Doggone Shame


The southwest of England has a long history of rebellion, riot and just being awkward. The latest little fracass is playing out in Langbridge, a small village near the old city of Bath. There is a group of one hundred protesters intimidating one poor individual leading a dog's life. Both the Daily Mail and Telegraph are running reports.

One hundred sheep have ganged up on poor Ci their Border collie supervisor. They close ranks and march forward with fixed expressions. As they get within a few feet, poor Ci has to back down. When Ci tries to walk away, they trot after him in a manner that can only be described as "purposeful.


What is this break down in discipline due to? Sheep dogs are not allowed to use physical punishment on the flocks in their charge. This may be a case of “spare the teeth and spoil the sheep” but we can't ignore the responsibility of the flock owner in this sort of situation. How much support have they given Ci? Was there adequate training given before throwing Ci into the general milieu teaching the naughty sheep their manners?

Well, the answer to these questions is a resounding “No.” Ci was put in with the flock as an inexperienced young puppy and the flock immediately took charge. That was the start of his ovinophobia. He has had this for four years now and there is no sign of him being booked in for therapy.

The next big question is what happens to a sheep dog that fails herding 101? Could he be re-trained to herd cows or would he be reduced to herding chickens? Perhaps he’ll have to maker the best of it and resort to fetching a tennis ball for a living. To make his disgrace complete, the Telegraph has a video of the action (1).

  1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8591664/Britains-worst-sheep-dog-chased-by-flock.html

Worn Out Genes


As we get older, the ends of our DNA, the telomeres, get shorter until replication goes haywire and we join the downhill race with our contemporaries, hoping to finish last. But it is not just the frazzled ends of our DNA that shows that we’re getting towards our use by date. Epigenetic modification does it too. Brockland et al of U Cal, LA have published a new study quantifying some of these effects (1).

In the early stages of our development, methyl groups get tacked on to some of the cytosine blocks of our DNA. This controls the activity and helps the cells remember what they are supposed to be. There are lots of unmodified cytosine molecules and those next to guanine form little islands – CpG islands. Brockland et al studied the methylation of two cytosine sites in three genes to see how this correlated with age.

The experimental program looked at 34 male identical twins so that random chance methylation could be ruled out. The twins were aged between 21 and 55. Then a larger group of men and women were asked to spit in a cup. Their ages ranged from 18 to 70. The results from all that saliva? Well,  the predicted age of the participants was within spitting distance of their actual age. That is, their age could be predicted within about 5 years on average.

The paper suggests that this could be a useful tool for forensic guys, and that may be so. But a much more exciting possibility is the use of the method to look at the difference between  chronological age and a patients biological age. We could all try hard to keep our DNA younger than our years and not just rely on our mirror. Also we could get tailored programs of health care to get us back on track and beat that ticking clock. Picture the day when we can drop into our local pharmacy, spit, and shortly after take our computer printout to the supplement counter.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014821

Urbanized Brains


Across the globe there is population drift towards the cities. The drift is rapid and by mid-century more than two-thirds of the people on the planet will be nicely urbanized. The size of cities is increasing all the time as they fill with oligarch-wannabes demanding the good life filled with luxury goods and pampered by doubtful services.

The scramble to survive in those seething masses is stressful. Schizophrenia is on the rise, as is anxiety and depression. Just being born in the city, even we subsequently break free, has our brains sensitized to react anxiously. Meyer-Lindenberg and a large team have carried out an fMRI study of people from different environments who were being stressed (1).

The age of the participants ranged from 18 to 80. Some were urban born, some were not and some were currently city dweller and some not. With their heads in the big magnet, the subjects were plied with nasty little arithmetic problems. That in itself would stress most of us, but with feedback telling the subjects to hurry, and the problems manipulated to ensure that nobody did better than get somewhere between 25 and 40% as a score, the amygdala and cingulate cortex of each subject lit up.  Some more like Christmas trees than others.

Recall that the cingulate cortex regulates the amygdala. That part of the brain was shown to be more active with those who had spent the most time as kids in cities. When your amygdala is lit up, you are feeling threatened and stressed. It’s not just nasty sums that lights up your amygdalae (remember they come in pairs but not necessarily of equal size), but people getting too close and personal get it excited too. Binge drinking is bad for you, of course, and it damages your amygdala. On the other hand working hard on expanding you social network can increase its size and that is likely to help you be nice to your neighbors.

All this leaves us with an intriguing question. How do we build sustainable cities, which won’t get our amygdalae flashing like the light on an ambulance rushing to the ER?


  1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7352/full/nature10190.html

A Royal Visit


The world’s newspapers are all agog with the events on the north island of New Zealand. At Peka Peka Beach an emperor has landed and is currently holding court to lots of locals. He’s made no pronouncements, but just relaxes and watches the fuss with interest.

He is a 10-month-old Emperor Penguin. Nice and plump and well fed on squid and krill according to the Sidney Morning Herald (1). He is however having a problem with the local drinks menu. Back home he would be slaking his thirst with a nice cold beakfull of snow. Not on the menu old chap in Peka Peka, but we have lots of warm wet sand. He has chosen to make do with that so as not to offend the locals. Although, warm sand will weigh a little heavy and maybe dull his appetite.

The consensus is that whilst cavorting in the Antarctic seas, he turned left instead of right and took one of those short cuts like your Uncle Bert used to take, which always involved you arriving late at the party or the wedding. Two thousand miles, though, is rather a long short cut.  I guess, like most males, he refused to admit being lost and wouldn’t ask for directions.

The last regal visit by a penguin of  Emperor status was 44 years ago on the south island. He is expected to leave shortly when he gets its fill of the attention of locals. It is to be hoped that he knows its right flipper from his left as he needs to make a right and head straight on from there.

  1. http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/penguin-takes-wrong-turn-ends-up-in-new-zealand-20110622-1gebr.html

Bug Eyes


Everyday, we hear or see some news item about drones wreaking havoc on some remote site. Fifteen to twenty years ago, these seemed to be just “big boys toys.” Now the big, big boys in the Pentagon have around 7,000 of them according to yesterday's New York Times (1). More are on the way. The Times also points out that the US is training more remote pilots than bomber and fighter pilots combined. So, all you gamers out there, there may be a new career waiting. Would boot camp be required for drone pilots, I wonder?

Ohio now has the USAF microaviary where they are developing small to tiny drones that can zoom about and look like a hawk or a moth. Perhaps a small kestrel would be a good design to aim at as that falcon swoops about and hovers.

I can imagine a moth design being prone to great difficulties, though. The picture that comes to mind are clouds of these little moth bugs trapped in the circle of light from a street lamp,  unable to get to its target and do its bugging job. Besides they would give bats indigestion and bats are becoming critically endangered. Flying bugs that are moth-like should clearly be off the agenda

  1. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html?_r=3


A Bird's Eye View.


When we look at a bird, we say “Oh there’s a crow,” or maybe a magpie or a mockingbird or whatever the species is. As we go out into our local environment everyday we see the same birds who, quite naturally, regard it as their environment. If we have a bird feeder, then we note the birds that come to feed. We may get a noisy crow who seems to be waiting and starts screeching as soon as it sees us coming.

We assume that it is the same crow because it happens at the same place, but could we pick him or her out of a police line up? I would wager that the answer would be a resounding “No.” All crows look the same to us, but all us don’t look the same to a crow, or a mockingbird as has been well documented in the past.

There are two reports this month in the journal Animal Cognition on birds recognizing specific humans (1, 2). The first shows that magpies can recognize people who have climbed to peer into their nest and will explain to them the error of their ways in livid magpie every time they see them (1). The other deals with pigeons in the park who quickly learn who are nice and who are nasty in terms of sharing food. Even swopping overcoats doesn’t fool them (2).

I am surprised at the surprise of the researchers who find this surprising. Birds spend a deal of their time in the air looking at the bigger scheme of things from an elevated viewpoint. They obviously have both sharp eyes and an extraordinary good pattern recognition and rapid processing ability, otherwise they would miss the lurking ground-based predator or the little snippet of food, or even worse that small entrance amongst the leaves to their nest site as the approach rapidly from a height.

The other point which I feel is almost too obvious to mention is that one crow, for example, recognizes other individual crows in spite of none of them wearing name-tags. The question that I would like answered is does that magpie recognize individual crows? Or would he say, if asked, “Oh crows, they all look alike to me.”

  1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/906q30818lv87592/
  2. http://www.springerlink.com/content/h4570207731l47h6/

Earmarked!


The brain-computer interface is taking a huge, dramatic step forward and moving into the consumer domain. The guys at Neurowear are working hard to bring their latest brain wave activated device to the fashionable stores by the end of the year. I have it right at the top of my Santa list. They are called Necomimi, Santa, mark it down now, please.

The prototype consists of a discreet headband that has a pair of furry cat ears mounted on it (1). Big deal, just another Anime character costume – I here you mutter, but remember that they are brain wave activated. If you are bored and disinterested in what you are looking at, the ears droop and you look fetchingly sad and clearly need attention. A fresh dish of caviar or perhaps freshening up your vodka-daiquiri would perk you up. As you feel more perky and interested, your cat’s-ears perk up in proportion.

Don’t dismiss this as a children’s toy. It is much more exciting than that. Open your mind to the possibilities. Picture a speed-dating event with everybody wearing these cat’s ears. There would be little pussy footing around. No need now for those little white lies and pretending to take down phone numbers. And think of the instant feedback potential; you could vary your line as his or her ears drooped.

They could be essential in every classroom throughout the land. No goofing off by students in the back row. But of course it goes both ways. Teachers and professors could be graded by an “ear-up count”. No longer any need for those tiresome questionnaires with unreliable answers.

The corporate meeting rooms would also benefit greatly. Those who have read the doc.s and ppt.s, and who have come loaded for bear, would show immediately that they were stand up guys, while the tag alongs who were disinterested and unprepared would be the droopy lot around the table.

The one proviso before launch is a government edict banning them from family-time gatherings. Some of us need to keep our illusions that our kids and spouses are interested in what we have to say.

The BBC video (1) shows how functional the Necomimi are. I dare say that some macho guys might prefer dog ears, perhaps of a Rotweiler design. I can hardly wait!

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13694911

Would You Like Relish On That, Sir?


As we all try and recycle to produce less waste for landfill, our population grows and our cities swell. Bigger cities mean more human waste to process to keep our rivers clean and the sludge builds up from the processing plants. Tokyo was having a problem with too much sewage sludge and handed the problem to Professor Ikeda of the Okayama Laboratory.

Like all good scientists when handed a sticky problem, he decided to go back to basics and think outside the box. The sludge had gone through the usual aerobic bacterial treatment, so had lots of proteins from the bacteria. Now, a good piece of Kobe beef is about 63% protein, 25% carbs, 9% minerals and 3% lipids. So far, so good.

Now, the Ah–Ha moment and a good bio–lab. The proteins were extracted and beefed up, so to speak, with some GM soy. Then colored red with regular food dye like the butchers use in the supermarkets. Now comes the tricky bit. These were all stirred up with a secret sauce called a reaction enhancer and placed in an exploder to puff it up a little. The result is extruded, as if by magic, in red slabs of neo-steak.

The planned price is aimed at the normal price for red meat. The Kobe beef industry probably won’t have to feel threatened, unless, I wonder, unless the raw materials are collected solely from heavy beer drinkers. The hamburger market is particularly ripe for the introduction of neo-beef as it is low in fat and carbs. This new product will surely be a recommended part of any good slimming diet.

A good microbrew and poop sliders as an appetizer, yummm! I dare anybody to say "this tastes like chicken."

  1. http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/japanese-scientists-creates-meat-out-of-feces/

Cheers!


When we think of France, one common image that comes to mind is of fine wine, fine cheese and great bread. Of course there’s lots of other things, but these three will keep most of us happy for many a sunny evening at a sidewalk café. Strange that if we drive a few miles across the border to Belgium, our choice naturally shifts to choosing from different beers.

We know that 2,500 years ago the Greeks were trading amphorae full of wine around the Mediterranean. Also wine was the drink of choice of the Romans. Outer Gaul was considered rather barbaric by the well brought up Romans (prior to the demise of the republic and the start of the decline, of course) populated as it was by lots of hairy Celts and such. Beer was much more suitable for rip-roaring evenings of tale telling around the fires by larger than life characters, typified by the French cartoon character Asterix.

A recent dig at Roquepertuse has come up with evidence of brewing from the carbonized remains of malted Barley (1).  The brewers were brewing in 5oo B.C. at this house. Roquepertuse is slap bang in the middle of France and was a Celtic religious center where there are statues of seated warriors looking rather relaxed and Buddha-like. Perhaps they had been depicted enjoying the brew.

The Romans destroyed the place in 124 B.C. I guess the beer drinkers moved north rather than drink the Italian wines. The great French vineyards would not be planted then, of course. But it wouldn’t be long before the locals were on a diet of wheat, wine and dormice while their friends who had moved north were still on barley, beef and beer. Personally, I have to confess to being a cross-eater and consuming all of the above but the dormice.

  1. L. Bouby, P. Boisinnot & P. Marinval, Hum. Ecol., 39, 351, (2011)

Your Cheating Heart


Image – Keith Gerstung


Zebra finches are very pretty birds that live happily in large colonies. They are monogamous – well, usually. In the wild, they cheat on their mate occasionally. It is worth noting, though, that when held in a large aviary, the cheating increases markedly. Aviaries are not so exciting as the wider world out there, I suppose.

The “flighty” nature of the females in a large captive colony has been investigated and reported on by Fortsmeier et al (1). Free males and females went through a speed-dating event to gauge the perky nature of the females and the lotharioc nature of the males. The bedroom habits of a subset of pair-bonded individuals were carefully recorded.

The question to be answered here was “was the reason for their infidelity, nature or nurture?” The results showed a strong tendency for daughters of promiscuous males to be promiscuous in turn. So, they couldn’t help it. But that wasn’t the total reason. There were some errant daughters from fine upright males, so a really good line from a particularly good looking and smooth singing young male could overcome the poor young female’s better judgment.

You may think that the private life of zebra finches should be no ones business but theirs, but it confirms some studies on promiscuity among young adult humans (2).  In their study, Garcia et al showed that the dopamine D4 receptor gene was a good indicator of promiscuous tendency. If there are seven or more repeat alleles in their D4’s, then they are likely to be experienced with “one night stands” and  also more likely to dabble in infidelity.

This is bringing us right back to the good feelings we have of sex, drugs and rock and roll, which, of course, we all imagine that we discovered for ourselves and wouldn’t want to think that we inherited it directly from Mom and Dad.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/03/1103195108.full.pdf 
  2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014162

Tired Thumbs


We rarely write letters these days, whether by hand or typed. Job applications and sympathy are probably the only ones. Embracing e-mails was easy, but was also accompanied with a loss of innocence. The contact was almost instant and the only effort to mail was the click of a mouse. The content became short and the language terse as these rapid communications flew back and forth, and still do, of course.

The field of computer-mediated communications (CMC) has expanded from e-mail, bulletin boards and our Facebook wall, to our Tweets and texts. The messages are smaller than ever and consequently terser and pithier. They arrive at and leave our devices every few minutes as the beeps, squeals and songs cry out for attention more fervently than our offspring.

The downside of all this is that we communicate with the wider world as if we are joshing with our friends after a few beers in the bar. Most of the relationships are not “joking relationships” but it is easy to slip into that mode when your keeping your character count down, whether to fit the space available or because your thumbs are tired.

Tired digits or no, we have slipped into a very plain form of CMCing that is visible to most of our contacts. Politeness Research (1) recently devoted a whole issue to the problem of how this plain-speak can easily be offensive or hurtful.

To date, I haven’t heard of anyone being told “you’re fired” on Twitter but I may be well behind the times. Even having your boss post it on your Facebook wall with your “friends” clicking the “Like” or “Dislike” symbols could make a bad experience worse.


  1. Journal of Politeness Research, 6, issue 1, (2010)

A Satisfied Mind


The use of focus groups is widely used by commercial and governmental organizations to decide if we will welcome the latest new thing with open arms and, more importantly, with open wallets. The wisdom of the crowd of choice should give the choice of the crowd as the correct answer. That is the received wisdom at the moment.

The problem is that the focus groups aren’t genuine crowds. They are interactive groups. With interactive groups, wiser heads can prevail. Even crowds can be swayed if the rhetoric is strong enough. Where should we go from here if we really want to know what people really, really want? Heavy duty technology has the answer. It can winkle it out of our little grey cells, whether we want it to or not.

Berns and Moore from Emory U have clearly cracked it. A quick glance at their paper in J Consumer Psych. (1,2) will knock your socks off with one of those “Ah-Ha” moments. Remember the big magnet can see all! They used Functional MRI (fMRI) to tease out of the brains of adolescents which pop music they truly preferred and showed that this correlated with the numbers of units sold over the preceding three year period. Good correlations were obtained and they predicted a third of the big sellers. Pretty good for kids who don’t usually know their own minds!

The part of the brain yielding up the information to the big magnet was the ventral striatum in this pop music experiment. This is where aspects of your emotional and motivational behavior lurk. For example, your addictive behavior has excited signals playing around here, even if the addiction is only to tea.

Clearly, fMRI scans should more successful in predictions than the responses that someone of indeterminate age with a clipboard would get on approaching a group of adolescents on a street corner. But the idea is much more powerful than that. If it’s diddling with your addictive center, the marketing/product idea could be progressively optimized so the alternatives wouldn’t get a look in.

Can you visualize the new world order where we have all got our hearts desire and won’t regret our choices of goodies or governments? Neuroeconomics is clearly the next big thing.

  1. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2011.05.001
  2. http://improbable.com/ 

In The Blink Of An Eye


While delving around in the literature on the Brain–Computer Interface (BCI), I tripped over a paper from last year on the Human–Computer Interface (HCI). Initially, I missed the differentiation indicated by change in name of the interface.

The BCI responds to electrical signals sensed through the scalp. The more the merrier, as the need is to pinpoint brain activity. The equipment is complex and expensive, although prices would fall if we all had one. The HCI responds to electrical signals measured by five facial electrodes and responds to eye movement. Costs are a factor of ten lower, but in the current research of Usakil et al (1), the signals are used to work a virtual keyboard. Of course, any other system of icons could be used.

The interest for both the BCI and HCI work is to help people with major motion and speech problems. A question that came to mind was would the advances be faster if the computer gaming industry picked up on the possibilities? Their deep pockets and numbers of engineers could make a huge difference. Extra fast inputs to game control that would give our overworked thumbs a rest would be very welcome.

The standard games controller looks so last century to me. The more active inputs where you hold a bat or dance around are much more this century. The thought that you could just give knowing glances and winks to your computer to make it do what you want sounds fun to me.

  1. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cin/2010/135629/

Garbling Guardedly


The English language can be very precise with a lot of subtle choices of words to give that delicate nuance that the writer has being striving to work into his or her piece of prose while attempting to survive in a lonely garret on the crumbs from the rich publishers table. Meanwhile, hoards of scribblers are churning out impenetrable agreements, conditions of use, assembly instructions, instruction manuals and reports from the hydra-like bureaucracies from around the globe. Some of these works of art have been penned in other than English first and then been fuzzied-up further in translation.

I had better ‘fess up here. I have just taken liberties with the word “fuzzy.”  The temptation to get ahead of myself was too great. 

We are coming up to the first anniversary of the publication of “The Index of Garbledness,” IG, (1). You see the authors are all mathematicians with a skill in Fuzzy Set Theory. The aim of applying their algebraic manipulations was not to give a numerical value to the IG  of the instruction manual that came with your latest delivery of flatpack furniture. No, the ultimate aim was to crack codes.

Pairs of letters, with or without spaces make up the components of the fuzzy sets. The challenge was to select those fuzzy sets that are characteristic of English. These are called Feature Fuzzy Sets. Now 10 of these were chosen, and through the wonders of algebra, a series of texts were put to the test.

Spaces between words were dumped for the tests, as no self-respecting spy would help the opposition by separating the words. Three texts were used. The first had 10 to 50% of the words garbled, the second had 50 to 90% of the words garbled and the last was totally garbled. The IG values for the three cases were 9.75, 22.67 and 28.85.

Many of us who have had notes from offspring at college explaining why the cash you just sent was insufficient for their purposes will have a good feel for what an IG~10 means. The instructions for filling in most government forms can sometimes match that, but my guesstimate for the small print for loans is more like an 15<IG <20. How much longer, I wonder, before we can download an App from the Cloud to scan our Docs to give them an IG value? You developers out there – we need it and we need it now!

  1. P.K. Saxena, P. Yadav,. And G. Mishra, Defence Science Journal, 60, 415, (2010)

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