate the detection of a new particle.

My hope is that this is all a cover for an expansion of CERN’s musical endeavors. Maybe they are starting their own record label. Anyway, someone put one of the clips of the sonification of the Higgs boson into a YouTube video with a unicorn, and here it is. Please fap to it now.

Boobquake backfired

Oh no

UPDATE: Oh, OK.

Possible hybrid bear shot by Innuit hunter

It looks like Carl Paladino is not the only one into ‘interspecies erotica’ these days. Bears around Victoria Island may have been crossing the lower taxonomic category to get it on as well.

So this unnamed Innuit hunter – probably poor and barely able to keep his family fed – one day he was shooting at some food, and up from the ground came a possible polar / grizzly ‘pizzly’ ‘grolar’ hybrid. The Innuit call these hybrids “Nanulak,” which is also the Innuit word for both “snow” and “corn.”

DNA testing has only confirmed one other case of these hybrids in the wild. That was in 2006 when a guy from Idaho shot one in the same general location at around this time of year. Here is what it looked like, since the hunter who made this most recent kill is – to his credit – refusing to make pictures public or even talk about it until DNA analysis is done:

Nobody’s really sure why these sightings have been getting more frequent in recent times. Maybe it’s because more members of the insane hunter demographic are able to go up to these remote areas. Or it could be a result of climate change. Or it could be that grizzlies are wandering way further north than they usually do just by accident. Or it could be that they were following caribou populations. So we’ll just have to wait and see what more data reveals.

Yeah, that’s right! I got no conclusion here. We just don’t know and that’s all we can say until better evidence is available. And that’s just how things can be sometime. So just fucking deal with it already.

Martian avalanches

It gets so cold during the Martian winter that carbon dioxide freezes and sometimes accumulates on fault lines. Then when Martian spring comes, it melts away and sometimes causes an avalanche. And sometimes the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter gets a picture or two of the avalanche.

The scarp is apparently about 700 meters high, and the avalanche cloud rises about 50 meters. More pictures of Martian avalanches taken by HiRISE are available here.

AI will (maybe someday) enslave us all (still)

I know I’ve done my whole fearmongering about Artificial Intelligence thing before, but this time I REALLY MEAN IT WE’RE ALL FUCKED AND ARE GONNA DIE OMG WTF AHHHHHHHHHHH.

MIT released a report on how they have integrated the probabilistic approach to AI with a stricter, rule-based one, and the result, they claim, is a new unified theory of AI. What had happened is they started off trying to simulate intelligence by a rigid model of thought based on rules of logic. For example if all ravens are black and X is a raven, then X is black. Since this rules out nuances, researchers decided to abandon that approach in favor of one based on probability.

Now they’re stepping back a bit by trying to build models of intelligence which accumulate both probabilities and logical inferences in order to fine-tune their deductions. It sounds a lot like how infants learn about the world around them, which makes this both kind of scary and fascinating at the same time if it really works. But then there’s the philosophical problem of whether or not it’s even possible to really simulate intelligence, or if a simulation is always going to come up short to the real thing, or if there’s no meaningful difference between the two at all since we couldn’t distinguish between the two based on the end result. Either way, we’re probably all fucked since Skynet is imminent.

Pic of the day

Sam Harris at TED

This is from the Technology Education Development conference last month. I’m not sure how much I agree with him here. The line between an objective morality and an absolutist one is pretty tricky. I think that if you have a  situation and you have different possible courses of action to resolve it, one of them is going to cause the least amount of harm and that would be objectively the best way to act. But then the thing about science is that we’re always finding out new stuff – like for example we could discover that harm is being caused where we previously thought there wasn’t.

This is not so much of a problem in science today because nowadays we have specialization and people devoting themselves to very specific sub-fields of study. So scientists can take minute details into account on how they affect their overall picture. But when it comes to ethics and morality, every single one of us would need to devote just as much time to do some sort of meticulous analysis since we really all have to use ethics and morality. And if we’re all going to take a scientific approach then that’s what we’ll have to do. It’s too much work, and I for one am very lazy.

Quantum effects on visible objects

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that this press release about the results of a study will be abused by the New Agey faith healer types like Deepak Chopra. And what I think they’ll try to do is claim that this finding – that quantum mechanics applies to objects which are visible to the naked eye – closes the alleged gap between the micro and macro effects of quantum mechanics.

The usual response by skeptics when someone like Chopra points out some counterintuitive implication of quantum theory and then tries to expand it as if it applies to things like “healing” is that they’re talking about how matter works on a micro scale and they need to show that this applies on a larger one. They haven’t been able to do that. For instance, you can point out that we’re made of atoms and atoms are mostly empty space. And so is something like a wall in your house. But just because both you and the wall are at a micro level mostly empty space, it does not follow that you can walk through walls. Someone would need to close that gap between the micro and macro to make that case, and it’s a pretty safe bet that that simply can’t be done.

And similarly, just because simple observation can change test results – as predicted by quantum theory – it does not follow that we can conjure up a bubble blower bottle out of nowhere.  But now that we know that quantum theory applies to visible objects, I’m guessing that followers of “The Secret” are going to claim that this crosses some line which they believe skeptics claimed can not be crossed.

The problem with that is that the point at which we’re able to see small objects is a pretty arbitrary one. In fact, it’s not even a set line since the visual capacities of humans (and all other animals, for that matter) exist on a spectrum ranging from good vision to blindness. There’s no reason quantum effects should just start and stop at the point where humans happen to be able to observe them unaided. It would be a pretty human-centric approach to try to bridge the gap in that way, if that’s what they end up saying.

This is supposed to be coming out in Nature, so chances are good that it’s been through a decent peer review process. This isn’t just some guys with a press release. UC Santa Barbara physics professor and co-author of the study Andrew Cleland called his findings in the press release, “a significant step forward for nanomechanics research.”

Pic of the day

New Scientist has a gallery of orangutans doing stuff around water, like fishing and building bridges. Here is one swimming and definitely not in the process of drowning because it was thrown into the water by New Scientist’s photographers while the crew pointed and laughed.

According to the accompanying article, “[O]ne pair was even seen having sex in water.”

An even more Earth-like exoplanet

Corot-9b (artist's impression)

This is a follow-up on an earlier story about Corot-7b. This more recently discovered exoplanet is more temperate than the one I wrote about last January because it has a much larger orbit. It’s also a gas giant, unlike the rockier 7b. So we can rule this one out for possible places to send humans after the nanobots take over and then destroy the Earth because we need a rocky surface to avoid being sucked down by gravity into the core and then crushed by the planet’s own mass.

Astronomers are only able to observe this exoplanet for 8 hours at a time every 95 days because they are using the transit method of observation. So some other details they’ve found so far are that its orbit is about the same as Mercury, the star it orbits is slightly cooler than our’s, and estimates of its average temperature range between -23°C and 157°C (That’s between -9.4°F and 314.6°F in American).

It’s located about 1500 light years away in the constellation of Serpens, which is also known as the snake. You know how that one constellation looks a lot like a snake in that it’s kind of like a line but with it curves around randomly? Yeah, it’s that one.

It's around here somewhere.

3.14159268

Today is fucking Pi Day. Be sure to celebrate appropriately. But please refrain from drilling yourself in the head in order to drive the living organism which is the stock market / true name of God according to the hidden numerical codes of the Kabbalah out of your brain because it’s driving you mad.

Please don't do this, no matter how loud the voices get.

You may shave your head, however.

It also would be Albert Einstein‘s 131st birthday if humans lived to be that old and he didn’t die in 1955.

Huge prehistoric crocodiles will eat us all

New Scientist is reporting that the newly identified Crocodylus anthropophagus probably ate human ancestors. They lived around 1.8 million years ago in Africa and were 7.5 meters (about 25 feet) long.

By contrast, what is supposed to be the largest living crocodile in Africa is only 6.1 meters (20 feet) long. His name is Gustave. There are apparently some crocodiles in India which are larger than Gustave, but still smaller than C. anthropophagus was. Here is a slideshow of examples:

There are a bunch of anatomical differences between these fossils and current crocodiles, and this kind of flies in the face of this idea that the genetic frequencies of crocodiles haven’t changed much over geological time and they’re basically all the same as their ancestors since Jesus made them along with all the other fish of the sea 6000 years ago.

So they found fossils of human ancestors with cut marks which matched up with the bite of C. anthropophagus. Maybe they were just being territorial, but the team who made the discovery thinks that the fossil remains were the victims of attacks by smaller crocodiles, while the larger adult ones would just totally fuck up and eat a whole humanoid.

Pic of the day

That’s Saturn from Cassini. There’s also a relevant update here for Obama’s proposed science budget, which is that some of the additional funding is going to go to extending Cassini’s mission through 2017 to further explore Saturn and its moons. And this extension will allow for a seasonal study since the period is proportionally a Saturnian 6 month period.