Is She Hot Or What?


There is an old saying that ‘horses sweat, men perspire but ladies only glow’ and then the term ‘she’s hot’ takes on an entirely different significance. But perception is all. Now Amanda Hahn and her team have used their thermal imaging kit on a total of 39 young ladies to see if they are really hot (1).

When and how exactly, I hear you ask. In the first experiment 16 young ladies were interviewed by two experimenters, one was female and the other wasn’t. Skin temperatures were monitored. When the man was talking to them, their palms and outer arm were distinctly cool. But their face and chest gave them away with a significant temperature hike.

The measurements were repeated with another group of young women, who were also questioned about what they felt when chatting to their male interviewer. Their assessment of stress, discomfort, excitement, embarrassment, etc. were all recorded and compared to their telltale facial temperature changes, but no correlation was found as the women got hotter without realizing it when the young men started interacting with them.

So it seems that talking to young men gets young women hot and bothered and the authors conclude that measuring skin temperature is a good measure of the mating signals being displayed.

As most young men don’t carry thermal imaging kit about their person, they will have to rely on the age-old hit or miss techniques to decide if she is hot or what.

  1. http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/05/29/rsbl.2012.0338.full



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Time For A Fresh Brew


  “I love coffee, I love tea” is that well known line from Manhattan Transfer’s song, Java Jive. But we hear from various directions that too much coffee and even too much tea is bad for us. The threat of caffeine and overstimulation is not one that I have paid too much attention to, although I have been told to drink less on several occasions. My suggestion of switching to wine has never gone down well.

Now my predilection for a cup of char is being supported by meta-analysis. The new study is by the InterAct Consortium who have been looking at a very large number of people and their likelihood of getting Type 2 Diabetes (1).

This is a pan-European study so it goes across avid tea-drinkers like the English at 4 cups per day to the Spanish who prefer coffee and drink (on average) >1 cups per day. The power of the study was this wide spread in national proclivities. Previous national studies were constrained to looking at groups with similar habits.

To cut to the chase so I can finish this before I have to put the kettle on to brew another pot, the good news is that ≥4 cups of tea reduces your risk of type 2 diabetes by 16%.
Unfortunately there is no mention of cup size per se and cup sizes may also vary across Europe, but the assumption was that a cup contained 125 g of tea. No mention is made of milk or lemon or of the order of addition

 I’m sticking to my mug and so far type 2 diabetes is still at bay. I do get several calls a week from companies selling diabetes supplies who are keen to send me a free glucose meter, but I have had to disappoint them so far.

Now it’s time for a fresh brew, a Dargeeling/Assam blend with a hint of bergamot will suit well.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036910



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Those Noisy Neighbors


Noisy neighbors are always a pain. Of course we are never noisy, well, not like those neighbors. Our music or TVs are always just loud enough for us to enjoy what’s going on and we turn things off at a reasonable time, don’t we?

Well, maybe so, but we’d better not ask the neighbors or they may also start complaining about noisy neighbors. Clearly, one aspect of the problem is dense urban dwelling, but the other aspect leads us into a wonderland of our perceptions and perspectives.

In order to check this out quantitatively rather than anecdotally, Desantis et al have done some experiments and their data hit the sidewalks yesterday in PLoS ONE (1).

They signed up a dozen young people for a price of €10 per hour to press a button when a hand on a clock got to their name. There was another person, who they thought was also a participant, whose name also appeared on the clock face but on a different part. The trick was that when they pressed the button a buzzer might or might not go off. There were significant apparent arbitrary delays built in, so that the participant had an added element of uncertainty.

They then had to listen to a sound that they were clearly certain that the other person had generated so that they could gauge the loudness of theirs against. With a variety of delays and levels of sound they had to think quite hard.

Of course, social and cognitive scientists don’t usually play fair and the sounds that they thought the other person had generated was one that they had. The authors are triumphant in that they say that if we think we are the originator of the noise, however unpleasant, we are convinced that we were quieter than when that other person was responsible.

Clearly, it always our noisy neighbors who are at fault. We rest our case.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037959



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Your Miniature Humanoid Friend


When we were young many of us had imaginary friends. They would accompany us and play when other friends weren’t available. Even now it sometimes helps to have a conversation with oneself although we wouldn’t set an extra place at the dinner table.

But now you can take your friend with you wherever you go. Discovery News in a hot report from the IEEE conference tells us of Yamagata U’s robotics team who have built a miniature humanoid friend that will happily ride along on your shoulder and take in the sights, discuss the poor service that you’re getting in that foreign café, or tell you that you’re lost.

Your miniature humanoid friend can wave his arms around (I suspect that they come dressed as a girl as well as a guy), waggle his head and breathe realistically.

MH–2, as he is affectionately known, isn’t just an animated doll, but due to the wonder of radio waves, is a real world avatar for a real friend who was too busy with a six-pack of their favorite brew to come along on your expedition.

What happens is that they turn on their Kinect or equivalent and MH–2 follows their actions and transmits what they should be looking at back to their TV screen so they too can enjoy the scenery, whether it is buildings, mountains or members of the opposite sex.

MH–2 does come with a sizable life support backpack so you probably wouldn’t want to take him up Everest. Also it could be a bit creepy taking him along to the bathroom. Leaving him outside to chat to strangers would probably be a poor option and, of course, he would never pay half the dinner check.

  1. http://news.discovery.com/tech/shoulder-robot-120529.html


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Clockwise


We are all creatures of habit, even when we try to be spontaneous. True spontaneity is very difficult to keep up and we revert back to our humdrum regular behavior. Along with this habitual behavior comes our dependence on the clock. Even when we neglect to set the alarm, hoping, perhaps, that we may sleep in, we wake up as usual a few minutes before it is due to go off. Our circadian rhythms seem to take all our essential activities into account.

Mealtimes are just one of those essential activities and we start getting restive as they approach. Our animal friends also find themselves in the same boat. Once they get used to a set of mealtimes, they start to get excited as their internal clock warns them to get ready. Luby et al decided to use their mice to check out how they felt about regular feeding and published their data in PLoS ONE (1).

To start with, they put groups of their mice on a restricted calorie diet so there would be no eating between meals to spoil their appetites. Several regular feeding regimens were tried at 12, 8 and 4 hour intervals and the mice quickly got used to that and stamped about impatiently waiting for service.

18 hour feeding intervals were not well received as food would not arrive at a regular time each day and the mice could not fit lunch conveniently into their circadian rhythm. They did make an effort, but gave that idea a resounding raspberry.

A much more popular option was being fed once a day at a regular time, but with the meal split up into 6 small helpings served at 30 minute intervals, allowing plenty of time for socializing as a well brought up mouse may wish to do.

The net result was to show that mice were distinctly clockwise and therefore, creatures of habit governed by circadian clocks just like us. So if you want to catch your mice, try feeding them at regular times each day and avoid putting that trap out at odd times when you happen to think about it – they are much less likely to cooperate.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037992


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Another G and T, Sir?


  Alcoholic drinks have been with us for a very long time and occur naturally as fruit falls and ferments with yeasts on the surface working their magic on the juices oozing from damaged skins. I well remember an occasion, when too busy to pick the plums from our plum trees, encountering a large number of wasps and bees crawling about having difficulty in flying and having to consider walking home. They were not in a very good mood and I expect their hangovers were significant.

Accidental drinking apart, many of us enjoy a jar or two and treat ethanol with the respect it deserves. This is not always possible, though, and sometimes she (somehow ethanol sounds female although dictionaries insist that it is masculine) becomes a demanding mistress.

Sometimes our like of alcohol gets all-absorbing as our amygdala takes complete control. It is interesting though that our amygdala shrinks as we become alcoholic, but what is the chemical mechanism involved?

This is clearly an important but challenging question and Lesscher et al were not going to let this issue pass them by and set about to sort things out and take a look deep into the genes. They reported out last week (1).

When it comes to drunks, mice and men become pretty much of a muchness. Hence the investigators started out with mice who were simple social drinkers taking a drop or two when they felt like it. Like many of us with too little to do and a bottle at hand, the mice increased their alcohol consumption over the first couple of weeks and then wandered around in a happily titrated daze.

Well, of course, if you are interested in genomics and have a large number of alcoholic mice staggering about, you have a chance to look for the alcoholic’s control gene and the amygdala 14-3-3ζ gene seemed to fit the bill nicely. So the next step was to either knockdown the gene or enhance via infusion and to watch what happens.

Well, when it was knocked out, the mice escalated there drinking and carousing. They really needed their regular fix, as they weren’t being put off by the addition of quinine to their drinks.

I should point out that a G and T has quinine in it and has been a favorite beverage for a rather long time, so asking a sozzled rodent if it would like another G and T was likely to be answered in the affirmative. We all need to look after our 14-3-3ζs to keep us under control.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037999

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Chili-Fennel Communication


Gardening can be very relaxing, especially when we are looking after our plants indoors. When nobody is watching, many of us talk to them. Of course, whether or not this cheers them up or it’s just for our benefit is still a subject for debate over a glass or two.

As usual, the focus is on our communication skills and we totally ignore those of the plants. Not so with Gagliano et al who have been taking an interest in the communication skills of red hot chili peppers – not the rock band you understand, but the plants and you can read about their adventures in the Public Library of Science (1).

They had noted that plants are known to communicate chemically, both through the soil and through the air, in addition to using light at the far-red end of the spectrum. So they set out to see if that was the limit of their repertoire. They chose chili plants and watched the progress of baby plants, firstly on their own, but then in the presence of adult chili baby sitters or, more threateningly, adult fennel plants. I must admit that I was blithely ignorant about the long-standing issues between chili and fennel.

The experiments were set up so that seed germination and early growth could not be affected by chemical messages nor by light signals. The results showed that not only did more of the chili seeds germinate when fennel plants were present, but the plants grew longer roots and stems.

The question remains open as to how the seeds and seedlings knew that fennel plants were lurking around out of site, but they responded positively in two years worth of experiments. The authors speculate on weak magnetic fields and sound, but maybe the lab techs gave it away by talking to them. Whichever is the cause, chili-fennel communication is effective.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0037382


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