Hermaphrochickens Challenge Gender Determination
“Chicken sex doesn’t work like ours. No, not that sex — but the process by which an embryo becomes a recognizably male or female animal.
Unlike mammals, it’s not hormones that dictate a chicken’s sex. It’s a fundamental property of the cells themselves. But this only became apparent when biologists investigated several odd chickens that were half male and half female, as if a line were drawn down the center of their bodies.
“We assumed this was caused by one side of the body having some kind of sex chromosome anomaly,” said Michael Clinton, a University of Edinburgh developmental biologist and co-author of the study, described March 10 in Nature. “But when we looked at them closely, they were composed of entirely normal cells. We realized that birds don’t follow the mammalian model.”
In mammals, there are two types of sex-determining chromosomes, X and Y. Each cell in an embryo has a pair of chromosomes, either XX or XY, but the cells are otherwise identical. Then, early in development, in response to some environmental cue, a group of cells that will someday become ovaries or testes start to produce hormones that cause other cells to develop in male- or female-specific ways. It’s the hormones that matter: Exposed to lots of testosterone and deprived of estrogen, cells with female chromosomes will form masculine tissues, and vice versa.”
Read more at Wired (thanks, Tiram)
Pi Day: Five Tasty Facts About The Famous Ratio
“Mathematics enthusiasts will this weekend be celebrating Pi day, which falls on 14 March in honour of the famous ratio’s first few digits, 3.14. You probably know that pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, but here are some less familiar facts about the mathematical constant. We did consider giving you 3.14 facts but alas we had five…
Pi really is in the sky…
The stars overhead inspired the ancient Greeks, but they probably never used them to calculate pi. Robert Matthews of the University of Aston in Birmingham, UK, combined astronomical data with number theory to do just that.
Matthews used the fact that for any large collection of random numbers, the probability that any two have no common factor is 6/pi2. Numbers have a common factor if they are divisible by the same number, not including 1. For example, 4 and 15 have no common factors, but 12 and 15 have the common factor 3.”
Read more at New Scientist (thanks, SuZi)
Bottled Air Offered To Stressed Workers
“Bottled fresh air from some of the country’s favourite beauty spots is being given out to stressed city workers by the National Trust.
The air, which was collected from seaside and rural areas around the UK, comes in several scents, including the seaside smell of Townend, and the lakeside aroma of Windermere in Cumbria.
Other aromas include the grass-filled air of Stourhead in Wiltshire, and woodland scents from Box Hill, Surrey.
Three-quarters of UK workers (74 per cent) claim that they feel stressed on a daily basis, but 70 per cent say that escaping from the city makes them feel instantly relaxed, according to a National Trust study.
The most relaxing activity was a walk with a breath of sea air, according to 72 per cent of those surveyed, with 66 per cent saying that a walk in the country air was the best stress reliever.
But 59 per cent of people said a breath of fresh air of any kind was enough to reduce their stress levels.
With this in mind, the National Trust came up with a natural solution for city workers across the country. Each 454gram recycled glass jar of air can relieve stress for 10 minutes, they claim.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, Mill)
Why Surprises Temporarily Blind Us
“Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound.
New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises.
The research was published March 7, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.
‘The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated,” René Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, said. “We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention.’
The researchers were also interested in what happens to us when our attention is captured by an unexpected event.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, SuZi)
The Octopus: All Brain, No Personality?
“Octopuses make for discerning TV viewers: it seems they prefer high-definition to traditional cathode ray images (CRT). What’s more, the first study using video to trick octopuses, finds that they may be the Jekyll and Hydes of the oceans: aggressive one day, shrinking violets the next.
“People have been trying for over a decade to get proper behavioural responses from octopuses and other cephalopods using videos,” says Roger Hanlon, an octopus researcher at the Marine Resources Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study. “But this is the first time anyone has managed it.”
Gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) reacted to films shown on liquid crystal high definition television (HDTV) as if they were seeing the real thing, according to a new study by Renata Pronk at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues. “They lunge forwards to attack crabs and back off from other octopuses, much as they do in the wild,” says Hanlon.
Surprisingly, an octopus that was bold, aggressive and exploratory on one day was just as likely to be shy, submissive and stationary the next. “This suggests that the gloomy octopus does not have personality,” writes Pronk in the new study.”
Read more at New Scientist
Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity On Display
“JERUSALEM — There are pasted-on half pages, numerous cross-outs and insertions in meticulous penmanship and an open acknowledgment that some of the mathematics was beyond even him. Albert Einstein personally rewrote the laws of physics in a sparsely furnished central Berlin apartment nearly a century ago and the resulting manuscript, profoundly human and surprisingly moving to examine, has been put on display here for the first time.
Each of the 46 pages, labored over between November 1915 and their publication in May 1916, has its own case, each lighted dimly in a room that has been darkened to protect the paper. There on Page 1 is the now familiar title in German: “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity.”
The display of the work, which forced a redefinition of gravity, predicted the existence of black holes and illuminated how galaxies are formed, is at the center of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Out of concern for the life of the documents, it will be up only for the next three weeks.”
Read more at the NY Times
Hull, first night
Last night was especially fun. A day off (Wednesday had been a travelling day from Eastbourne to Hull) always brings a slight scattiness to the performance, which was all part of the fun created by a terrific audience. Eastbourne crowds are lovely but famously quiet, so it was encouraging to really feel the presence of the audience again. The participants too were lively and fun – all very much appreciated. I really loved the show.
It was a real pleasure to meet so many of you afterwards too: thank you those of you who bought prezzies for me and the crew. Particular mention to the delightful Elizabeth who had brought far too many generous gifts wrapped in impressively home-produced ‘Derren Brown’ wrapping paper. Thank you all. And I know Coops was very impressed with his Roast Beef Monster Munch T-shirt last night: an excellent coup, I thought, pun intended.
It is such a sweet thing to occasionally be handed a little prezzie from someone who’s enjoyed the show, but please don’t go over the top with them. Think we’re going to need a bigger truck…
Today I must persevere with TV writing accompanied by the brilliant Iain: some pressure is on to assemble ideas into a produceable format. Together we shall pace my small room and sweat blood until a new nugget of sparkling televisual gold is alchemically formed. Or not: more likely we’ll settle on an idea that seems ridiculous in the morning. I’m also doing a TV interview this afternoon for BBC ‘Look North’, during which I shall insist on looking North. They want to do it in a dressing room, but I don’t think they’ve seen how small the dressing rooms are. I don’t have long to think of a few amusing things to have in the background… false goatees lined up on polystyrene heads, that sort of thing.
Thanking you.
x
Artist travels world fixing crumbling monuments with Lego
“Jan Vormann, 26, has taken his project from its humble beginnings at an art fair in Rome and brightened up thousands of people’s days with his brightly coloured plastic version of Polyfilla. From the old quarter of Tel Aviv in Israel to the grand Bryant Park of New York, Mr Vormann has acted either independently or with the city’s permission to leave a little part of his childhood behind.
Estimating to have used upwards of 1,000 of the little Danish building blocks, Mr Vormann enlists the help of passers-by intrigued by his careful placing of the Lego bricks. “I like to think of my work as a Repair Manifesto,” said the Berlin-based installation artist. “My work draws attention to the smallest parts of our cities that are falling apart because of the brightness of the Lego. “It draws people’s attention through the coloured blocks and makes them aware that this wall or statue or construction is not complete anymore, for whatever reason. “In the case of my latest project in New York which I completed in early March, I simply wanted to help the Mayor Bloomberg brighten up the great city.”"
Read more at The Telegraph
Stunning Ant Colony
This video is rather surprising – just keep watching you will be amazed.
Einstein’s Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale
“The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a new study.
The finding suggests that the invisible substance called dark matter and the even more mysterious force known as dark energy are not just figments of physicists’ imaginations.
For centuries Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation worked well enough to explain gravity on Earth. But astronomers eventually saw discrepancies in the way larger objects such as planets interacted.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published in 1916, proposed that gravity works on large scales because matter warps the fabric of space and time, also known as space-time. (See “Einstein and Beyond” in National Geographic magazine.)
This notion has been used to successfully explain phenomena in our solar system, such as the slight alterations in Mercury’s orbit around the sun, which Newton’s gravity couldn’t account for.
The existence of dark matter and dark energy is based on the assumption that Einstein’s gravity is affecting galaxies billions of light-years from Earth in the same way that it affects objects in our solar system.
Based on general relativity, for example, scientists think dark matter exists because some cosmic objects behave as if they have more mass than we can see.
But until now, tests of general relativity on galactic scales have been inconclusive.”
Read more at National Geographic
