Wild Cat Found Mimicking Monkey Calls
“In a fascinating example of vocal mimicry, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and UFAM (Federal University of Amazonas) have documented a wild cat species imitating the call of its intended victim: a small, squirrel-sized monkey known as a pied tamarin. This is the first recorded instance of a wild cat species in the Americas mimicking the calls of its prey.
The extraordinary behavior was recorded by researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and UFAM in the Amazonian forests of the Reserva Florestal Adolpho Ducke in Brazil. The observations confirmed what until now had been only anecdotal reports from Amazonian inhabitants of wild cat species — including jaguars and pumas — actually mimicking primates, agoutis, and other species in order to draw them within striking range.
The observations appear in the June issue of Neotropical Primates. The authors of the paper include: Fabiano de Oliveira Calleia of Projeto Sauim-de-Coleira/UFAM; Fabio Rohe of the Wildlife Conservation Society; and Marcelo Gordo of Projeto Sauim-de-Coleira/UFAM.
“Cats are known for their physical agility, but this vocal manipulation of prey species indicates a psychological cunning which merits further study,” said WCS researcher Fabio Rohe.”
Read more at Science Daily
It’s the way they move – politicians’ personalities inferred from their motion patterns
“People form impressions about the personality of politicians simply from the way they move, according to a new study. This isn’t your typical body-language investigation into double-armed hand-shakes, bitten lips and fidgety fingers. Rather Markus Koppensteiner and Karl Grammer devised a new system for mathematically describing the movement patterns of forty real German politicians giving speeches in parliament. Each 16-second, silent video was converted into a stick figure by using an interactive computer programme to place dots on key landmarks such as the elbows, shoulders and forehead. The movement of these landmarks generated dynamic coordinate data which was then crunched according to mathematical characteristics including the ‘turbulence coefficient’ (i.e. periods of high activity followed by periods of low activity), and the activity levels of body parts such as the head and arms.
Next, 150 participants, mostly students, watched these same video clips and rated the personalities of the moving stick figures. The key finding was that there were correlations between the personality characteristics attributed by the students to the stick figures and the motion patterns of those stick figures as identified by the researchers’ motion analysis programme. For example, politicians who displayed a high turbulent coefficient (low activity interrupted by periods of high activity) tended to be rated as more agreeable. Those who displayed more head movements were considered less conscientious, and those who showed low turbulence (i.e. consistently high activity levels) with many horizontal and vertical arm movements tended to be considered more extravert.”
Read more at BPS Research Digest
Night Owls Are Smarter Than Other People
“Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably.
Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late.
A previous study found that evening people are smarter than morning people. In a new paper, Kanazawa replicates the finding and provides a theoretical grounding. Because the nocturnal lifestyle allowed by electricity didn’t exist 10,000 years ago, we must now rely on general intelligence to override our early-to-bed instincts. So those with more of it stay up later. How much later? See below.
Bedtimes and wake-up times for Americans in their 20s by IQ.
Very Dull (IQ < 75)
Weekday: 11:41 P.M.-7:20 A.M.
Weekend: 12:35 A.M.-10:09 A.M.
Normal (90 < IQ < 110)
Weekday: 12:10 A.M.-7:32 A.M.
Weekend: 1:13 A.M.-10:14 A.M.
Very Bright (IQ > 125)
Weekday: 12:29 A.M.-7:52 A.M.
Weekend: 1:44 A.M.-11:07 A.M.”
Read more at Psychology Today (Thanks @TheBritScott)
Amazing: The Scale of the Universe
Someone sent us a link to a slider application showing the scale of the universe. Click the picture below to visit the site and have a look. Quite fascinating.
Visit New Grounds to try it out (Thanks Blackdogmma)
Some Penn & Teller tickets left!
Penn and Teller – my favourite magicians – are so rare amongst conjurors: they have remained cool in a way that others seem to find impossible. I believe this is due mainly to the fact that their agenda has never been about themselves: they have never postured and apotheosised themselves in the hollow way magicians invariably do. And although they have always been the ‘bad boys’ of magic, disclosing methods and ridiculing the fraternity, they produce some of the finest pieces of magic you will ever see.
As you will probably know, they are performing at the Hammersmith Apollo this coming week. The show is fantastic: astonishing, in-your-face, gasp-out-loud, and very funny. There are some tickets left and it’s well, well worth going to see them. They so rarely come to the UK: this is a real treat.
Tickets can be bought here.
Dark Matter May Be Building Up Inside the Sun
“The sun could be a net for dark matter, a new study suggests. If dark matter happens to take a certain specific form, it could build up in our nearest star and alter how heat moves inside it in a way that would be observable from Earth.
Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that makes up about 83 percent of the matter in the universe, but doesn’t interact with electromagnetic forces. Although the universe contains five times as much dark matter as normal matter, dark matter is completely invisible both to human eyes and every kind of telescope ever devised. Physicists only know it’s there because of its gravitational effect on normal matter. Dark matter keeps galaxies spinning quickly without flying apart and is responsible for much of the large-scale structure in the universe.
Current dark matter detectors are looking for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, that connect only with the weak nuclear force and gravity. Based on the most widely accepted theories, most experiments are tuned to look for a particle that is about 100 times more massive than a proton. The chief suspect is also its own antiparticle: Whenever a WIMP meets another WIMP, they annihilate each other.
“This is something that has always worried me,” said astroparticle physicist Subir Sarkar of the University of Oxford. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the big bang, the particles should have completely wiped each other out by now. “Obviously that did not happen, we are here to prove it,” he said. “So something created an asymmetry of matter over antimatter,” letting a little bit of matter survive after all the antimatter was gone.”
Read more at Wired
More Than Two Hours of Daily TV, Video Game Time Can Cause Attention Problems
“Researchers studying middle school students and college graduates have found those playing video games or watching TV for more than two hours per day were roughly twice as likely to have significant attention problems. If only they’d measured internet use, too.
Iowa State researchers studied 1,323 third, fourth, or fifth graders, along with 210 college students. Each group reported their own television and video game use and attention problems, but teachers and parents also provided input on the younger group.
The study found that those subjects who exceeded the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommended video game and television limits of two hours per day were “about 1.6 times to 2.2 times more likely to have greater than average attention problems.”
The researchers’ self-stated conclusion is that video games need to be included in factoring in children and young adults’ total screen time for attention span research. Our conclusion, after thumbing back through our distractions and attention? Modern computing and office multi-tasking should be included in future studies, too.
Have you noticed greater attention problems in yourself or others who hit the screen pretty hard each day? Does it seem odd that honing in on one game for two hours per day can seemingly lead to focus problems?”
Read more at LifeHacker
When the scientific evidence is unwelcome, people try to reason it away
Written by Ben Goldacre:
“What do people do when confronted with scientific evidence that challenges their pre-existing view? Often they will try to ignore it, intimidate it, buy it off, sue it for libel or reason it away.
The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.
The results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views.
Some people go even further than this when presented with unwelcome data, and decide that science itself is broken. Politicians will cheerfully explain that the scientific method simply cannot be used to determine the outcomes of a drugs policy. Alternative therapists will explain that their pill is special, among all pills, and you simply cannot find out if it works by using a trial.
How deep do these views go, and how far do they generalise? Professor Geoffrey Munro took about 100 students and told them they were participating in a study on “judging the quality of scientific information”, now published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.”
Read the rest at The Guardian
Elephant Parade London
Elephant Parade is a conservation campaign that shines a multi-coloured spotlight on the urgent crisis faced by the endangered Asian elephant. Brought to you by www.elephantfamily.org, the event sees over 250 brightly painted life-size elephants located over central London this summer.
The Elephant Parade Mela and Live Auctions have raised over £1.8 million! Miniature elephants and the official art book are available to buy at Selfridges until the end of July or at the elephant parade online shop.
You can also sign their petition to save the asian elephant.
http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/ (Thanks Loz)
Are You Feeling Low? Take Part in Online Study
Researchers at University College London are carrying out an internet-based study into whether online support groups and expressive writing are beneficial for people.
This study is conducted entirely online.
It will involve you either joining an online support group or completing an expressive writing activity (minimum 5 minutes every two weeks) as well as filling in questionnaires about how you are feeling.
Visit their website to find out more:
http://www.onlinesupportresearch.com/ucl-online-support-groups-study/
