Male nursery web spiders often woo potential lady-friends with gifts wrapped in silk. Mating may ensue, during which a female unspools the present, expecting to find a tasty treat. But the males can be unscrupulous. Some offerings contain inedible plant seeds or empty insect exoskeletons.
…The empty-handed males were mostly unsuccessful at mating. Whereas those with a gift could get the girl. But if the gift was worthless, the females quickly realized the deceit and pushed the copulating males off.
The Scientific American blog post (based on this paper) makes it sound as if the males are the only ones using deception and dirty tricks. But why do the males silk wrap their gifts? Why not just present the females with food?
Females presented with food will often grab the food and run, leaving the males doubly hungry. A wrapped package is harder to steal (the males have a better grip on the silk) and as the females slowly unwrap their potentially delicious presents the males copulate. Thus, the rituals of silken wrapped gifts conceal intricate conflicts over resources and sex. Only among spiders, of course.
The Nature.com summary is here, the new paper is here (pdf), abstract:
Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a pure state is a physical property of system, much like position and momentum in classical mechanics. Another is that even a pure state has only a statistical significance, akin to a probability distribution in statistical mechanics. Here we show that, given only very mild assumptions, the statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory. This result holds even in the presence of small amounts of experimental noise, and is therefore amenable to experimental test using present or near-future technology. If the predictions of quantum theory are confirmed, such a test would show that distinct quantum states must correspond to physically distinct states of reality.
I have no ability to judge this, but it seems serious people are taking it seriously. Hat tip goes to Kevin Drum.
…the single most important change affecting the world’s population — its expansion from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to today’s 6 billion — would not have been possible without the synthesis of ammonia.
…All the children to be seen running around or leading docile water buffaloes in China’s southern provinces, throughout the Nile Delta, or in the manicured landscapes of Java got their body proteins, via urea their parents spread on bunded fields, from the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia.
Another wondrous discovery from late 19th century/turn of the century Germany, though on the other side of the balance Haber played a critical role in inventing the German poison gases used in World War I. Have I mentioned that Vaclav Smil is one of the most important thinkers/writers today, in any field? It is worth reading all of his books, and there are not many people (with many books that is!) you can say that about.
By the way, many people think that Clara Immerwahr (Fritz Haber’s first wife, and the first female PhD at the University of Breslau) looks like Taylor Swift:
They compiled data establishing, among other things, that certain areas of the body are particularly ticklish (the nape of the neck, for you do-it-yourselfers), that the most playful rats tend to be the most ticklish, that rats can become conditioned to chirp simply in anticipation of being tickled, that tickle response rates decline after adolescence, that young rats preferentially spend time with older ones who chirp more frequently, that the tickle response appears to generate social bonding, that chirping decreases in the presence of negative stimuli (such as the scent of a cat), that rats will run mazes and press levers to get tickled, etc. Based on their research and observations, Panksepp and his fellow researchers hypothesized that rats, when being tickled or engaging in other playful activities, experience social joy that they vocalize through 50 kHz chirping, a primordial form of laughter that is evolutionarily related to joyful social laughter in young human children.
Here is more, with further references and links at the bottom, and for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
In Why they call it Green Energy: The Summers/Klain/Browner Memo I discussed the Shepherds Flat wind project, a $1.9 billion dollar project subsidized to the tune of $1.2 billion. Today, the NYTimes has a good piece on an even bigger subsidy sucker, a $1.6 billion CA solar project that is nearly 90% subsidized by taxpayers and ratepayers leaving a nice profit but virtually no risk for its corporate backers. The grateful but perhaps overly voluble CEO of the corporation building the project had this to say:
As NRG’s chief executive, David W. Crane, put it to Wall Street analysts early this year, the government’s largess was a once-in-a-generation opportunity…
“I have never seen anything that I have had to do in my 20 years in the power industry that involved less risk than these projects,” he said in a recent interview. “It is just filling the desert with panels.”
I suspect that he might have continued, “it was like taking candy from a baby,” but that is just a suspicion.
There are good reasons for taxing all sources of carbon and subsidizing cleaner energy sources (especially R&D) but huge subsidies targeted on a handful of corporations without “skin in the game” are a recipe for waste, corruption and abuse. We can only hope that this was just a once in a generation opportunity.
Addendum: The NYTimes usually has great info-graphics but today’s experiment made it more difficult not easier to get to the key information.
Hat tip: Daniel S.
Addendum 2: It’s telling that so many people want to shift the debate away from the advisability of particular solar and wind subsidies to whether I or others have been consistent about coal, oil and nuclear subsidies.
For the record, in this very post I discuss taxing carbon, obviously including oil and coal, so it is clear that I do not favor subsidizing those energy sources. Also, careful readers (most MR readers!), will see that I am especially worried about “huge subsidies targeted on a handful of corporations,” both of those clauses are important. In this case, for example, we are talking about nearly 90% subsidies and they are targeted on a case by case basis; put these two things together and you get waste, corruption and abuse. For these reasons, I am less worried about subsidies to green energy that leave private firms with lots of skin in the game and that are open to any firm.
The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.
Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
Could it be that too many people like being the smartest one in the room? Or is it some other explanation?:
“But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”
From the folks that brought you BigDog, a robot that can walk, run and do push-ups. Notice especially how the robot is able to stand on one foot when it shifts its weight.
With regard to age, there’s a suggestion that enjoyment rises through childhood, peaks in adolescence and then gradually fades with age. Related to this is the ‘snuggle theory’ – the idea that viewing horror films may be a rite of passage for young people, providing them with an opportunity to fulfil their traditional gender roles. A paper from the late 1980s by Dolf Zillmann, Norbert Mundorf and others found that male undergrads paired with a female partner (unbeknown to them, a research assistant), enjoyed a 14-minute clip from Friday the 13th Part III almost twice as much if she showed distress during the film. Female undergrads, by contrast, said they enjoyed the film more if their male companion appeared calm and unmoved. Moreover, men who were initially considered unattractive were later judged more appealing if they displayed courage during the film viewing. ‘Scary movies and monsters are just the ticket for girls to scream and hold on to a date for dear life and for the date (male or female) to be there to reassure, protect, defend and, if need be, destroy the monster,’ says Fischoff. ‘Both are playing gender roles prescribed by a culture.’
That was the email heading from Nick Mann a week or so ago. Nick asked:
If humans saw strong signs of life on Mars when telescopes became powerful enough to detect it (1800’s?), how would’ve that impacted our economic space priorities? Would’ve we already have sent a manned mission there? Does it matter what stage the life was in (i.e. seeing villages & dirt roads vs glowing metropoli)?
I will predict a one-way mission to Mars, sent in the 1980s, but not too much earlier. For one thing, Mars is far away (duh). The moon shot already took quite a concentrated effort, and it is hard to imagine it being started before the 1950s, given earlier missile technology and the like. World War II already gave associated technologies a big boost, large relative to the likely effect of Mars-gazing on the political equilibrium for everyday science funding.
Ask a comparable question about today. Let’s say we could identify a distant planet as having intelligent life, or likely to have intelligent life. How much would the budget of NASA go up? Not enough to make a huge difference in the short run I suspect. It already seems there may be not-very-intelligent life on Mars (though don’t forget the slime mold, maybe the Martians are smart), and possibly something of interest on some moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and yet we are dismantling NASA’s space efforts.
If you wish to argue this the other way around, both voters and politicians up through the 1960s seemed to have a much more “can do” attitude about large science projects than they do today. As Peter Thiel mentioned recently, is it not odd — and bad — that we refer to ourselves as “the developed nations”?
It is a very good book, clearly written, engaging yet sober, substantive in every chapter, and it does not oversell its material. If you are familiar with the underlying papers you will not see much new here, but as a readable introduction to the work of Kahneman (and Tversky) I give it an A or A+.
It is evident throughout that the author is a psychologist and not an economist; your mileage may vary, but you will not find a response to John List in here. Here is a bit about those unreliable judges, this time in Germany rather than Israel:
The power of random anchors has been demonstrated in some unsettling ways. German judges with an average of more than fifteen years of experience on the bench first read a description of a woman who had been caught shoplifting, then rolled a pair of dice that were loaded so every roll resulted in either a 3 or a 9. As soon as the dice came to a stop, the judges were asked whether they would sentence the woman to a term in prison greater or lesser, in months, than the number showing on the dice. Finally, the judges were instructed to specify the exact prison sentence they would give to the shoplifter. On average, those who had rolled a 9 said they would sentence her to 8 months; those who rolled a 3 said they would sentence here to 5 months; the anchoring effect was 50%.
You can pre-order the book here; it is due out October 25th.
Hydrogravitional-dynamics (HGD) cosmology of Gibson/Schild 1996 predicts that the primordial H-He4 gas of big bang nucleosynthesis became proto-globular-star-cluster clumps of Earth-mass planets at 300 Kyr. The first stars formed from mergers of these 3000 K gas planets. Chemicals C, N, O, Fe etc. created by stars and supernovae then seeded many of the reducing hydrogen gas planets with oxides to give them hot water oceans with metallic iron-nickel cores. Water oceans at critical temperature 647 K then hosted the first organic chemistry and the first life, distributed to the 1080 planets of the cosmological big bang by comets produced by the new (HGD) planet-merger star formation mechanism. The biological big bang scenario occurs between 2 Myr when liquid oceans condensed and 8 Myr when they froze. HGD cosmology explains, very naturally, the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe concept of cometary panspermia by giving a vast, hot, nourishing, cosmological primordial soup for abiogenesis, and the means for transmitting the resulting life forms and their evolving chemical mechanisms widely throughout the universe. A primordial astrophysical basis is provided for astrobiology by HGD cosmology. Concordance ΛCDMHC
cosmology is rendered obsolete by the observation of complex life on Earth.
There’s a popular myth that NASA spent “millions” of dollars developing a pen for astronauts to use in the weightless environment of a space ship — while their sensible Russian counterparts were happy to use the low-tech pencil. Alas, for all its appeal and plausibility, this is not true. Initially, astronauts and cosmonauts were both equipped with pencils, but there were problems: if a piece of lead broke off, for example, it could float into someone’s eye or nose. A pen was needed, one that would defy gravity, write in extreme heat or cold, and be leak proof: blobs of ink floating around the cabin would be more perilous than a stray pencil lead. A long-time pen maker named Paul C. Fisher patented the “space pen” in 1965 (which he had developed at the cost of a million dollars, at the request of but not under the auspices of NASA.) NASA bought four hundred of them at $6 each, and, after a couple of years of testing, the pens were put into space.
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald was asked to help the British decide where to add armor to their bombers. After analyzing the records, he recommended adding more armor to the places where there was no damage!
The RAF was initially confused. Can you explain?
You can find the answer in the extension or at the link.
Wald had data only on the planes that returned to Britain so the bullet holes that Wald saw were all in places where a plane could be hit and still survive. The planes that were shot down were probably hit in different places than those that returned so Wald recommended adding armor to the places where the surviving planes were lucky enough not to have been hit.
Bayer halts nearly two-thirds of its target-validation projects because in-house experimental findings fail to match up with published literature claims, finds a first-of-a-kind analysis on data irreproducibility.
An unspoken industry rule alleges that at least 50% of published studies from academic laboratories cannot be repeated in an industrial setting, wrote venture capitalist Bruce Booth in a recent blog post. A first-of-a-kind analysis of Bayer’s internal efforts to validate ‘new drug target’ claims now not only supports this view but suggests that 50% may be an underestimate; the company’s in-house experimental data do not match literature claims in 65% of target-validation projects, leading to project discontinuation.
“People take for granted what they see published,” says John Ioannidis, an expert on data reproducibility at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, USA. “But this and other studies are raising deep questions about whether we can really believe the literature, or whether we have to go back and do everything on our own.”
For the non-peer-reviewed analysis, Khusru Asadullah, Head of Target Discovery at Bayer, and his colleagues looked back at 67 target-validation projects, covering the majority of Bayer’s work in oncology, women’s health and cardiovascular medicine over the past 4 years. Of these, results from internal experiments matched up with the published findings in only 14 projects, but were highly inconsistent in 43 (in a further 10 projects, claims were rated as mostly reproducible, partially reproducible or not applicable; see article online here). “We came up with some shocking examples of discrepancies between published data and our own data,” says Asadullah. These included inabilities to reproduce: over-expression of certain genes in specific tumour types; and decreased cell proliferation via functional inhibition of a target using RNA interference.
The unspoken rule is that at least 50% of the studies published even in top tier academic journals – Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, etc… – can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab. In particular, key animal models often don’t reproduce. This 50% failure rate isn’t a data free assertion: it’s backed up by dozens of experienced R&D professionals who’ve participated in the (re)testing of academic findings.
