Familiar Face – Don’t I know You?


A familiar face in the crowd is something we look for and instantly makes us feel more relaxed and at home (– unless it is someone we don’t want to meet because, well perhaps we shouldn’t ask.)

So if we see someone who looks like us, then we feel good about that as we see someone familiar who is probably related as our doppelgangers are few and far between. Kinship is a good thing and we can obviously trust our kin  to do the right thing by us.

That was the starting point of Giang et al who published their study in last weeks Public Library of Science (1). They took 58 men and women in their early 20’s as their subjects to play with themselves (unwittingly of course). They game was on.

Specifically it was a social cooperation game in which you and the other player invested money, only small sums, so the players didn’t have to be one percenters. If the partner invested the same amount, you did well, but if they cheated and only said they would and didn’t, you lost money.

In past published experiments, players tended to invest more money when the image of the other player looked like a likeable person. Now what’s not to liked about a possible family member? Well, we’ll see.

The experiment started with photographs of the participants and then these were morphed a little to look like someone different, but not totally. Hence you would be playing with yourself, but not quite yourself, more a familiar face.

When all the results came in, shock horror but not the expected outcome. What happened was that the players didn’t trust themselves (well familiar face person) any more that someone different. Of, course not everybody would look “likeable” after morphing, but not trusting people that could look like a possible sibling? Well who’d have thought it.

Sibling rivalry seems to be alive and well amongst the students of Heinrich Heine U in Düsseldorf.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047809

Schools Of Dolphins


Schools of dolphins in Australia’s Shark Bay are well studied. The Shark Bay Dolphin project started back in 1982 when some scientists stepped out on Monkey Mia beach and found the bottlenose dolphins were friendly. In fact they would come in to the shallows to greet the waders and be hand fed.

Now the schools of dolphins are some of the best studied, but they also have some unusual habits. The bottlenose dolphins go foraging, as regulations on feeding make sure that they don’t become spongers on the generosity of tourists in fishing boats.

Foraging, though, has its hazards. They have to stick their noses into things that other fish wish they wouldn’t and that can have painful consequences – certainly for the fish. The Shark Bay schools of dolphins have an answer to that problem. They stick a sponge on their nose for protection.

It seems that they have been sponging their noses for some time and Kopps and Sherwin have been puzzling over how that is taught (1, 2). Is this something that genetics passes along, or was it something that one clever girl shows the others?

As nobody speaks dolphin, the next best thing is to simulate how long it would take to produce the behavior patterns observed in the bay. Computers being wonderful tools, they cranked out results in short order, but they did not correspond with the actual observations.

It seems that social learning is the answer. So we can think of this as schools of dolphins have home schooling to learn the best sponging techniques. (To catch their own fish, of course.) Sponging from the tourist voyeurs is a no-no. In any case, sponging by Shark Bay schools of dolphins has been going on long before the tourists – about 150 years more or less.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19909635
  2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347212003806

Cloaking Devices


Cloaking devices are a big thing in Sci-Fi stories. They are the dream of some physicists working hard to bend light round objects. So far some success with small objects has been won, but we’re still a long way from something as big as the Starship Enterprise.

Nature doesn’t hang around waiting. The evolutionary pressure of predation is a great spur and small fish have had a lot of predatory pressure to evolve for quite a while. Jordan, Partridge and Roberts from Bristol U have been taking a look at fish like sardines and herrings, or at least trying to when the light is right (1, 2).

They have shown that the silvery skin, which gives that shimmery appearance as they move in and out of sight, has layers of crystals in them. Each layer has the crystal axis perpendicularly oriented to the next layer. The crystals are guanine.

The article in Discovery News focuses our attention on guano as though it was something that we higher beings might find just a tad distasteful (1). But we should remember that we are laced through and through with guanine as it is one of the four components of our DNA. Without guanine we would just be part of an very old primordial soup.

So having established that guanine is good for us, we can continue eating sardines and herrings without thinking about bird droppings. The way their skin works to confuse is by not confusing. When light is reflected from a mirrored surface, the fraction of the light that is reflected is the fraction that is polarized horizontally – that is parallel to the surface. The vertical components do their best to penetrate.

Our multilayered little piscatorial wonders have alternate layer which tackle the horizontal and vertical components because of their crystal orientation. Hence, wonder of wonders, they don’t reflect and if they don’t reflect, the predators don’t see them. So they, in their way, are like little stealth aircraft which don’t reflect radar waves back to the detectors, and “fly” about in the sea while being difficult to make out clearly.


  1. http://news.discovery.com/animals/fish-break-law-of-physics-become-invisible-121021.html
  2. http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphoton.2012.260.html


Driving Tired Is Bad News


Driving tired is bad news. The risk of driving tired is as high as driving under the influence of alcohol, or so we’re told. Of course, it is all a matter of degree, how tired and how much alcohol, but nevertheless it’s an increased risk of not being able to anticipate that clown doing something in front of you – never your fault remember, your insurance company insist on that.

Now freeways/motorways are where these days we frequently spend time on long journeys. Not very exciting driving and the speeds are high – let’s say 10 M.P.H. above the speed limit if we are conservative.  But hours heading home on that long unending ribbon of asphalt can cause the eyelids to become inordinately heavy.

The cure is that we take is a break and maybe a coffee, but is this optimal? Well, Taillard et al have asked this question and reported out in PLoS ONE last week (1). The team based in Bordeaux and Sweden would have had plenty of opportunities of putting their findings to the test if they have been commuting to each other’s institutions.

They focused their attention on 40 males in the age range 20 – 50-years old. Women may come later, we’ll see. The task was to head out at 1 A.M. and drive 250 miles to finish at a little after 5 A.M. Note no participants were lost during the experiments.

The rigorous experimental driving program had three conditions. The first was a 15-minute break with a coffee flavored drink (minimal caffeine) and the second was a proper cup of coffee with a carefully measured caffeine dose. The third and most innovative condition had a portable “imitation sunlight” unit mounted on the dashboard that emitted a blue light at ~470 nm. This is the type of light is sold to cheer us up during those dark winter days or just during a long period of dark cloudy weather to keep us from S.A.D.

The blue light was almost as effective as the coffee in preventing the tired drivers from wandering over the lane markings of the road in an unpredictable fashion.

Nobody would want a portable light unit on the dash which could fly around when we have to take evasive action when some pesky pedestrian, other driver, or in extremis, a police car interrupts our progress.

The answer is clearly that car manufacturers should fit our instrument panels with a blue light illumination. Don’t let us neglect coffee though. Once the caffeine starts to wear off, the steady increase in bladder pressure is sure to keep us awake and encourage us to take another break and help us when we’re driving tired.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0046750