23 Wednesday Oct 2013
Tags
biology, Coca-Cola, Diet (nutrition), food, Health, High-fructose corn syrup, Human, Popular science, science, Sugar
Everyone knows that too much sugar is bad for you, but how much is too much? According to a study published earlier this year, the amount of additional dietary sugar considered safe by regulatory agencies was enough to impact the health of mice, reducing the lifespan of females and the fertility of males. Continue reading
18 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in Humans
Tags
biology, evolution, Human, Melody, music, Musical instrument, Popular science, science, Singing, Vocal music
Humans are remarkably talented musicians. We can recognize a tune despite changes like being slowed down or sped up or even if all of the notes are shifted to a higher or lower pitch. Though these may seem like trivial feats, most other animals can’t manage them. Experiments have shown that six-month old human babies can already distinguish musical pitch and recognize shifted melodies. These exceptional abilities suggest that humans might have some innate capacity to perceive and understand music, something like our hypothetical language faculty. Given that we’ve been able to sing for much longer than we’ve had musical instruments, it seems reasonable that any music capacity we evolved would be more attuned to vocal than instrumental music. Continue reading
17 Tuesday Sep 2013
I discovered the blog Raising My Rainbow sometime last year and have been reading it (semi-)regularly ever since. Written by Lori Duron, it chronicles the ups and downs of raising CJ, a gender-creative little boy who “only likes girl stuff and wants to be treated like a girl”. The blog has been enormously popular and successful, leading Duron to write a book of the same name. Continue reading
11 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in Humans
Tags
Behavior, behaviour, Cognition, games, immersion, Joy Division, MMOG, MMORPG, Popular science, science, University of Malta, Video game, virtual worlds, Will Love Tear Us Apart, World of WarCraft
Instead of writing a post for Inspiring Science this week, I decided to share my first published feature article with you! It appeared in Issue 6 of Think magazine, which was published on Monday. I wrote about the research of Gordon Calleja, director of the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, and also reviewed Will Love Tear Us Apart, a game he designed based on Joy Division’s song Love Will Tear Us Apart. You can read my feature below and also check out the other articles in the issue (it’s free!) and visit the magazine on Facebook!
Gordon Calleja has a dream job: he studies video games. It may sound like frivolous fun, but his work is serious research. He examines how people perceive the world around them and interact with it. His research blends aspects of philosophy, neuropsychology, and literary theory with futuristic concepts like cybernetics and post-humanism; his papers are peppered with references to Wittgenstein and Borges alongside quotes from avid gamers. In his book In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation, published last year by MIT Press, Professor Calleja tackles the question of how we experience games – how the barrier created by the screen and the controls dissolves into a sense of really being there. ‘Ultimately,’ he says, ‘studying presence in games is asking how we are conscious here in the physical world.’
09 Tuesday Jul 2013
Tags
biology, digestion, DNA, Gene expression, GMO, Health, horizontal transfer, Human, MicroRNA, Mouse, nutrition, Popular science, RNA, science
Around a year ago I wrote about a study which showed that micro-RNAs from plants that were eaten could regulate genes in the animal that ate them. It was an exciting and important finding. The study claimed that the miRNAs survived passage through the digestive tracts of mice, got into their bloodstream and traveled to their liver, where they regulated genes involved in cholesterol metabolism. This week I read a post on Virginia Hughes’ blog Only Human where she discusses several follow-up studies which haven’t been able to reproduce the original results. That doesn’t necessarily mean the study was wrong, but it certainly raises doubts. In her post, Virginia also links to a rebuttal letter she received from the author of the original study, so it looks like the debate is on! I’ll try to keep an eye on the subject and report back about it as things develop, but in the meantime read Virginia’s excellent summary of the current state of affairs. Showing that creatures can directly regulate genes in organisms of another kingdom of life would be a major finding, so I’m really glad that there’s debate about it. That’s how science should work: we should try to repeat studies, remain critical and open-minded, and challenge each other.
13 Thursday Jun 2013
Posted in Humans
Tags
biology, brain, Cognition, illusions, Optical illusion, perception, Popular science, science, vision, Visual system, Waterfall
Humans have an exquisite sense of vision. It’s the primary sense for most of us and our making way of interacting with the world around us. We process the massive amount of visual data generated by sight using trillions of interconnections between billions of neurons spread across half our cerebral cortex. Despite this, our visual system falls prey to illusions, constructing ambiguous interpretations and objects that can’t or don’t exist. How do these illusions work and why do they succeed in fooling us even when we know about them? Continue reading
