Moldy News


A plasmodium of slime mold may not be everyone’s idea of a pet. It’s not cute, beautiful or cuddly, nor does it hang on your every word. But you can teach it to do tricks. Also, and this is greatly in its favor, it is cheap to feed and doesn’t tear up the furniture if you go out for the day and leave it at home.

Geek note: A plasmodium is a huge single cell with multiple nuclei, which will grow towards a food source.  

A pet that does tricks is high up on our list of  “must haves” that we all consult frequently when we take a moment away from the rat race. What tricks could my personal plasmodium do? Well you can use it as a biological computer, maybe even let it help with your kid’s hard math problem. You can get more details in the new paper by Adamatzky of the U of WOE (1) for ideas for tricks to impress your friends.

What attracted my attention were its feeding habits, not its ability to calculate optimal graphs or find its way through mazes, amazing though that may be. Being brought up on a Spartan diet of rolled oats with an occasional dollop of honey and completely eschewing salt, I was surprised to read that it had an addiction to sedatives.

Its drug of choice was Glaxo-Smith-Kline’s ‘Nytol’, which has a content high in valerian root and hop leaves. If this fix isn’t available, it will sniff out Kalms Sleep from G.R.Lane. It would mainline on valerian root if it got the chance, but this isn’t normally available on the High Streets in uncut form.

It can be tempted with passionflower, although wild lettuce and vervain will do at a push, but it gets a bit sniffy if offered gentian, however, it will accept it in the end.

In an experiment to introduce a new recreational drug to the slime mold, nepetalactone was offered. This comes from catnip and produces a psychosexual response in cats when sniffed (2). It doesn’t do the same for us people though, it just sends us to sleep like the valerian root and it positively repels cockroaches. How did the slime mold plasmodium respond? It was okay, but not as good as the valerian.

  1. http://precedings.nature.com/documents/5985/version/1/files/npre20115985-1.pdf
  2. http://chemistry.about.com/od/medicalhealth/a/Nepetalactone-Chemistry.htm

Learning The Hard Way


Elephants are credited with having an extremely good long-term memory capability. A good memory is a survival asset and our locations, with refuges and food sources, are critical learning requirements for a large number of species. How quickly we learn, though, is another problem.
                                                                     Great Pond Snail                                                        
Wikipedia

Apparently when it comes to memory and wrote learning, the great pond snail is a good test subject. Perhaps not up to the standard to make it a regular circus performer, but good enough to keep the attention of an academic audience.

The latest challenge to these mollusks was thrown down by Dalesman et al (1). They rooted around in a couple of small drainage ditches and a couple of large canals to acquire four populations of these performers. They were dumped into pond water and given half an hour to memorize the details of their new surroundings. 24 hours later, they “sat” their examinations.

Bad news was to follow. Only a dismal 25% pass rate was achieved. The populations were given a year to get their acts together and then went through the same procedure. Alas, with the same result.

Now it was time for a serious intervention. Tench and crayfish like great pond snails, for lunch that is. When our mollusk students got a whiff of either, their long-term memory improved to a remarkable level.

Clearly, in the carrot and stick approach used here, the carrot was not a very worthwhile carrot. On the other hand the stick was certainly big enough. Will we see an equivalent introduced for human students in the Universities of Calgary and Plymouth who collaborated on this study?
  
  1. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.005

Working For Peanuts


The family of great apes, the orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees, share almost all their genetic code with each other and us. I have even been told that men are genetically closer to male chimpanzees than women (because of the Y-chromosome), but I suspect that was more in the spirit of a put-down than a scientific classification.

Over recent years, we have come to respect their intelligence more and more. We never tire of devising new challenges for them in their captive environment. Hanus et al from the Max Planck in Leipzig have just challenged a group of great apes to compete with children at ages 4, 6 and 8 years old with “the floating peanut test”(1). Some of the apes were lab. captive and others were in sheltered accommodation in a reserves in Uganda and Indonesia. The children, on the other hand, were quite free-range and were coralled from local kindergartens and primary schools.

The test consists of a peanut in a clear acrylic tube strapped very firmly to the wall and the subject has to devise a means to retrieve it. They have access to water but no electric saws or drills.  The solution to the problem is to float the peanut out with water so they could eat it.

The gorillas didn’t cope with this at all. Perhaps a solitary peanut doesn’t look much like a treat to a large gorilla suffering from middle-aged spread. The other problem for the apes is that they had to carry the water in their mouth and spit it into the top of the tube. Rather difficult with a face shaped like an ape and a narrow tube strapped to a wall. They had to do a lot of supping and spitting to add enough water.

The Orangs were in a care Center in Indonesia and didn’t do well either. This was a surprise as a previous group in Leipzig had been quite good at it. 20% of the chimpanzees got their nuts.

So how did the kids do? They didn’t have to spit as they had water in a pitcher in the room. Well, the 4-year olds didn’t do as well as the chimps with only 8% getting their nut. Six year olds did better with a 50% success rate. This rate increased to nearly sixty percent with 8-year olds.

My question is why did 40% of 8-year olds fail? Was the reward too small and their expectations too high?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019555;jsessionid=1A8937E918CEB8B9FF571EB88565ACCA.ambra02

And Yet Another Oscar?


The activity in our brains is yielding more and more to magnetic resonance imaging and reading the genes. In this context, the BBC acted as a catalyst for a rather nice study suggested by Colin Firth while he was doing a bit of guest editing on the current affairs program, ‘Today,’ during the run up to Christmas. He had the bright idea that politicians should have their heads examined. The combined power of the Beeb and Mr. Firth resulted in a labor Member and a conservative Member of Parliament having their brains looked at.

The exciting results were too good to ignore and a study of 90 students at U College London, who are soon to be released into the arms of the unsuspecting public, was started and has now been published (1,2). After the Blair-Brown disaster and UCL being moderately upmarket, no student was asked to admit to being of the Labor persuasion.  They had to rate their political views on a five-point scale between very liberal to very conservative.

The big magnet then teased out their gray matter variations in three parts of the brain. These were the amygdala where your fear factor lurks, the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps you dither and the left insula where feelings of disgust start seeping out from.

The more liberal leaning had more gray matter to dither with in their cingulate cortex. That is, they can tolerate more uncertainty. A fatter amygdala and insula correlated with being conservative and means you have more to get worried about things with and feel disgusted.

Your lifestyle and brain activity do cause changes in your brain so it is interesting to speculate about what they have been teaching these guys at UCL, or have they all been watching too much television, and which channels?

If these gray matter features don’t change much with age and experience, we could save money on elections and just give everybody brain scans as an 18th birthday present and then juggle the parliamentary composition on the basis of a running average. Clearly, the selection of politicians should include information on how plump their amygdalas and cingulate cortexes are. We voters have a need to know.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13661538
  2. R. Kanal, T. Fellden, C. Firth, & G. Rees, Current Biology, 21, 677, (2011).

Cloud Cuckoo Land


Connectivity is the watchword of today civilization, even though many of us are running as fast as we can to catch up. This is a problem, of course, as the technology is speeding up and we are getting older and slower. So, now we have the question: “how much time do we spend struggling helplessly in that web?” Too much maybe.

Internet Addiction Disorder, IAD, is now a problem. A recent study by Yuan et al (1) took a close look at a group of nineteen-year olds who have been diagnosed with IAD. These young adults spent a little over 10 hours per day in Internet use for at least six days a week.

Five years ago, this would seemed to have been excessive, but today my eyebrows aren’t raised. With our social media duties of liking friend’s wall art and comments, with tagging this and that along with tweeting and searching for restaurants, we have little time left for aiding our avatar’s social lives on Second Life and have to pack in our multi-player activities into those key hours of the day when we are supposed to be glued to our TVs to see what we should be desiring tomorrow. Fourteen hours a day Internet free sounds pretty good.

However, this is not the case with young brains. The brain scans of the individuals in the study, showed decreases in gray matter compared to the expected norm, indicating that some loss of cognitive function in a range of areas was predicted. They also indicated greater feelings of depression. The longer the length of the addiction, the greater the degree of brain atrophy that was observed.

The cause and effects here are not entirely obvious. Detailed screening for other health issues was rigorous, but the social issues prior to addiction aren’t very clear. Once addicted, late nights on the internet were favored even when disrupting their family or room mates lives.

I will have to keep a check on my internet consumption and get back to spending evenings surfing the plethora of reality TV shows with my twitchy ADHD controlled fingers. IAD coupled with ADHD and equipment becoming outdated in six months after purchase, is likely to be catching up with more and more of us in the short term.

  1.  http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020708

Listening In


Social learning is an occupation that takes up a great deal of our time, at least for the non-hermits amongst us. The direct approach is generally favored and we have the formalities of meeting and greeting learned at an early age. But this amounts to a small part of our actual social learning. We expend a great deal of our efforts in eavesdropping.

In a social learning context, eavesdropping is an okay practice. It doesn’t refer to being nosey and listening into a private conversation, whether for your or your government’s delectation. It refers to observing and listening in a social context, and many species make assessments of individuals on this basis. Love, or hate, at first sight is down to how we perceive the sights and sounds of an individual. Portrait painters, writers and those merciless ad-men make a living out of eavesdropping in the psychology sense.

It was interesting to note that this month’s issue of the journal, Animal Behaviour, has two papers on the subject. The first one that caught my attention was on how the ranking of dominance in us guys was dependent on eavesdropping (1). The subjects, and remember that we are all subjects in this world-wide psychological experiment, ranked guys as being higher up the dominance tree after seeing them being aggressive with someone else. The more aggressive, the more dominant. No surprises there, as we have all let the pushy or the bully get away with it at one time or another. The surprise for me was that the perception of the trustworthiness of the more aggressive characters was not affected by the observation of aggressive behavior. Amazing, but I guess many people like “strong leaders!”

Less disturbing, was the paper on how our doggy-friends eavesdrop on us when we are with the chattering classes around our dinner tables. A set of carefully controlled experiments were carried out to see if the dogs could rank our food sharing potential, and whether it was on the basis of gestures or conversation going around the table. Again a surprise result for me. It was the vocal cues that were being followed. Now, I know many of you out there will tell me that “he understands every word I say,” but beware, he might understand more than you would like him to.

  1. B.C. Jones, L.M. DeBruine, A.C. Little, C.D. Watkins, & D.R. Fienberg, Animal Behaviour, 81, 1203, (2011).
  2. S.Marshall-Pescini, C. Passelacqua, A. Ferrario, P. Valsecchi, & E. Prato-Previde, Animal Behaviour, 81, 1177, (2011).

Playing Safe?


The Romans thought that all swans were white, but the Australians knew better, and Europe was amazed around 1700 when they shared their secret. Now we use the term Black Swan event to describe a surprise that we hadn’t predicted. In 1690 would you have invested in a company trying to raise swans that were black?

If we are looking over our investment portfolio, we try and play safe when our paper gurus in the press mutter about possible disasters. If we are told something is risky, we avoid it and choose the certain gain. We all nod wisely and mutter the old proverb about “a bird in the hand etc.” Faced with a falling market, many of us will take the risk of a bigger loss on the off chance when we read that an investment might buck the trend.

Later, when we’re sitting in the bar drowning our sorrows and agreeing with our fellow nouveau– pauvreté, we tell each other that it wasn’t our fault, it’s just our lack of experience. Next time, hmm… next time. Ludvig and Spetch from Princeton U (1) decided to pin down what the decisions would be when things weren’t so risky. They carried out experiments in which the participants could choose an easy win or take a risk of increasing it or loosing it. In addition they also had decisions to make in losing situations where they could accept a small loss or take the risk of a bigger loss or maybe none. 

Here is the interesting bit though. The experiments were designed so that they were just given the choices or that they were trained on the frequency of particular events occurring. As the authors put it making decisions based on ‘contemplating the future or reflecting on the past.’

Our alcoholic driven epiphany in the bar was correct. Experience would lead us to be less risk averse when it comes to gains and not to throw good money after bad when losses are on the menu. One wonders if there is a lot of poker played around the Princeton campus.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020262