Drive by science

[JoeP]

Babies like it when you imitate them | MNN - Mother Nature Network

And the detail: Imitation recognition and its prosocial effects in 6-month old infants: which I have not completely studied.

When adults imitate babies, the babies like it and engage more.

"By showing that 6-month-old infants recognize when they are being imitated, and that imitation has a positive effect on interaction, we begin to fill up this gap," Sauciuc said. "We still have to find out when exactly imitation begins to have such effects, and what role imitation recognition actually plays for babies."

They worked from a sample of 16 6-month-old babies. My own research, conducted on a sample of 1 (me), suggests that adults naturally imitate babies and like it when the babies smile and laugh. And speculates that this might be an evolved trait that helps teach babies that what they do can influence others. I can't think of this kind of imitation-engaging happening in other species, beyond perhaps great apes.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Over my head, but for the nerds: Never-before-seen "black nitrogen" plugs puzzle in periodic table

[JoeP]

I was fully prepared to dismiss that ("newatlas.com"? sounds like woo, "puzzle in periodic table"? doubtful, and sounds like clickbait).

But holey tables, batman, it's solid. At least at 1.4 million atmospheres. Pressed between two diamonds.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I squinted at it a bit too, but there’s this: New Atlas - Media Bias/Fact Check Seems okay.

[JoeP]

Snake eels burst through the stomach of predators in bid to escape being eaten alive | Science | The Guardian

When eaten alive by predators, they will use their hard pointed tail tip, which is for digging, to burst through the fish’s stomach in a bid to escape digestion.

“Fish are able to withstand quite a bit of trauma. Sometimes you’ll see fish with quite sizeable chunks out of their backs and those have healed up, so a small perforation in their stomach wall … they are probably barely aware that it’s happened.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

[fragment]

Originally Posted by JoeP

* JoeP gets fragment started on photorespiration

Oh yeah, I'm a pretty terrible teachy person, no expert on plant physiology and my memory is a bit hazy on this one, but:

An enzyme called rubisco is essential to the process of photosynthesis (in most cases). Photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide as an input and produces oxygen as a waste product. Rubisco is the bit that grabs the CO2. However, it's not terribly specific, and while it is supposed to bind to the CO2 if there is some O2 lying around it can bind to that as well. That's a problem because it renders the rubisco useless until some energy is spent to extract the oxygen. In other words, photosynthesis is a process that becomes inefficient in the presence of it's own waste product.

Nonetheless rubisco is everywhere that plants and other organisms photosynthesise. It has been called the most abundant protein on earth. One theory is that because it appeared early in the history of the planet when there was abundant atmospheric CO2 and no atmospheric oxygen there was no downside at the time. Because evolution is conservative, it hasn't been replaced by anything in the time since.

I will note that, even though rubisco has not been replaced, some plants have developed workarounds. Some plants have an extra process which essentially concentrates CO2 in the parts of the leaf which have the rubisco. This does have a bit of an energy cost but under certain conditions it's a better trade-off than the more basic process.

Anyway I think photorespiration is a nice example of bey's pithy comment "We are 3 and half billion years of cludgy biological technical debt, it is amazing that we function at all."

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Reality

[Ari]

Paper request!

This is quite cool (well from a research perspective, less so for the guy) of a man who sees spaghetti squiggles when looking at the numbers 2 - 9, and I would like to say more but don’t have access to the paper on PNAS, is there anyone who has a subscription that wouldn’t mind sending me a copy?

Lack of awareness despite complex visual processing: Evidence from event-related potentials in a case of selective metamorphopsia | PNAS

[fragment]

Try scihub Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science

[beyelzu]

CRISPR Gene Edited Patient Sickle Cell 1 Year On

So CRISPR has been a promising technique for therapeutic reasons and widely used in labs.

A handful of people have been treated by editing genes to increase fetal hemoglobin production.

It seems to work thus far and that’s fucking amazing.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by beyelzu

So CRISPR has been a promising technique for therapeutic reasons and widow used in labs.

widow? A typo? but I can't work out what word it should be

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by fragment

Try scihub Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science

I (accidentally! I have no idea how that site got in my glovebox officer!) clicked that link on my work computer. Hmm:

Sorry, you don't have permission to visit this site.
Web Page Blocked
Access to the web page you were trying to visit has been blocked
Not allowed to browse Copyright Infringement category

The category may be fair, but it seems to me that "you don't have permission" "page blocked" "access to the page blocked" and "not allowed to browse" are four ways of saying the same thing.

Must be really bad.

[beyelzu]

Originally Posted by JoeP

widow? A typo? but I can't work out what word it should be

widely

[fragment]

Originally Posted by JoeP

I (accidentally! I have no idea how that site got in my glovebox officer!) clicked that link on my work computer. Hmm:

The category may be fair, but it seems to me that "you don't have permission" "page blocked" "access to the page blocked" and "not allowed to browse" are four ways of saying the same thing.

Must be really bad.

Huh. Is that a govt mandated ISP level block, or something else? Anyway, there may or may not be search engine results for "sci-hub mirror" that might accidentally get someone there if they were being careless.

[JoeP]

No, it's entirely the company. Probably a default configuration left in by their VPN-plus-other-things software. "Hey {company}, thanks for buying our product, do you want to allow Copyright Infringement sites? No? Great, default settings it is."

I would use my personal machine but my big screen is connected to the work laptop so

[Ari]

Oow nice! Some details from that paper, a man started having issues seeing numbers after a neurological event (potentially stroke) due to a degenerative disease. Whenever he looked at the numbers 2 - 9 he saw only a jumble of moving lines like spaghetti.

You will notice I left out 0 and 1 which he was still able to see. To me “1” makes a bit of sense as it’s self descriptive, as either just a straight single line or a single object and thus is more than an abstract symbol but “0” is surprising to me, and they cite this happening before, so it appears the symbols 0 and 1 are stored in a different or more robust way than the other numbers.

He had some visual funnyness with some letters as well, seemingly those with a similar design to numbers like Z but that’s just a hypothesis as he was still able to understand them as the letter they were, compared to the visually destroyed numbers. And visually destroyed they were, changing each time he looked at them so there wasn’t even a way to guess at the number. Just the image though, he still retained what a “5” was, that you add two of them to get a 10, three of them to get a 1@, four of them combine to a &0 and five makes *$ or 25. Roman numerals were also spared. It seems that specifically 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 got turned to a spaghetti mess.

I find this interesting as the Spaghetti squiggles look very similar to a type of visual noise I get after GABA manipulating drugs, like alcohol, it both looks and feels like the gain has been turned up on a specific visual processing area for a bit, it also takes just a touch longer to understand what objects are, especially in low light.

Back to the paper, when shown black numbers on a white background he saw black squiggles on white, but when the number was colored it’s specifically the background that changes color and the squiggles stay black. There’s video of him drawing the squiggle 8 and when he fills in the orange back he mentions the area at top is partly open but then when he looks back it’s more closed. Presumably seeing but also not the holes in the 8, I find when looking at the orange 8 I can switch back and forth between the white inside being holes or white objects sat on top of a solid orange object. Now I’m wondering if this background/foreground differentiation is done in a specific brain area...

In another test they placed smaller images inside letters and numbers and asked him what they were. He could answer correctly 99% - 100% of the time when it was inside a letter or 0 and 1 but no better than chance inside a 2-9, however the wacky part and main point of the paper, was that the same area of his brain would light up for the small image when inside a number (the face area would light up only when there was a face, or nose in the 6 G example) so it seems his brain was correctly seeing and processing the second image but the number squiggles overruled them. In addition the broken numbers seemed to rule an area around them, but if the image was separated enough from them he could finally tell what it was.

After using him as a test subject they successfully taught him a new set of symbols for numbers and he was able to continue in an engineering and math related job for 3 more years, until the degeneration got worse.

(Images, The 8 they showed him and the one he drew, and an example of a pear he couldn’t see but a nose that he could.)

[JoeP]

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Behold

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

A 'Viral' New Bird Song in Canada Is Causing Sparrows to Change Their Tune

[JoeP]

Next in drive by through train science:

Scientists find out why leaves on the track causes travel chaos | Transport | The Guardian

Tannins in the leaves combine with iron that has been dissolved from the rails by acids, forming a layer of black material that reduces friction between steel surfaces.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Incredible shot of the menacing torrential storm over #Montreal last night
Photo by the brilliant Martin Reisch @safesolvent
via @ToulasTake pic.twitter.com/JVuMhWTSlk

— Anne Lagacé Dowson (@alagacedowson) August 3, 2020

[JoeP]

[JoeP]

Next in eight-armed hug science:

Octopuses Rolling on MDMA Reveal Unexpected Link to Humans

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Beaver families win legal 'right to remain' - BBC News