Butterflies Are One Of Life’s Pleasures


Butterflies are one of life’s pleasures. They are beautiful, varied and ephemeral. The way they come from some less than cuddly caterpillar creature is nothing short of amazing. Rearranging all those body parts whilst they are pupating is a feat of juggling with your eyes shut that leaves me in awe.

 Now some butterflies live short lives, some hibernate over the winter when there is no nectar to sup, but some are adventurers. The monarch flying from the upper parts of the United States down to the Amazon to enjoy the tropical beneficence and keep out of the snows, is well documented. It is sad that habitat loss from one end to the other of its route is putting it under stress.

Europe also has its migrants, and the Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui, is one that winters in Africa. The very large group of Stefanescu et al have published their study of this gem in the current journal of Ecography (1). This was no small effort. It included radar monitoring as well as ground based studies and brought in citizen crowd sourcing science work to follow the migratory progress.
Painted Lady                              Alvesgaspar, Creative Commons

The Grand Migration, (and it is fair to call it such,) takes six generations to complete the cycle. It broods continuously as it goes and the numbers can be huge – many millions on the wing. The populations steadily advance Northwards during the spring until, finally as Autumn approaches, they have to head South to the equator, thousands of kilometer away.

Those little fragile wings catch the wind and the butterflies take advantage and fly high to get the fastest drift. They can be found flying their hearts out over a kilometer up in the sky, should one take the time to look. The trip from the heart of Africa to the fringes of the Arctic Circle and back means that they clock up ~14,000 km at speeds up to 50 km/h.

The number of immigrant Painted Ladies to the UK in 2009 was ~11M and they prospered so that ~26M emigrated in the Autumn that year (2).

  1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2012.07738.x/abstract
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19991550

Young Blood – Put Your Order Into The Blood Bank For Your Memory’s Sake


Young blood may be to way to go for bright outlook on life. Of course, we aren’t full up of that young vital fluid pulsing through our veins after we see our 30-th birthday come and go. Looking out, things may look the same, but looking in, well let’s not pull any punches, we look progressively challenged in jeunesse doreé stakes.

After accidents in which we leak, or if we want to get a boost in a cycle race, blood transfusions are a good thing. The Guardian has a news item on the work reported by Villeda et al at the at the New Orleans meet of the Society of Neuroscience (1). They gave old mice transfusions of blood from young mice and that young blood perked the old fellas up no end.

Apparently, the scuttlebutt is that Kim Jong-Il was into young blood transfusions to aid his youthful outlook. The young blood he chose, was said to be from healthy young virgins (female I assume), but we don’t have confirmed data on this. So back to mice and science.

The old mice got their shots of young blood and their memories improved and the ageing process had slowed. There were 20% more neuron connections and that’s important for a mouse if you’re looking for your cheese. It’s even more important if it’s you or me and we’re looking for our car keys.

In addition to improved connectivity, they found an increase in stem cells and that’s really important for keeping your brain plump and healthy.

The question on all your lips is of course was it the young cells in the blood or proteins in the plasma. Well, after plasma injections our old-fella mice were repeatedly tossed into a swimming pool with islands and they learned to find the islands and remembered where they were a lot better than un-transfused fellows.

Clearly, there is something in the plasma that makes them more difficult to drown. Definitely we old fogies need to sign up with groups of teens to get transfusions of their plasma just in case we fall into a swimming pool with islands. BUT it may also help us to remember where on earth we put those car keys.

  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/17/young-blood-reverse-effects-ageing

Good Mates = True Love? Or Just Strong Mates, Big Mates and Noisy Mates

European Tree Frog         Creative Commons – Christian Fischer




Good mates are often judged as being “good” because they are more attractive because of strength as judged by size or the noise that they produce. This has nothing to do with logical choice or that advice that they were given at the proverbial maternal knee, but is simply hormone driven.

The problem is not all mates are what they may seem. In the animal world, the prospective mate isn’t brought home to be introduced to disapproving parents. It’s all out there to play for. So are many of the females out there fooled by male subterfuge?

This question of ‘true’ love was asked by Brepson et al from the U of Lyon and is in the online edition of Animal Behaviour (1). The team decided to put the question to the diminutive European Treefrog. At one and a half inches long it doesn’t take up much space in the lab, but it can make quiet a decent croak when it is in the mood for love.

Male frogs, the European Treefrog included, announce their availability to the female population by spending the night hours croaking. Large males with a booming croak are the focus of adoration by the females who eschew the weaker, shaky croaks of the little fellas.

The team of course asked “does size matter?” to a female frog. Deeper louder voices of course, but is that the only criterion for a good mate? What about being well fed and ready to go?

A corner of the lab was turned into a frog only mating arena, but the nasty trick was to install a loudspeaker which could play macho male croaks. So what’s a little frog to do? Frog or not, what do you expect of a Latin lover? They will cheat of course if they have to. The spirit of Casanova is not dead. They will sidle up to be close to the big boy, but strike faster and stealthier as soon as the opportunity arises so the love–lorn female is unaware that the big booming voice wasn’t their young lover’s.

The finer points of gastronomy being of great importance in that area of the world, the question popped up as to how did being well fed affect cheating behavior, less or more? So the next batch of frogs had their stomachs extensively pumped and half of the batch were then stuffed full of cordon blue bottles and crickets. It had no effect on the tendency to cheat to get laid.

Clearly the way to a frog's heart is not through its stomach.

  1.  
  2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347212004010
  3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19886131

Anticipating Your Robot For The Best Human Robot Interaction


The Human Robot Interaction is a major challenge, but an important one, as we get more robots interacting with us in our homes and they are built with humanoid features. You see, we prefer to share our homes with things that we perceive as biological rather than unfeeling machines if we are going to have more complex helpful relationships than we do with our toaster.

We do have to be careful that we don’t make them too human-like, but don’t quite make it. Then we could end up with a creepy, zombie-like butler that would fit right in the dip in the Uncanny Valley Theory (1). Cuteness has its merits.

When we interact with another person, we anticipate and tend to copy their action as our mirror neurons fire away. That yawning spread like wildfire in that boring class we have all sat through, didn’t it? This interaction is also known as motor resonance (2). We have two things going on. We have a proactive gaze and then automatic imitation. Thus we anticipate and accommodate the motion. The result is that we feel comfortable as long as the action isn’t threatening.

Our robot butler/caregiver shouldn’t be threatening, so we have to avoid the uncanny valley with no zombies making unexpected moves. The key is to get that motor resonance functioning well when we design our humanoid helpers, but the challenge is then to find experimentally what works best with us humans in an everyday environment.

A review of methods for measuring motor resonance with the human robot interaction has been published by Scuitti et al and they show that the behavioral methodologies such as studying predictive gaze and automatic imitation measurements fit the bill much better than PET, fMRI or EEG scans.

If we can get the right human robot interaction, the advent of rent-a-robot stores may not be far away. It could work out better and more economical than have to pay for a place in a care home.

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
  2. A.Sciutti, A.Bisio, F.Nori, G.Metta,L.Fadiga, T.Pozzo and G.Sandini, Int. J. Soc. Robot., 223, 4, (2012)., http://www.springerlink.com/content/g82v75n437259607/fulltext.pdf