Mad science: "Activite their Capgras" sounds more humorous said aloud than it reads off the page.

Wired online has a short article and video presentation on the curious work of UC Berkeley neuroscientist Bradley Voytek. Voytek - who is not helping fight the pervasive stereotype that UC Berkeley is some sort of really expensive summer camp for really smart weirdos - has assembled a neurological picture of zombiism by translating zombie behaviors seen in a handful of popular flicks into known neurological conditions. From the article:

Based on that map of the zombie brain, Voytek and a fellow neuroscientist Timothy Verstynen established that the walking dead suffered from a condition they called Consciousness Deficit Hypoactivity Disorder. CDHD is characterized by “the loss of rational, voluntary and conscious behavior replaced by delusional/impulsive aggression, stimulus-driven attention, the inability to coordinate motor-linguistic behaviors and an insatiable appetite for human flesh.”

After settling on a brain-model for the reanimated, Voytek extrapolated some survival tips for the zombie apocalypse. Notable exploitable bugs in the zombie-brain: Zack's probably got crap memory, so if you come up with a really neat way to kill zombies, feel free to keep it in rotation as long as you please. Also, Voytek speculates that zombies probably have difficulty visually tracking more than one moving object at a time. Certainly the resourceful zombie hunter could put that to good use.

Mad science: Are we inherently tasty?

In what must surely rank as one of the strangest articles ever posted by Slate, writer Jesse Bering pulls and info dump on long pig in the name of making "an evolutionary case for cannibalism."

Bering brings up the work of Lewis Petrinovich argues "contrary to critiques arguing that man-eating is a myth conjured up by Westerners to demonize "primitives"—we really have been gobbling each other up for a very, very long time. We're just one of 1,300 species for which "intraspecific predation" has been observed. Among primates, cannibalism can usually be accounted for by nutritional and environmental stress, or it appears as a reproductive strategy in which mothers, for example, consume their unhealthy infants to make way for more viable offspring."

To be honest, I don't know if I'm sold. If one is going to make the case that evolution tricked us out with the ability to eat other humans, then you have to make a similar case that it also tricked us out to make it fairly uncommon. (In the article, Bering attempts to make the case that cannibalism is, in fact, more common then we admit, but I don't buy it; Bering is probably right in the assertion that cannibalism has happened more often then we'd care to think, but the real comparison you'd need to show is that it happens regularly when compared to other eating habits, and compared to how often we eat something other than people, the practice is still statistically negligible.) Furthermore, there's always the possibility that it is simply a side effect of some other, less sensational adaptation. For example, we evolved to eat meat. People happen to be meat. The adaptation wasn't aimed at them, but it opens up the possibility. That said, I can't really do justice to his argument here, so check out the article.

Still, whether or not Bering successfully achieves he goal of evo-devoing up a just so for anthropophagy, there's quite a bit of weird data to found in his article. Here's some choice tidbits, as it were.

One pair of anthropologists, for example, actually crunched the numbers, concluding that the average human adult provides 66 pounds of edible food, including fat, connective tissue, muscle, organs, blood, and skin. Protein-rich blood clots and marrow are said (by the rare connoisseur) to be special treats.

Or this bit on inducing mammalian cannibalism in the lab:

Pinpointing the specific factors that cause cannibalism is a rather difficult affair in the laboratory, mainly because of those pesky university ethics review boards. Still, an intrepid Japanese researcher shrugged off these considerations and induced cannibalism among a captive population of squirrel monkeys by feeding the pregnant females a low-protein diet. This led to a high rate of abortion and the mothers' devouring their aborted fetuses—a much-needed bolus of protein.

The idea that we're all cannibals and that it can be induced by controlled conditions was actually the middling Hunger, reviewed on this blog not too long ago. I was also reminded of philosopher Max Stirner's grim vision of the human condition as metaphorical cannibalism: "For me, you are nothing but my food - even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use."

Oh, and happy new year.

Mad science: Body disposal pro tip.

Without fail, the same issue comes up after Thanksgiving year after year. If you're anything like me, you're looking at the aftermath of your Thanksgiving feast, scratching your head, and wondering, "How the heck do I dissolve a human body? And how long will it take?"

Happily, this year, the social science blog Barking Up the Wrong Tree has go us covered.

Below is the entire copy the article, but you'll need to go to the source to follow all the links:

Assassins for Mexican-American drug cartels have been dissolving their victims' bodies in chemicals, according to a piece published Tuesday in the New York Times. The process is known colloquially as making pozole, in reference to a traditional Mexican stew. It can take several hours to make a pot of pozole. How long does it take to dissolve a human body?

About the same, with the right chemicals and equipment. The assassins typically use sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, strong bases commonly known as lye. (The Times story misidentified their reagent of choice as an acid.) Heated to 300 degrees, a lye solution can turn a body into tan liquid with the consistency of mineral oil in just three hours. If your kettle isn't pressurized, you won't be able to heat the solution much above the boiling point of water, 212 degrees, and it might take an additional hour or two to complete the process. Narco-hit men did not pioneer this technique. Adolph Luetgert, known in his day as the "Sausage King of Chicago," dumped his wife into a boiling vat of lye in 1897, then burned what was left. Police eventually found bone fragments in the factory's furnace.

Mad science: Start by asking them how their flight was. And while they're distracted, go all Wolverines on the green bastards!

Above: Train them now! An oversized head? Make sure it's dead!

The regular "Examiner" column at Slate answers the question: "Do we have an alien-contact plan in place?"

The answer: Not for any situation where we'd really need it. There is an existing protocol, proposed by SETI, for reacting to the discovery of a signal from the far reaches of space.

The protocol, adopted in 1989, is that if someone detects a radio signal seemingly indicating that we're not alone, he should get in touch with SETI researchers, who will help him verify whether the signal is really and truly evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. At that point, he should notify the International Astronomical Union as well as the United Nations and relevant research organizations. On the finders-keepers principle, the discoverer would get to make the first public announcement, but data should be made available to the international scientific community. (Source coordinates, however, would be kept secret, to avoid a situation in which anyone with a radio telescope could start up a conversation.)

And that's all Kool and the gang; but what we all really want to know is if there's a plan for dealing with aliens who show up all determined to blow up our major landmarks, kill our leading citizens, and run off with our women folk. Aside from "contact Will Smith," there is no plan.

In the farfetched Hollywood scenario wherein we detect an alien spaceship or aliens send us a Greetings, Earthlings!-type message—all bets are off. (If the Pentagon or some such has a plan for how to deal with contact, it's classified.) Naturally the response would hinge on the nature of the contact: peaceful or violent, needy (give us fossil fuels) or helpful (cold fusion). Many scientists, including Stephen Hawking, believe that contact with intelligent aliens would end badly for us—we'd be the Native Americans to the alien Europeans. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships," Hawking said recently, "having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."

Lacking official protocol, those worried about first contact can turn to the very unofficial Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion. Like Hawking, the authors believe humans would play the part of Native Americans circa 1492. They also think that, in light of the sluggish global response to natural disasters, there's little indication that we could react effectively to invasion. Since we'll probably be technologically outmatched, the best defense strategy would be guerilla warfare.

So we graffiti alien installations with "Martians Go Home" and start making Molotov cocktails. Apparently plan A is more Red Dawn than ID4.

Stuff: The roots of lycanthropy.

Sorry I've been flying under the radar for so long. While I toil away on the next review, here's some quality reading to keep you occupied. First, from the late, great Martin Gardener comes this study of lycanthropy.

This choice bit describes the origins of the term lycanthrope:

The Greeks worshipped the wolfgod, Zeus Lycaeus and there are many stories of ordinary men being transformed into wolves and other creatures. In Graves' translation of Greek myths an account is given of the inhabitants of Parnassus who followed a pack of howling wolves to a mountain top where they established a new city, Lycorea. According to the myth, the Parnassians practiced Lyacaon's Abomination, a ritual where a boy was sacrificed and his guts made into a soup which was eaten by shepherds, one of whom would then turn into a tormented werewolf who was condemned to wander the countryside for 8 years, regaining his humanity if he refrained from eating human flesh. According to this legend a full recovery was possible as illustrated in the legend of Damarchus who went on to win a boxing prize at the Olympic Games after rigorous training in the gymnasium. The connection with cannibalistic practices is further illustrated in the legend of Lycaon, King of Arcadia, who was changed into a wolf as punishment for secretly feeding Zeus human flesh.

The article traces the cultural history of lycanthropy (as late as the 1700s, epidemics of lycanthropy would break out and, in one case, a French judge is reported to have condemned more than 600 sufferers to death) and ends on a curious note that suggests our own affection for werewolf fictions may have replaced religious inspirations for the disease. In short, movie werewolves might be creating modern lycanthropes:

To gain an understanding of certain bizarre psychiatric symptoms it may be helpful to consider the effects of religion and culture. At the time of the Inquisition, when the werewolf was a feared satanic representation, the incidence of lycanthropy peaked. As religious beliefs have changed, the perception of the devil as a wolf or goat-like creature has receded but is not entirely unfamiliar. These beliefs may be revived in those suffering from severe depressive illness where they are incorporated into delusions of guilt and sinfulness. Similarly, the cannibalistic and aggressive qualities of the lycanthrope can be traced back to the content of ancient myth and followed through the centuries when the werewolf retained these characteristics. Despite the passage of time, the werewolf remains a powerful and evocative image. The influence of myth and legend has been filtered and obscured with the passage of time but it is likely that the symptom of lycanthropy will continue to be seen as long as tales of the wolf-man can frighten us.

Mad science: Like the fist of an angry god.

In general, I like my end-of-the-world scenarios to be as wacky as possible. Our presence on this globe is so improbable that it just seems dramatically appropriate that our exit should be just as improbable. But sometimes it rewards a person to consider the classics.

Over at the UK screamsheet tThe Independent, Chris Impey revisits one of the 20th century's most enduring contributions to the intellectual dark ride of our apocalyptic imaginations: death by space object strike:

Every century or so, a 10-meter meteor slams into the Earth with the force of a small nuclear device. Tunguska was the site of the last, in 1908, and it was pure luck that that meteor landed in the uninhabited wilderness of Siberia. Every few thousand years, Earth can pass through unusually thick parts of the debris trail of comets, turning the familiar light show of a meteor shower into a deadly firestorm. Roughly every 100,000 years, a projectile hundreds of meters across unleashes power equal to the world's nuclear arsenals. The result is devastation over an area the size of England, global tidal waves (if the impact is in the ocean), and enough dust flung into the atmosphere to dim the Sun and kill off vegetation. That could ruin your day.

Then there's the "Big One". About every 100 million years, a rock the size of a small asteroid slams into the Earth, causing global earthquakes, kilometre-high tidal waves, and immediately killing all large land animals. Creatures in the sea soon follow, as trillions of tons of vaporised rock cause drastic cooling and the destruction of the food chain based on photosynthesis. There's good evidence that this happened 65 million years ago and our tiny mammal ancestors were the beneficiaries as the giant lizards were extinguished.

Mr. Impey also considers such we're-screwed scenarios as "fried by the high-energy radiation of a distant hypernova," "Sun eats the Earth," and one of my new favorites: "the Big Rip." This is the term for the hypothesis that the expansion of the universe might eventually reach a crisis point and the whole darn thing could just unravel. That's right, the universe could break.

So enjoy the weekend like it may be your last! It's always later than we think!

Mad science: All the dead are vampires.

Vampires are essentially a Romantic and Victorian phenomenon. Prior to that, a vampire was one of any number of distinct and mostly unrelated local folk beasties. But an explosion of vampiric literature and art in the 19th century began to establish, for what would ultimately become a global audience, the norms for vampires. With the exception of the wonderful Chinese jumping vampire, almost all notions of what a vampire is pretty much a reaction to the Romantic/Victorian template, itself a massive constriction of the diverse and regional sense of the term. (That last bit is worth noting when encountering purists' arguments about what should and should not be considered a real vampire: There's no original vampire; it was always already a mess of different influences, original inspirations, and second-hand ideas.)

At the Chronicle of High Education, science writer turned horror anthology editor Michael Sims attempts to find the cultural and scientific roots of the Victorian vampire boom. And he comes up with some neat ideas:

The vampire story as we know it was born in the early 19th century, as the wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence. But in writing these depraved tales, Byron and Polidori and company were refining the raw ore of peasant superstition. And the peasant brain had simply been doing what the human brain does best: sorting information into explanatory narratives.

I found lots of reports of vampires from Europe—from urban France, rural Russia, the islands of Greece, the mountains of Romania. Along the way, I was reminded of something I already knew but hadn't thought of as relevant in this context: During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, dead bodies were a common sight. Plague and countless other illnesses ravaged every community. Corpses of the executed and tortured were displayed in public as warnings, even left hanging as they decomposed.

Few bodies seemed to rest peacefully even in the ground. Often people in the 18th century had an opportunity not only to see corpses but also to glimpse them again after they were buried. Urban cemeteries were densely overcrowded, sometimes with the dead stacked several graves deep, causing horrific spillage during floods or earthquakes. More corpses than the ground could accommodate resulted in the stench of decay and the constant risk of disease. Grave desecration was also common; a thriving trade in illicit cadavers for medical students joined a vicious rivalry between competing religious groups. After Louis XIV abolished the convent at Port-Royal des Champs as a hotbed of Jansenist heresy, drunken locals dug up nuns' bodies from the cemetery and fed them to their dogs. Corpses of executed heretics were dragged through the streets, then reburied in too-small graves by breaking the body into small pieces.

Sims thinks this familiarity of death lead to the development of erroneous notions about what death should look like: a corpse gently sleeping for eternity. The actual messy process of decay is not so pleasant. And this unpleasantness was interpreted as something out of the norm.

As I continued digging into the literature, I wondered: If ordinary people were encountering the corpses of the recently dead or even long-dead friends and relatives, what were they actually seeing that they misinterpreted and then wove into a vampire mythology? Not surprisingly, no one understood the process of decay within a subterranean chamber. They had no forensic body farm at which to chart a corpse's fade from nauseating stink to cautionary bones.

Any variation from "normal" in the grave provoked fear, yet there isn't really much of a norm in the process of decay under different circumstances. Some coffins protect their residents better than others. Lime helps preserve a body, as do clay soil and low humidity. Graves in different climates and latitudes vary, depending upon air temperature and humidity, soil composition, and insects, not to mention those invisible sanitation workers who turn us all back into the dust from which we came—and of course in the 18th century, no one knew that such creatures existed.

Many natural changes after death were judged to be evidence that the late lamented had turned into a bloodsucker. Like hair, fingernails don't actually continue to grow after death, but as fingers decompose, the skin shrinks, making the nails look abnormally long and clawlike. You begin to look as if you're turning into a predatory animal. Dead skin, after sloughing off its top layer, can look flushed and alive as if with fresh blood. Damp soil's chemicals can produce in the skin a waxy secretion, sometimes brownish or even white, from fat and protein—adipocere, "grave wax." In one eyewitness account from the 18th century, a vampire is even found—further proof of his vile nature—to have a certain region of his anatomy in a posthumous state of excitement. The genitals often inflate during the process of decomposition.

And what about the blood reported around the mouths of resurrected corpses? That too has a natural explanation. Without the heart as a pump to keep it circulating, blood follows the path of least resistance. Many bodies were buried face down, resulting in blood pooling in the face and leaving it looking flushed. Sometimes blood also gets lifted mouthward by gases from decomposition. Vampire stories recognize that death is messy.

It's interesting stuff. Plus, Sims found this brilliant quote:

The scholar Marie-Hélène Huet sums up the subtext of many early vampire accounts: "All the dead are vampires, poisoning the air, the blood, the life of the living, contaminating their body and their soul, robbing them of their sanity."

Mad science: "You know that she is in a movie in which sharks eat people; she thinks that she is living a normal life."

Paul Bloom, Yale psych professor, has an extensive and excellent article about the pleasures of the imagination posted on The Chronicle of Higher Education. Bloom discusses the role of imagination and focuses on those liminal experiences that seem to hold over both real and fictional stimulation. The whole article is worth your time, but I pull out a little extract here because it discusses the first kill in Jaws, a horrifying scene I recently wrote up as an unofficial entry in Arbogast's "One I Would Save" blog series.

Here's Bloom on the role of empathy death of Chrissie Watkins:

Often we experience ourselves as the agent, the main character, of an imaginary event. To use a term favored by psychologists who work in this area, we get transported. This is how daydreams and fantasies typically work; you imagine winning the prize, not watching yourself winning the prize. Certain video games work this way as well: They establish the illusion of running around shooting aliens, or doing tricks on a skateboard, through visual stimulation that fools a part of you into thinking—or alieving—that you, yourself, are moving through space.

For stories, though, you have access to information that the character lacks. The philosopher Noël Carroll gives the example of the opening scene in Jaws. You can't be merely taking the teenager's perspective as she swims in the dark, because she is cheerful, and you are terrified. You know things that she doesn't. You hear the famous, ominous music; she doesn't. You know that she is in a movie in which sharks eat people; she thinks that she is living a normal life.

This is how empathy works in real life. You would feel the same way seeing someone happily swim while a shark approaches her. In both fiction and reality, then, you simultaneously make sense of the situation from both the character's perspective and from your own.

Mad science: How werewolves became imaginary.

Over at the Fortean Times web site, writer Brian Regal tracks the history of the werewolf feared monster of Europe's darkest forests to figment of the imagination. The broad arch of the werewolf's lapse into fantasy is familiar, but Regal points out that the extent to which the werewolf became strictly fictional is uniquely notable:

For most of recorded history, the half-man, half-wolf lycanthrope reigned supreme as the creature travellers most feared encountering in the woods and along dark roads at night. Numerous legends concerned werewolves – the awful deeds they committed, how to protect against them, how to kill them – and belief in their reality can be found in many cultures from ancient times to the present. But while the werewolf still holds a place in fiction and films, few people today actually fear meeting one in reality. Many individuals and groups actively search for cryptids, but there are no werewolf-hunting organisations. So – where have all the werewolves gone?

From the late 19th century on, anomal­ous primates like the Yeti, Sasquatch and Bigfoot nudged aside the wolfmen of old and stepped forward to occupy the niche of this fearsome man-like monster. But what accounts for this curious transformation?

Regal starts his story with a discussion of the dog-headed proto-werewolf of Greek legend: the Cynocephali, the race of dog-headed men that even included (in the lore of the Eastern church) St. Christopher, pictured above. He notes that, curiously, Europe started to dismiss the possibility of werewolves even as its belief in demons and witches proved fatally strong:

Despite the widespread cultural acceptance of werewolves as a reality, by the late 1500s some European writers were questioning the concept. While belief in witches flourished with murderous abandon, views on werewolves had little consistency in learned circles, and though werewolves often found themselves associated with witches, no werewolf ‘craze’ ever developed. In fact, there are only a few werewolf trials on record. As the Enlightenment dawned, a debate ensued over whether demons could transmute a human into a werewolf. Philosophers and theologians wondered whether the human soul was capable of becoming genuinely bestial, and such theological reservations posed the same problems for werewolfery as evolution did two and a half centuries later. It was during this period of scient­ific revolution that psychological, rather than physical, explanations for lycanthropy gained currency.

Ultimately, he argues, the rise of Darwin put paid to the wolf man. Evolutionary theory began to kill off the beasts of myth, replacing them with an equally fantastic, but more "scientific" zoo of missing links, prehistoric survivals, and "nature's mistakes" (though Darwin himself was dismissive of any notion of a missing link). Notably, apes - and their cryptid shadow relatives, Bigfoot, yeti, sasquatch, the stink ape, and so on - became the beast-man link of choice.

Movies: Where my dogs at?

In their critique of American cinema's finest moment, Deep Blue Sea, Kyle Kurpinski and Terry D. Johnson, the authors of How to Defeat Your Own Clone, point out the difficulty of increasing the intelligence of a species through genetic engineering. Intelligence is one of those simple sounding concepts that gets all wiggly once we try to pin it down. This is due in no small part to the fact that what we call intelligence is actually a complex of related but distinct brain and body functions. Consequently, enhancing the intelligence of a species requires precise manipulations of an unknown number of minute elements in an effort to reach a vague-at-best result. It would be like building a puzzle from a box without a reference picture lid, and doing in the dark. This isn't to say that you shouldn't try it. Just because boosting brainpower is hard doesn't mean that it's impossible. But, the author's point out, giving evil-genius grade intelligence to sharks is going to be considerably more difficult than, say, breeding them without teeth. If you can do super-intelligent killer sharks, you can just as easily do super-intelligent plankton eating sharks. And, while you've got the hood up on one of the most dangerous species of all time, why not take out that little bit of extra insurance? The take away for Kurpinski and Johnson: "If we're concerned about the bioenhanced creatures of the future, we don't need less engineering, just less stupid engineering."

If only somebody had told this to the mad scientists of Nicholas Mastandrea's 2006 action horror flick The Breed, a creature feature that uses psycho gene-scrambled doggies as its baddies.

The flick's plot is factory-standard. A small group of attractive young folks getaway to a cabin on what's supposed to be a deserted island. But there's deserted and then there's deserted. The island is home to a pack of lethal canines, bred for size, speed, smarts, a sense of dramatic irony, and a profound distrust of the tradition relationship between dogs and humans. To really seal the deal, they've been infected with some form super-rabies that not only makes the insanely aggressive, but apparently wires them into some viral neural network that allows them to plan elaborate doggie ambushes and the like. Well, elaborate for doggies anyway.

(I have to qualify that last statement and emphasize the "apparently." Later in the film, one of our human protags will get the same bug. She'll start making statements about the super-puppy pack's motivations and movements that the other characters treat as uncanny. However, these statements trend towards the obvious: "They don't want us here?" Really? What gave that away? Was it all the killing that gave it away? And her ability to detect the pack usually manifests after the dogs are visible and they've started barking their heads off. Spidey-sense it ain't.)

The Breed's actually better than you'd suspect. Though, honestly, that's as much a testament to low expectations than it is praise of the filmmakers. Mastandrea's served as a second unit director for decades (and he's worked on everything from Monkey Shines to W) and he's got a workman-like narrative style that efficiently situates the viewer and never loses the action. The script, though working off the much used Beau Gest trapped-and-surrounded plot, actually manages to work in a surprising amount of exposition in the story's occasional pauses. The decision to use actual dogs instead of CGI pooches pays dividends. Finally, there's Michelle Rodriguez: an actress whose curiously predatory looks and understated physical grace are often the best things about the sadly far too often dire flicks she's in.

Even giving these folks their due, The Breed's still recognizably part of that largest of horror subgenres: the lazy Saturday afternoon time killer that's too bad to call good, but not so bad it drives you to change the channel. The plot works, but the only surprises are semi-regular jump scares that wear out their welcome pretty early. The origin story of the killer canines subplot lacks emotional heft because the brothers at the center of it are such thin characters that their emotional struggle with the truth of their own family's involvement in government-sponsored mad science never feels real. The whole psychic canine Internet thing struck me as so poorly developed as too be an unwelcome distraction rather than an intriguing riddle.

If the sense that it's slender pleasures add up to slight more than the energy expended to follow the film and ignore the occasional rough patches, one has to count The Breed as a (extremely qualified) victory.

Though throughout the film, I found myself pondering what working conditions were for the lab coats who made these killer pups.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm giving these stronger, smarter, meaner dogs a mutant strain of rabies that will make their thirst for human blood nigh unquenchable."

"Sweet. Is that going to make them more killy?"

"Hell yeah. Crazy killy. Killy times infinity. That's how killy."

"100% straight up badass. I love it. Um, but what about safety controls?"

"Um. I don't get you."

"You know, something like a missing enzyme or they've got no teeth or they need to call us every four hours or they grow paralytically despondent and commit suicide. Shit like that. You know, to prevent them from turning into unstoppable killing machines."

"You're thinking about it all wrong. You need to be like, 'Who wants stoppable killing machines?' And the answer is nobody. Because then people can stop your killing machine. You might as well not start your killing machine if somebody can stop it."

"Good point. Then you know what we should do: Network their brains into a killing machine collective hive mind. They'd be like killy infinity plus one."

"I love you, dude."

"Seriously."

"Yes. All these years, tormented by my unspoken passion. Driven to a tortured silent desperation by my boundless hunger for your embrace. So near, but untouchable. Though, before I forget, we should totally insert that 'I hate humans, especially scientists' gene Bill whipped up last week. I figure killy is one of those go big or go home sort of things."

"Sure, why the hell not?"

Psychic rabies? Honestly? To abuse a phrase, we don't need less mad science, just less stupid mad science.

Mad science: Can you hear me now?

The Guardian reports on an astronomer who claims that one of the unexpected consequences of switching to digital broadcast technology is that it makes the Earth harder to detect from space.

In the past, TV and radio programmes were broadcast from huge ground stations that transmitted signals at thousands of watts. These could be picked up relatively easily across the depths of space, astronomers calculated.

Now, most TV and radio programmes are transmitted from satellites that typically use only 75 watts and have aerials pointing toward Earth, rather than into space.

"For good measure, in America we have switched from analogue to digital broadcasting and you are going to do the same in Britain very soon," Drake added. "When you do that, your transmissions will become four times fainter because digital uses less power."

"Very soon we will become undetectable," he said. In short, in space no one will hear us at all.

Drake also notes that this goes both ways. Assuming that there's an advanced alien race out there, it is possible that they also let their communications systems develop for maximum efficiency, that is to say, max results for minimum energy expenditure. If they did, then they'd be as invisible to us as we are becoming to them.

What is true for humans would probably also be true for aliens, who may already have moved to much more efficient methods of TV and radio broadcasting. Trying to find ET from their favourite shows was going to be harder than we thought, Drake said.

Of course, this is only assuming that we want to be found. Perhaps a little cosmic camouflage is a good thing.

Mad science: The tepid dream-lives of children.

It's a well-worn cultural trope that the dream-lives of are rich wonderlands (or Oz's, as the case may be) of unbounded, raw, liberated emotion and creativity. New research suggests, however, that this is a back construction of some sort, an adult colonization of the pint-sized Land of Nod that reflects our needs to see children as uniquely innocent and free. In fact, says the cruel, demystifying ogre of science, the dreams of young children are remarkable mainly for their incredible dullness and simplicity.

Only the the abstract is available online, but here's an extract with some revealing data:

When do children start dreaming, and what kind of dreams do they have? Given that children often show signs of emotion in sleep, many assume that they dream a great deal. However, a series of studies by David Foulkes showed that children under the age of 7 reported dreaming only 20% of the time when awakened from REM sleep, compared with 80–90% in adults.

Preschoolers’ dreams are often static and plain, such as seeing an animal or thinking about eating. There are no characters that move, no social interactions, little feeling, and they do not include the dreamer as an active character. There are also no autobiographic, episodic memories, perhaps because children have trouble with conscious episodic recollection in general, as suggested by the phenomenon of infantile amnesia.

Preschoolers do not report fear in dreams, and there are few aggressions, misfortunes and negative emotions. Children who have night terrors, in which they awaken early during the night from SWS [slow-wave sleep] and display intense fear and agitation, are probably terrorized by disorientation owing to incomplete awakening rather than by a dream. Thus, although children of age 2–5 years can see and speak of everyday people, objects and events, they apparently cannot dream of them.

Between the ages of 5–7 years, dream reports become longer, although they are still infrequent. Dreams might contain sequences of events in which characters move about and interact, but narratives are not well developed. At around 7 years of age, dream reports become longer and more frequent, contain thoughts and feelings, the child's self becomes an actual participant in the dream, and dreams begin to acquire a narrative structure and to reflect autobiographic, episodic memories.

It could be argued that perhaps all children dream, but some do not yet realize that they are dreaming, do not remember their dreams, or cannot report them because of poor verbal skills. Contrary to these intuitive suggestions, dream recall was found to correlate best with abilities of mental imagery rather than with language proficiency... Put simply, it is children with the most developed mental imagery and visuo-spatial skills (rather than verbal or memory capabilities) that report the most dreams, suggesting a real difference in dream experience.

The cartoon is from See Mike Draw.

Department of Crazy Crap You Didn't Even Know You Had to Fear: Evolution is a sometimes friend.

The X-men it ain't. Discover magazine covers a scientist who believes that the future of human evolution is not nifty eye beams and weather control, but extinction caused by a slow but steady spread of micromutations that, in the short term, are unnoticable but, in the long term, start collectively screwing us big-time. From are selections from the article:

This week, the evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch has published a provocative paper (to mark his inauguration into the National Academy of Sciences) in which he makes another kind of forecast. Our future evolution, he warns, is going to lead to a devastating decline in our health. . .

Lynch concludes that every gamete (a sperm or egg) acquires the following:

–38 base-substitution mutations (a single “letter” of DNA changes to another one).

–3 small insertions or deletions of a stretch of DNA

–1 splicing mutation (which changes the combination of segments of a gene that cells use to build proteins)

–Plus some assorted other mutations (gene duplications, insertions of DNA copied by transposable elements, and so on).

All told, Lynch estimates a total of 50 to 100 mutations.

A lot of the new mutations in every new baby are harmless. But each baby may acquire a few harmful ones. These mutations rarely cause a swift death. Instead, in their totality, they slice off a tiny fraction of the total offspring an entire population can produce. Lynch estimates that mutations to protein-coding DNA cause the fitness of a population to decline by 1%. That’s assuming natural selection does not favor other mutations over these harmful ones.

Lynch acknowledges that natural selection is still in effect in humans, particularly in places where people never see doctors, let alone get clean drinking water. But as the world’s standard of living goes up, he argues, more and more people are being shielded from natural selection’s most intense effects–and harmful mutations are piling up.

In a matter of a few centuries, Lynch predicts, industrialized societies may experience a huge increase in harmful genes–”with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels,” he writes.

Ironically, though Lynch's theory sounds suspiciously like the protect-our-genes ranting of paleo- and neo-eugencists, it fatally undermines the eugenic argument by pointing out how useless such a program would be. You can't stop the inevitable micromutations Lynch points to above, but you can go out of your way to make sure you're doomed by minimizing natural selection and maximizing the concentration of mutated genes by limiting your gene pool.

Battling this decline won’t be easy, says Lynch. Rather than a few big mutations causing the trouble, the decline will be brought about by a vast number of mutations, each with a very small effect. The fantasies of selective breeding dreamed of by eugenicists aren’t just loathesome–they’re also useless. Instead, Lynch argues for something that would make the eugenicists crazy. “Ironically, the genetic future of mankind may reside predominantly in the gene pools of the least industrialized segments of society,” he writes.

In short, if you're single, you need to do your part to save the human race by getting some hot you-on-somebody-else action on across ethnic barriers. That's right! It's no longer your creepy fetish; it's the only way to save humanity. Do it now, for the future.

Mad science: "The case of the haunted scrotum."

Vaughan of Mind Hacks discusses an unusual case human's seeing meaning - specifically, in this case, a human face - in random data. He tells it better than I do:

This is quite possibly the oddest example of an illusory face I have ever discovered.
Seeing meaningful information in meaningless data is a psychological effect known as pareidoia or apophenia and this is an example that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1996:

The case of the haunted scrotum

A 45-year-old man was referred for investigation of an undescended right testis by computed tomography (CT). An ultrasound scan showed a normal testis and epididymis on the left side. The right testis was not visualized in the scrotal sac or in the right inguinal region. On CT scanning of the abdomen and pelvis, the right testis was not identified but the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghostlike apparition (Figure 1). By chance, the distribution of normal anatomical structures within the left side of the scrotum had combined to produce this image. What of the undescended right testis? None was found. If you were a right testis, would you want to share the scrotum with that?

J R Harding

Consultant Radiologist, Royal Gwent Hospital

Pic below:

Mad science: Zombie animals.

Scientific American, a magazine whose title increasingly sounds like a deliberate and almost provocative anarchronism (like the CP in NAACP), has a nifty article and slide show on behavoir-changing parasites: parasites that not only infect a host, but hijack existing behavoirs and twist them to better serve the spread of the parasite. Here's two examples from the article:

In the case of the spooked spider (Plesiometa argyra), a parasitic wasp (Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga) lays her eggs on the spider's abdomen. Just before the larva emerges, the host spins a strange, new type of web—one that looks nothing like its usual wide nets. This silk platform, however, is perfectly suited to supporting a cocoon for the vulnerable young wasp larvae, which have been feasting on the spider's innards as they grow.

The snail-manipulating flatworm (Leucochloridium paradoxum) grows and multiplies inside the snail. Once ready to move on to its next host, the worms push up into the snail's tentacles, making them swell and squirm, mimicking the action of bugs that birds like to eat. As the snail crawls, blindly, into the sunlight, a passing bird is likely to swoop down to snatch a tasty tentacle or two. The worm-infested meal will then infect the bird, which passes it onto other snails via dubious droppings.

Mad science: Lost in Pandora.

Over at the Frontal Cortex, there's an interesting, if kind of disturbing, assessment of Avatar as an example of the fully realized potential of the medium of film.

From the mind of Jonah Lehrer:

The modernist critic Clement Greenberg argued that art should be evaluated on its adherence to the "specificity of the medium". Painting, for instance, is defined by its abstract flatness, which meant that artists should no longer try to pretend that what they convey is real. While centuries of "realist" artists tried to escape the flatness with elaborate technical tricks, Greenberg argued that the flatness wasn't an obstacle or hurdle: it was merely an essential element of painting. This led Greenberg to become an advocate for people like Jackson Pollock, who celebrated the 2-D un-reality of their art form.

The point, though, is that every art is defined by its medium. The reason I've referenced Greenberg in the context of Avatar - and please pardon the pretentiousness of the above paragraph - is that I think Cameron has deftly realized the potential of his medium, which is film.

Lehrer then goes on to discuss a neuroscience experiement that suggests movie audiences react to film, from a neuro-biological perspective, in surprisingly standardized ways. According to the work of Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach, the brains of film-goers "'tick together' in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment." Their research indicates that that, across individuals, the visual cortex, fusiform gyrus (the area responsible for face, color, word, number, and category recognition), and areas related to touch activated. It was also notable what areas didn't activate: "Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom 'losing yourself in the act' receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings." In short, we divert processing power from critical, self-evaluative functions to sensory processing functions.

I should note here that the flick used in the study was the spaghetti western classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

That's all Kool and the Gang, but why would this mean the flick with the giant Native American Smurf cats is the ultimate expression of film? Lehrer explains:

At its core, movies are about dissolution: we forget about ourselves and become one with the giant projected characters on the screen. In other words, they become our temporary avatars, so that we're inseparable from their story. (This is one of the reasons why the Avatar plot is so effective: it's really a metaphor for the act of movie-watching.) And for a mind that's so relentlessly self-aware, I'd argue that 100 minutes of self-forgetting (as indicated by a quieting of the prefrontal cortex) is a pretty nice cognitive vacation. And Avatar, through a variety of technical mechanisms - from the astonishing special effects to the straightforward story to the use of 3-D imagery - manages to induce those "synchronized spatiotemporal patterns" to an unprecedented degree. That is what the movies are all about, and that is what Avatar delivers.

I'm all aboard Lehrer's neuro-just-so explanation of Avatar's unique power. I haven't seen it, but the fact that nearly everybody praises the film in terms of its uniquely immersive qualities seems to jibe with the lick Lehrer's putting down. What's my problem then? Well, my problems are legion and it would take another blog to answer that question - but focusing on this particular issue, I have a problem with Lehrer's claim that "at its core, movies are about dissolution." And not just because the sentence suffers from pronoun troubles.

The problem with Hasson and Malach's study, as well as with Lehrer's overreaching application of their results, is that it is dishonest about what constitutes our understanding of the word "movie." Both the original study and Lehrer selected specific kinds of films: narrative films in recognizable genres, heavy on plot. This isn't meant to be dismissive of these flicks, even Lehrer claims it is case with Avatar: "I was lost in Pandora, transfixed by a perfectly predictable melodrama." But there are plenty of movies out there that break that mold. Even if we don't evoke the complete abstract works of most extreme film experimentalists, we can wonder about the lab results that Palindromes - a flick that regularly swaps in and out actors to play a single lead character - would have had on the viewer activation patterns. What about the ol' reliable French New Wave, with its constant, intentional breaking of film's magic immersive spell? Is Masculine, Feminine: In 15 Acts really a less artistically achieved film than Avatar because it refuses to let you get lost in it?

On a related note, the ability to "get lost in a film" would seem to me to considerably more than a function of the medium's formal elements. I recall, from my youth, a Washington Post film review - name long forgotten - reviewing the rap-centric Spinal Tapish satire CB4. The review used the phrase "like taking the SATs in Martian." The barrier to entry was not, one assumes, Tamra Davis's experimental filmmaking techniques. Davis's work is fine example of clear storytelling. Rather, it is a purely social thing: Without access to the semantic level of the film, which required a slightly more than passing acquiantance with rap music, the formal level failed to produce phenom - presumably because it failed to produce the activation pattern - that both the researchers and Lehrer suggest is inherint to powerful films. One could argue, as I will for the sake of argument, that the the "dissolution" of film is an individual phenomenon. That Avatar is a brilliant film for Lehrer and, presumably, there was some "perfect viewer" that got CB4's brilliance. (His name was Justin Goslin. He thought that movie was the funniest shit he'd ever seen, man.) But then shouldn't we, by extension, assume that films like Derek Jarman's Blue and Warhol's Empire have perfect viewers too? In which case we lose the argument that the formal elements of the films in question are responsible for the effect reported. Empire lacks story elements and editing. Blue is a steady field of the titular color with dialogue over it. Admittedly, these are extreme cases, but I feel we're justified in interrogating Lehrer in this way because he's not just making an aesthetic judgment regarding Avatar, but claiming that there's a element of scientific fact at the core of his judgment. To like Avatar is one thing. To make a claim for the neuro-reality of the film experience and then gloss it with value judgment is another.

I get where Lehrer's going with this, but the "film as cognitive vacation" thing rubs me the wrong way. Not because films that serve that function are inferior or shouldn't be enjoyed, but rather because it suggests that films should never aspire to be anything other than, literally, mass delivered sedatives for our critical faculties. Like the tired notion that comics are inherently "childish" by viture of the features of their medium, Lehrer's definition of film, and his expectation of the pleasures film can provide us, assumes a certain level of mindlessness. Indeed, it makes it the medium's highest virtue. Why straightjacket film that way?

Mad science: Ancient Europeans were sick puppies.

Wired Science reports a grisly archeological discovery:

At a settlement in what is now southern Germany, the menu turned gruesome 7,000 years ago. Over a period of perhaps a few decades, hundreds of people were butchered and eaten before parts of their bodies were thrown into oval pits, a new study suggests.

Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues. A social and political crisis in central Europe at that time triggered various forms of violence, the researchers suspect.

“Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says. Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals.

The article gives the grim details:

Work from 2005 to 2008 — led by Andrea Zeeb-Lanz and Fabian Haack of the archaeology division of Germany’s Directorate General for Cultural Heritage — unearthed additional human bones, mainly skulls and limb bones bearing incisions. Remains of an estimated 500 people have been found so far.

Pottery resting among the bones accumulated over no more than a few decades, the researchers say. Some pieces came from Neolithic sites located 400 kilometers from Herxheim.

The pits that surrounded Herxheim provided no protection from invaders but may have marked a symbolic boundary for a ceremonial settlement, Boulestin proposes. At first, Boulestin’s team, like Orschiedt and Haidle, thought that the dead were brought to Herxheim for ceremonial reburial.

But Boulestin and his colleagues’ opinion changed after they analyzed 217 reassembled human bones from one deposit, representing at least 10 individuals.

Damage typical of animal butchery appears on the bones, including that produced by a technique to separate the ribs from the spine, the scientists say. Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out.

Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed.

People most likely made the chewing marks found near intentionally broken ends of hand and arm bones, Boulestin says.

And later:

Whatever actually happened at Herxheim, facial bones were smashed beyond recognition, “giving an impression of the destruction of individual identity, a kind of psychic violence against the person,” Thorpe says.

In the article, researchers speculate that the community may have faced some catastrophic food shortage that forced these people to dig up and consume their dead. Evidence of reburial ceremonies supports this theory. Chemical analysis may further support this explanation.

Link Proliferation: Eat yourself fitter.

"The Ultimate Revenge of the Art Nerd

The New York Times reviews the MoMA's upcoming "Tim Burton" exhibit and, sadly, finds it lacking.

Given the tremendous visual appeal of Mr. Burton’s movies, you would hope that “Tim Burton,” the Museum of Modern Art’s expansive retrospective of his noncinematic art, would be equally exciting. Alas, it is a letdown. Focused mainly on hundreds of drawings dating from his teenage years to the present and including paintings, sculptures, photographs and a smattering of short films on flat screens, it is an entertaining show and a must for film buffs and Burton fans. To see the raw material from which the movies evolved is certainly illuminating. But there is a sameness to all Mr. Burton’s two- and three-dimensional output that makes for a monotonous viewing experience.

I will most likely see it anyway, though it sounds like MoMA's basically installed three galleries worth of Hot Topic merch. The entrance to the exhibit (see above) looks fun.

Roll Save Versus Anxiety of Influence

The Escapist takes a look at the literary influences on the earliest iteration of D&D. Shocking, it isn't the name J.R.R. Tolkien written out 1,000 times.

Still, it's interesting that the game's original foreword, which Gygax penned in November 1973, long before any legal concerns entered into the picture, states: "These rules are strictly fantasy. Those wargamers who lack imagination, those who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste." There's no mention of Tolkien there and indeed, even with the aforementioned references to Hobbits and Balrogs and the like, there are probably even more references to the Martian creations of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the text of the game itself.

How Evolution Makes Some People Better Cannibals

Kuru is to cannibals what mad cow disease is to beef eaters. In Papua New Guinea, where the cultural traditions of once required some tribes to eat dead, the disease claimed more than 2,500 people before cannibalism was officially stopped in 1950.

The legacy has left a curious tag on the genetics of the some of the cannibals and their non-cannibal descendants: In the last 200 years, the cannibals evolved a anti-kuru gene that researchers now call the "most clear but evidence of human evolution in action."

Mead and his colleagues discovered the mutation after comparing stored DNA from 152 dead Fore victims of the disease with DNA from more than 3000 living Fore, including almost 560 who participated in the ritual eating of brains before it was banned.

In 51 survivors and their descendants, they discovered a hitherto-unknown variant of PRNP, the gene which makes prions, the proteins that spread the disease. These prions become malformed and in turn make all healthy prions they encounter malformed as well, in a chain reaction that ultimately destroys brains by turning them into a spongy mush.

The change in the gene comes at a position called codon 127. Throughout the animal kingdom, the codon contains the same amino acid, called glycine or "G", from each parent, giving the form G127G. To their astonishment, Mead and his colleagues found a variant of the codon never seen in nature before, in which one of the glycines has been swapped for a valine amino acid, giving the new variant the name G127V.

Initially, Mead and his colleagues thought that because the variant had never been seen before, it must have damaging rather than beneficial effects. "We thought we'd found the trigger for how kuru happens, that someone ate the brain of someone with the mutation and that's how the disease started spreading through the cannibalistic funeral feasts," he said.

"Instead, we found the complete opposite, which is that it was protective."

Mad science: The uncanny leaps the species barrier.

Seed magazine has a nice piece on neuroscience research aimed at transforming the century-old psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny into a data-supported and more strictly defined phenomenon.

Disturbing experiences that feel both familiar and strange are instances of the “uncanny,” an intuitive concept, yet one that has defied simple explanation for more than a century. Interest in the particular occurrences of the uncanny, in which humans are bothered by interaction with human-like models, began as a psychological curiosity. But as our ability to design artificial life has increased—along with our dependence on it—getting to the heart of why people respond negatively to realistic models of themselves has taken on a new importance. Attempts to understand the origins of this reaction, known since the 1970s as the “uncanny valley response,” have drawn on everything from repressed fears of castration to an evolutionary mechanism for mate selection, but there has been little empirical evidence to assess the validity of these ideas.

The article discusses Sigmund Freud's 40-page essay on the concept and the 1970's essay by roboticist Masahiro Mori that introduced the "uncanny valley" concept. It then goes on to discuss new findings from Princeton researcher Asif Ghazanfar.

Last spring at Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species.

“By showing that monkeys can do it, several things become plausible,” Ghazanfar says. “One is that there is an evolutionary explanation for the uncanny valley and the other is that it is not something specific to our human, cultural experience.” These findings may for the first time allow scientists to go back through a century’s worth of peculiar ideas about the origins of the uncanny valley and begin putting them to the test.

Ghazanfar puts forth his own non-Freudian theory of the uncanny:

Ghazanfar rejects all of these hypotheses. “What is really going on is much simpler,” he says. He believes the uncanny valley response occurs because an animal—human or nonhuman—is evolutionarily inclined to develop an expectation of what members of its species should look like, a supremely important skill, as it lets the animal know with whom it can and cannot interact.

In this sense, life-like robotic and computer-generated models occupy a weird middle ground in an animal’s mind: They are familiar enough for the animal to consider the possibility that they are of the same species, but strange enough that they don’t quite meet the expectation the animal has developed for members of its species. “Any face that violates that expectation is going to elicit the uncanny response,” Ghazanfar says.

There does appear to be some experimental evidence in support Ghazanfar’s theory. Studies with children have shown that at a very young age, babies do not react negatively to human-like robots. As children grow older, such robots become more bothersome. This, Ghazanfar suggests, might be an indicator that infants have not yet developed a narrow expectation for what a human should like. As of yet, however, he has not tested his theory explicitly.

All praise to the wonderful Mind Hacks blog, source of neuroscience brilliance.

Mad science: Meet the new disease-spawned end times; looks like the old disease-spawned end times.

Over at Foreign Policy they've got a nice post on Black Death 2.0.

Plague has never really disappeared, but it suddenly seems poised for a comeback. Indeed, world health officials have quietly recategorized plague as a "re-emerging" disease in recent years, and it now infects 2,000 people annually, killing 200. The Chinese government even quarantined an entire town this summer after an outbreak of pneumonic plague, which eventually killed three and infected nine more. And experts fear the next stage of the disease will be especially dangerous, fueled by age-old phenomena, such as humans trying to use plague to wage war on their enemies, as well as new ones, such as climate change.

Welcome to the plague years, the next generation. For most people, plague automatically means the Black Death, which began in the 14th century and killed a quarter to a third of Europe's population, roughly 15 million to 25 million people. This is the best-known plague pandemic, but it wasn't the first. That honor goes to a sixth-century outbreak that originated in northern Africa and took out as many as 100 million people. Nor was the Black Death the last major pandemic. Plague spread through China and India during the 19th century, killing some 12 million people, and then spread to the United States in 1900, causing an epidemic in San Francisco.

Between major pandemics, the plague never completely disappeared. It never does: It merely retreats until conditions favor another outbreak.

You may think, "So what? We licked before, we'll lick it again." Ah, not so fast, my too confident friend. The plague hasn't been sitting around, waiting for us to come kill it.

Today, plague is endemic among the rodents of the American Southwest. Isolated outbreaks also occur regularly in East and Southern Africa, Vietnam, Burma, China, Mongolia, Russia, and Central Asia. What's more, there are already troubling signs that the disease is evolving into even more dangerous forms: Scientists recently discovered a drug-resistant strain of the plague in Madagascar.

There is a bright side: This awesome look might become fashionable again.