Foxes zero in on prey via Earth’s magnetic field – life – 12 January 2011 – New Scientist.

The suggestion/hypothesis is that lining up prey with magnetic field helps the foxes to judge distance and allows them to pounce more consistently and effectively — capturing prey at a statistically significant higher rate.  Interesting!

Related articles

• Foxes zero in on prey via Earth’s magnetic field (newscientist.com)
• Team Frank!: Birds might actually be using quantum mechanics to find their way through the skies (io9.com)

Brain connections

Brian Keim writes the following:

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and

Image via Wikipedia

listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

The findings don’t explain why any two people “click,” as synchronization is a result of that connection, not its cause. And while the brain regions involved are linked to language, their precise functions are not clear. But even if the findings are general, they support what psychologists call the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” — a fancy way of saying that talking brings people closer by making them share a common conceptual ground.

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”

The researchers didn’t test brain synchronization during phone calls or video conferencing, but Hasson speculates that “coupling would be stronger face-to-face.” He also thinks dialogue will produce especially strong forms of synchronization, and plans to run scans of people engaged in deep conversation, rather than telling or listening to long stories.

“But first, we’ll look at cases where there’s a failure to communicate,” said Hasson.

Image: Overlap between neural activation in speaker and listener./PNAS.

See Also:

• Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
• Brain Scan Lie-Detection Deemed Far From Ready for Courtroom
• Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets
• Nun Brains Show Language Skills Predict Future Alzheimer’s Risk
• Roots of Language Run Deeper Than Speech

Citation: “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication.” By Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, Uri Hasson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 29, July 27, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/mind-meshing/#ixzz0uu5MQiY2

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• The Neuroscience of Inception… (shannonturlington.com)
• Neuroscientist David Eagleman calls himself a possibilian. What’s that? (santitafarella.wordpress.com)
• Successful Conversations Involve Mind Melds, Study Reveals (livescience.com)

Banana Formula Sheet

I think this formula sheet could have a dual purpose; great for physics formulas and also for experiments about friction– don’t slip now!

Scientists Listen to Faint Sounds Inside Insects

May 14, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

<!–

–>

Enlarge

Rendering of a ladybug being recorded by the atomic force microscope (AFM) probe.

(PhysOrg.com) — A team of Clarkson University scientists led by Prof. Igor Sokolov are using atomic force microscopy (AFM) to record sounds emanating from inside living insects like flies, mosquitoes and ladybugs.

// // ACS Video Perspective – Researchers highlight coherent multidimensional spectroscopy – pubs.acs.org/JPhysChemVideo

AFM is one of major scientific tools responsible for the emergence of modern nanotechnology. The unprecedented sensitivity of AFM allowed the Clarkson team to record sub-nano oscillations of very faint amplitude (less than the size of one atom) at high frequencies (up to 1,000 hertz or cycles per second). Previous work in the study of insects was only done at up to 5 hertz. The sounds are recorded by touching the surface of the bugs with an AFM probe. The study of these sounds may allow researchers to discover unknown features and physiology of insects. Sokolov hopes these discoveries may help in finding solutions to the problems caused by insect pests. “Insects are of general interest not only as the most numerous and diverse group of animals on the planet, but also as highly efficient bio-machines varying greatly in size,” says Sokolov. “Some are major agricultural pests and competitors of humans for crops. Mosquitoes and other insects are important vectors of plant, animal, and human diseases. Also, vast lands of the earth are still underdeveloped because they are occupied by blood-sucking insects.” You can listen to audio files of the internal sounds of mosquitoes, flies, and ladybugs:   //

//

// The Sokolov team’s research is published in the top journal of applied physics, Applied Physics Letters, at http://apl.aip.org/applab/v96/i4/p043701_s1 .The team consisted of Sokolov, who has appointments in Physics, and Chemistry and Biomolecular Science; Maxim Dokukin, a physics postdoctoral fellow; and Nataliia Guz, a physics graduate student; and Sergey Vasilyev, instrumental scientist. The other members of Sokolov’s group, physics graduate students Dmytro Volkov, Ravi Gaikwad, and Shyuzhene Li, work on biosensors, self-assembly of particles, and the study of skin aging.

Provided by Clarkson University

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Backpack Hydroelectric Plant Gives You 500 Watts on the Move

• By Alexis Madrigal
• March 1, 2010  |
• Categories: Energy

A human-portable hydroelectric generator that weighs about 30 pounds and generates 500 watts of power may soon be a new option for off-grid power.

Developed by Bourne Energy of Mailbu, California, the Backpack Power Plant can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than 4 feet.

The company showed off its more-rugged, militarized version of the Backpack Power Plant at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco last week. Bourne Energy CEO Chris Catlin estimates the system will cost $3,000 after it goes into production.

“The BPP-2, which operates silently with no heat or exhaust emissions, is 40 percent less visible during operation and can also be bottom mounted to be totally invisible,” the company maintains.

Off-grid solar cells are also quiet, but they don’t make much power relative to the mini-turbine. For example, one commercially available foldable solar panel measures about 12 square feet and produces 62 watts of peak power. You’d need 60 square feet of panels to get the same peak power as the BPP-2, and the panels would only generate electricity while the sun was shining.

To install the civilian BPP, you would dig two trenches on opposite sides of a river and insert a lightweight anchor into each. Then, you’d run a synthetic rope between the anchors and the BPP. Catlin said his company designed the system to work like the high-tension mooring systems that hold up floating oil rigs.

The military version of the BPP has been designed to work with a variety of flow rates. The civilian version was designed to function best in streams moving at 2.3 meters (7.5 feet) per second.

The civilian market for a $3,000 mini hydro system might not be huge in the industrialized world, but Catlin hopes the plant will find willing customers in developing nations and the military.

“This can bring a cheap, highly portable energy technology to remote areas and remote villages,” Catlin told Wired.com.

Bourne is currently looking for $4 million in venture capital to take the BPP from prototype to production.

Photo courtesy Bourne Energy

See Also:

• Nation’s First ‘Underwater Wind Turbine’ Installed in Old Man River
• Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
• 5 Huge Green-Tech Projects in the Developing World

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Tumblr, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/backpack-hydroelectric-plant/#ixzz0gy9c4wTT

DUML spring semester has just begun and unfortunately we have no takers for Physics 54.  As disappointing as this is, I plan to take this opportunity to work on revamping some of the labs we do for the Physics 53 and 54 sequence.  The guiding principles are:

• Keep the “activity-based”, Socratic flavor for the labs
• Include more open-ended activities — less “cookbook”
• Include marine biophysics content when possible
• Include technology tools which facilitate “paperless” labs
• Encourage broader publishing of results — both student reports and analysis of lab effectiveness

Of course, any changes will need a blessing from the Duke physics department, which holds rather high standards.  Ideas I am currently ready to pursue and explore/develop include:

• X-ray diffraction and Crystallography – collaboration with Dave Richardson and Karen Magnus, et al.
• Crab Claw Forces — collaboration with Dan Rittschof
• Synthetic Barnacle Glue adhesive strength — more with Rittschof
• Fluids and transport mechanics – collaboration with Jim Hench
• Underwater acoustics – collaboration with Douglas Nowacek
• Control circuit designs and robotics — collaboration with Tom Walbert

One of my personal goals ties in nicely to this DUML physics effort, namely pursuing a doctorate in Physics Education Research through NC State.  I believe that presenting the Physics 53 and 54 sequence with an enhanced biology/biophysics laboratory component will provide for a more engaging experience for our DUML students.  The majority of the physics student population at the Marine Lab consist of pre-med biology majors, and while feedback and student course assessments have been positive, a fall semester pilot test of the crab claw force lab got rave reviews, so I have evidence that the course can only improve with some new physics labs and demos which take advantage of our location.  Duke Marine Lab is in a beautiful location and I know I can do a  better job I can do of taking advantage of  local resources.

Consider the following comment from The Basic Science Medical Education Dilemma blog [linked below]

The proposition that animates my own work is that a more effective curriculum at the earlier stage would prepare entering students significantly better for the challenges of understanding and retention they face in medical school, by which I mean the education they receive at the fundamental level of physics, chemistry, organic chemistry and biology. Medical school would be more vivid if students learned the fundamental physical and biological sciences within a combined curriculum that builds on itself, not within disconnected modular courses. How can a person understand free energy change in chemistry without mechanics, electrodynamics, and thermodynamics from physics? How can you understand oxidative metabolism without oxidation reduction? Being a person who has worked very closely with many small groups of premedical students, taking them through the basic sciences in review more times than I want to admit, I’m burdened with knowing how little conceptual fluency entering medical students actually possess after their undergraduate years that would help them unify the enormous encyclopedia already in their heads, let alone what is coming in medical school.

I hope to make some small contribution to enhancing physics education and in particular to enhancing physics education at DUML for our life science majors and pre-meds.  Time for me to get busy.  Item number one on the agenda is making a final decision on the X-ray crystallography lab.  I’ll post more details about this in the near future.

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• Changes Could Be Coming for Pre-Meds and the MCAT (blogs.wsj.com)
• “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (Richard Feynman, Pasadena, 29 December 1959) (metamodern.com)
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Blue Whale Songs Get Even Bluer
Why are blue whales singing with increasingly deeper voices?

By Emily Sohn | Wed Dec 16, 2009 07:00 AM ET

Blue Whale Songs

Scientists can’t seem to figure out why blue whales are singing at a deeper pitch.
Getty Images

Blue whales’ songs are hauntingly deep, filled with extraterrestrial vibratos, and utterly mysterious. Despite many attempts to interpret them, scientists still don’t know what the world’s largest animals are saying.

Now, the mystery only thickens. For decades, blue whales have been singing with increasingly deeper voices, reports a new study. In some cases, the pitch of their songs has dropped by more than 30 percent. Frustrated researchers cannot yet explain why.

“It’s a worldwide phenomenon,” said Mark McDonald, an ocean acoustician and independent researcher in Bellvue, Colo. “All blue whales are shifting their frequencies downward. They are all going in the same direction, and we really don’t understand it.”

“Maybe by putting this data out there,” he added, “someone will have a eureka moment and see something that really explains this.”

McDonald first suspected something was going on about eight years ago, when he started setting up underwater detectors to study blue whales across the Pacific Ocean.

To get the devices to work, he and colleagues noticed that they had to shift the detector frequencies downward every year. At the time, they didn’t know if something was amiss with the detectors or with the whales.

For the new study, McDonald and colleagues collected acoustical data on blue whales from as far back the 1950s. Some recordings came from underwater microphones put in place by whale researchers or the military. More recently, researchers have developed new technologies to monitor whale sounds over large distances and time-spans.

McDonald’s group was able to collect data from multiple points in time for seven of the 10 known types of blue whale songs.

Each song type, researchers believe, belongs to a different population of whales. Within a population, individuals match frequencies with each other.

For all seven of the groups, the scientists reported in the journal Endangered Species Research, the pitch of the animals’ voices has dropped over the years, with some groups falling more than others. In the most extreme example, blue whales off the coast of California are now singing with voices that are 31 percent deeper than they were in 1964.

One of the first theories colleagues propose when they heard about the findings, McDonald said, is that the vocal tracts of blue whales might be bigger now than they used to be.

After all, the theory goes, whales have increased in number and probably in size since commercial whaling was banned in the 1960s. Bigger whales should have bigger vocal chords that produce deeper voices.

The problem with that hypothesis, McDonald said, is that blue whales are mostly fully grown by age 8, even though they live for many decades. When it comes to body size, populations should have recovered long ago. Yet, their voices keep deepening.

“All sorts of people say that this is the obvious answer,” McDonald said. “But when you try to put the numbers to it, that one doesn’t pan out.”

The numbers also ruled out climate change, ocean acidification and a rise in ocean noise from ships, among other theories.

Instead, McDonald’s current favorite hypothesis is that, because their numbers have increased, blue whales are more likely to be close to other whales. That means their calls don’t have to be as loud in order to be heard. In turn, they can sing in lower frequencies, which don’t travel as far through water as higher ones do.

It takes more energy to sing deeply, though. To explain why they’re making that extra effort, the researchers propose that deeper voices are sexier — even for whales — and could be used to attract potential mates. Only the males sing.

There’s also a possibility that cultural change is driving whale voices deeper in the same way that our languages change over time, McDonald said — an intriguing idea that is, for now, pure speculation.

The fact that scientists haven’t yet solved this mystery suggests that there may not actually be a solution that makes sense, said research biologist John Calambokidis, of Cascadia Research, a research organization in Olympia, Wash., that focuses on threatened marine mammals.

“You can’t always expect animals will respond in a way that is logical,” he said. “A new thing like ocean noise might make them respond in ways that are not necessarily adaptive.”

The study is yet another reminder of how little we actually know about blue whales.

“There are still so many mysteries about these animals,” Calambokidis said. “New methods like acoustics research have opened up new insights. They’ve also raised new mysteries, and this is one of them.”

A Gripping Read

Published

by

Clifford

on December 10, 2009

in Los Angeles, books, literature, media, science, science and society and science in the media

.

There’s a physics angle to the Tiger Woods business of last week (that I’d not really been following since I was, thankfully, out of the country during the media blitz).

A physics angle? Really? Surely in my attempts to show the science angle in everyday things I’ve gone too far?

Well, actually there is. So there was some business with a car crashing and so forth, and there are photos of the interior of the car. There’s a book visible. It’s a physics book! It is John Gribbins’ Get a Grip on Physics, from 1999.

It is out of print now, but apparently its Amazon (USA) sales rank shot from 396,224 to 2,268 over a short period. (For the record, before you ask about the other items in the photos (from Getty images), I’ve heard no news on whether umbrella sales also spiked. Or bottled water sales, for that matter.)

I like this story for lots of reasons, but the main one is that this shows to the general public that a high-profile sports star can find some time and interest to dip into a physics book from time to time. These popular level books are for everyone – not just the so-called geeks. Ordinary people with a range of interests who are interested in dipping into the larger culture that is available. I hope it encourages others to venture into this sort of reading material, without feeling/fearing that they are now going to be labelled a “science geek” for doing so. For all I know it was right next to a copy of a collection of Maya Angelou poems on his bedside table, or an excellent juicy murder-mystery novel, before he grabbed it and dashed for the car. That’s the way science should be – just out there among the other great stuff.

Here’s a Guardian story on it, with more information and some quotes from the pleased author.

I’m off to plant copies of D-Branes in the back seats of various local Hollywood stars, especially the accident prone ones. Hmmmmm, now which holiday parties is Lindsey Lohan going to?

My sweet physheads have completed lab activities for the fall Physics 53 course and are now finishing the last of the material for recitation and preparing for the final exam — my how time flies.  For the lab on mechanical waves and sound in particular, many students choose to submit a short research blurb about acoustics in a marine environment and so I share this  Wired Science blog link about the changing nature of blue whale songs. Check the link above for the full blog…here is a teaser:

All around the world, blue whales aren’t singing like they used to, and scientists have no idea why.

The largest animals on Earth are singing in ever-deeper voices every year. Among the suggested explanations are ocean noise pollution, changing population dynamics and new mating strategies. But none of them is entirely convincing.

“We don’t have the answer. We just have a lot of recordings,” said Mark McDonald, president of Whale Acoustics, a company that specializes in the sonic monitoring of cetaceans.

McDonald and his collaborators first noticed the change eight years ago, when they kept needing to recalibrate the automated song detectors used to track blue whales off the California coast. The detectors are triggered by songs that match a particular waveform, and every year, McDonald had to set them lower.