A Shifty Look – Is He Truly Lying Or Has He A Wandering Eye?


Buying a used car? Making a political donation? Does the guy taking your money have a shifty look? If so, you’ll probably think twice before believing those silver-tongued blandishments.

The received wisdom is that if the person’s eyes keep looking up to the right, they are lying so steer clear. If the eyes keep wandering up to the left, you can go ahead, the guy is trustworthy. Well, Wiseman et al are too wise to go along with that and have put it to the test with some experiments (1).

32 canny Scots undergraduates were set up to pretend to put a cell phone in an office but in fact stuff it in their pocket and then lie about what they saw in the drawer that they put the phone into. They ran through the procedure again, but this time they actually put the phone in the drawer after rifling through so the could report out what they saw truthfully. Their eye movements were carefully logged. Coding was done both by the experimenters and another group of undergrads.

Results? No agreement with the eyes right or eyes left theories, so they got serious with videos of ‘real’ people pleading on TV for the return of abducted children. Half of the 52 videos showed people who later had compelling evidence against them that they had been responsible for the disappearance and hence were lying.

Everybody looked at the camera. No flicking eyes up to the right or left. Looks like we’re back to the polygraph, but maybe not. We pickup on a plethora of non-verbal signals and have long, long ago learned to put these together to decide if we think a guy is straight up or crooked as a corkscrew. The trouble starts when we listen to the blandishments.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040259



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Educating The Twittering Classes


How are we going to be educating the twittering classes? No brainer! By Tweeting our thumbs off. Of course the effectiveness of education has to be assessed and Edu–Twittering is no exception and there is now a definitive study available.

Last year’s Kidney Week was held during the week of November 8th and had 10,000+ participants. With their hash tag Twitter address, some of those 10,000 were able to work those thumbs, night and day, to educate, advertise, ask questions or make wisecracks. Desai et al painstaking read through all these Tweets, classified, evaluated, boxed them up, and finally, reported out in this week’s Public Library of Science (1).

The first surprise (to me) was that only 172 people of the 10,000 had twitter-engaged thumbs so the size of the Twittering Classes among the kidney cognoscenti seems rather limited, although they Tweeted at five times each on average. Uninformative Tweets in the form of advertisements took up about a third of the Tweeting space.

What makes an informative Tweet? The authors homed in on three criteria. Firstly, the Tweet had to have something to add to the Tweetee’s understanding of kidney disease, secondly, there should be some internal citations (after all a Tweet is not a tablet of stone which would henceforth be a self-evident factoid), and lastly, an informative Tweet should have ‘positive sentiment score’.

Snarky Tweeting is not going to be educative for the Tweetee except in terms of education of the Tweetor likeability rating. The general conclusion was that Tweeting is a good thing in terms of increasing informed awareness of conference topics and can be usefully employed by any conference organizer.

Perhaps academics should consider Tweeting their lecture bullet points out as they reach them (clearly with a positive sentiment). The vibration of smartphones all over the lecture hall might waken up those in the back rows.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040253



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The Cat's Coming Back!


The big news this week appears in Katie Hill’s post (1) and syndicated round the world by the BBC (2). A big Film Festival is scheduled to open in Minneapolis on August, 30th, 2012. Why is this so compelling? Because you avid fans of action movies (and sometimes inaction movies) out there can nominate your fav clip.

The clips are YouTube type videos of cats being cats being cats. Clever cats, comic cats, capering cats, conniving cats, contrary cats, comely cats, celebrity cats and, of course, let’s not forget cute cats will be hogging the limelight exclusively. No dogs will be able to cock a leg at this parade.

The cat’s coming back. Last years most viewed YouTube celebrity video was the talking dog, but with such a cat cornucopia to choose from after August, 30, dogs will be left in the dust chewing slippers.

Send off your nomination, mark your cat’s calendar and there will be no caterwauling!

  1. http://blogs.walkerart.org/mnartists/2012/05/31/internet-cat-video-film-festival-on-open-field/
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18795123


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Let's Get A Charge Out Of This


Cell phone need charging? Well, look at your nice new T-shirt and suggest let’s get a charge out of this. Plug it in and you would be able to get back to your proper function of keeping the twittering classes fully informed. It’s coming soon in a store near you – not this year, but soon.

Bao and Li of U of S Carolina have made a great start according to their paper in Advanced Materials, which was picked up by the BBC (1,2). They have made bits of a T-shirt into a super capacitor, which can be charged, depleted and recharged again, again and again…

The first step is a rather unconventional wash and dry cycle. They cwashed the cotton with salt water, sodium fluoride not chloride (hard on the hands so wear gloves) and then went through a very fierce drying cycle. Firstly it was pre-dried at 120 Celsius and then at ~900 Celsius in an Argon gas stream to prevent it from vanishing in a puff of smoke. A final rinse in clean water and a good dry (120C again) and their white cotton was now a nice black piece of fabric.

No dyes nor cotton any longer, but activated carbon, all ready to be decorated. Little manganese dioxide nano-flowers were electrochemically deposited all over using deposition from a manganese acetate solution. A nice wash and dry and their new capacitor was all ready to go.

The fabric is flexible, mechanically stable and the capacity for being a great super capacitor. You might not want to sweat too much or go out in the rain without a coat, but those would be a minor disadvantage compared to hours of longer twittering time that would become available. The cache´ of asking strangers if they like the nano-floral decoration on your cell phone charger would be a bonus.

  1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201200246/full
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18781878


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How Deep Should Your Deep Freeze Be?


If you’re not going to eat it now (whatever "it" is), you toss it in the deep freeze, but just how deep should your deep freeze be? Not deep enough if you really want to go for broke and forget dates. Would 3,000 years be long enough? Or what about 8,000?

Yes it can be done according to Robinson’s recent Salzburg paper reported out by BBC Nature (1).  On a nice little spot in East Antarctica food stored is still being used on a regular basis. Robinson from the U of Wollongong has been studying the mosses at the edge of a lake, which seemed to be happily growing on a barren sand/gravel base.

Apparently the mosses only grow when it’s sunny down there and the top layer of ice melts, and then as the icy winters come rushing in everything is back in deep freeze. With the wind and the cold, even the mosses freeze, but not before they are dried out so ice crystals don’t disrupt their cellular structure. Next year, rather briefly for those of us living in more temperate climes, the sun returns to produce some water from the ice. Rehydration and growth returns, as if by magic.

But what magic? All of those of us from ex-farming stock, now reduced to window boxes and bonsai, know that plants crave nitrogen – not an abundant element in sand and gravel. Well Professor Robinson’s 16 years of cool work cracked it. Thousands of years ago a penguin colony was in residence and penguins live on fish and fish live on krill down the food chain to algae.

A penguin has to do what a penguin has to do, which after offering suitable nest pebbles to a friend and dining on fish, then proceeds to guano coat the scenery in a rather haphazard manner. So thousands of years of their decorative habits prior to 3,000 years ago has left a deep frozen supply of processed nitrogen, enriched with minerals of course, as manna for moss.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18704332



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Warming Up Is Hard To Do


Athletes, Olympian or just wannabes, spend time warming up and stretching before competitions, but most mammals don’t bother with such niceties – they just get on with it. Not usually for sport, but to eat and go about their life plan.

But some mammals find their food of choice in cold water, so what is their species strategy? They grow bigger and keep cool so they conserve energy to make few but long underwater trips to feed. So when Campbell et al from U Manitoba got down and dirty with their studies of the diminutive American Water Shrew, they were in for a surprise (1).

Not for S palustris  the long dives, these creatures are only a couple of inches long (not counting the tail) and they have to get in and out quickly. Having to eat their body weight of small fish, dragonfly larvae, tadpoles and other such delicious fare, that means a great deal of in and out, with the cold water a constant challenge.

The answer? They do their shivering first. This heats their body up, maybe by a degree Celsius or more. Going in hot to trot, or rather dive, means that they don’t slow down, get their target prey and are out again before their teeth start chattering.

So being contrary can sometimes work to keep small and beautiful. Being bigger and slower isn’t always the best strategy, not that shivering on demand is an easy trick to master.


  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18674864



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