For ScienceNOW last week, I wrote a quick item about turkey surgery. Well, how to close up your stuffed turkey. If you, like me, thought, “Why would you need to close up a turkey?” I will explain. Apparently some people who know what they’re doing take the major bones out of the turkey before stuffing it. You end up with kind of a floppy turkey roll, so you have to sew it back together so it will hold its shape while it cooks.
The story is about a bunch of European veterinarians who wanted to figure out the best suture pattern for closing up a turkey. (Skin staples won. Ew.)
My story also ran on Wired Science.
There are lots of species of poison dart frogs and they come in lots of colors and patterns, even within the same species. Their colors are advertisements to predators: don’t eat me! you’ll be sorry!
For ScienceNOW last week, I wrote about an experiment that figured out a little bit of how poison dart frogs stay so diverse.
It seems like poison dart frogs shouldn’t be so diverse, because if you’re the frogs, it seems like it would make more sense to just give the predators one warning to learn. But that’s not how it works. Read all about it.
photo: Mathieu Chouteau
Yet again, I find reason to be happy that I am happy. Hm. That is an odd sentence. Anyway, a new study from the UK finds that happy people live longer. I wrote it up for ScienceNOW last week.
This doesn’t mean that unhappy people should feel bad about themselves. The authors aren’t saying you should go fix your personality. But it’s an interesting association, isn’t it?
Forget lessons. You can get better at putting just by using a famous person’s golf club. Ok, not even. A golf club that you are *told* belonged to a famous person. I wrote about it for ScienceNOW today.
Confidence is really important in sports, and people with more confidence do better. I mean, confidence isn’t going to make me better at basketball than Michael Jordan. But it’ll make me better at basketball than me without confidence. Crazy, huh? Brains are powerful.
I just realized that New Scientist posted my story about the NASA Art exhibit on their culture blog, so you can read it here for free. Yay free!
If my story inspires you, you aren’t too late to go see the show – it’s open til October 9. It is, of course, also free, because it’s at the National Air & Space Museum.
The last time I mentioned this story, Lila asked for a picture of the gown, which I never provided. So here you go! The gown. It’s made from fabric printed with images taken on Mars by the Sojourner rover. The designer gave out 3-D glasses at the fashion show. It’s hard to see in this photo, but the shoes and tights match the gown.
(Here’s my earlier mention of the story.)
photo: me, incompetently
This weekend I swung by the National Museum of Natural History to check out a temporary exhibit that opened about 10 days ago. The museum has a fellowship program where artists can spend time hanging out with scientists and looking at collections, or probably doing more or less whatever they want. For his fellowship, the artist Shih Chieh Huang wanted to learn about bioluminescence. The result is a small gallery with nice glowy, wavy art.
It’s kind of mesmerizing – I spent more than an hour in the gallery. The guard said some lovely things about the art. (Guards spend all day with the exhibits. They have opinions.) But he hasn’t been at the museum that long and didn’t know what the policy was on talking to the media, so I agreed not to quote him. They were good quotes, but they weren’t worth getting a guy fired over. Read my blog post here.
photo: me
For the August issue of the HHMI Bulletin I wrote about how neuroscientists try to measure all those little electrical impulses going around in the brain and figure out how we think. Read it here.
Another new story for ScienceNOW – this one about chimps being generous. It’s been kind of a mystery of primatology that chimps seem to be quite generous and sharing in the field, but stingy in experiments. The authors of the new study I wrote about thought maybe the experiments just hadn’t been designed in a chimp-appropriate manner, so the participants didn’t really know what was going on. So they came up with a new way to test their sharing and found that chimps actually are nice.
My favorite line in the study was in the part about how they got the chimps to take part in the experiments. The authors wrote: “If a chimpanzee declined to participate that day, her test was rescheduled for another day.” These chimps live outdoors in a research colony in Georgia. On a day when the researchers were planning to work with a particular chimp, they’d open the door of the research building and call her name. The chimps think experiments are fun, but sometimes they just don’t feel like it – if there’s nice weather, say, or some interesting social interaction they don’t want to miss out on. And if that happens, well, they just don’t participate that day.
Read it here.
The tayra is a three-foot-long weasel relative that lives in Central and South America. Last week I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about how they cache unripe plantains, then go back and eat them when they’re ripe. Read the story here.
It’s not clear whether this means tayras are really thinking about planning for the future, or whether they’re just doing something that they have learned will be useful later.
Here’s what one of my sources, Mathias Osvath, says about the difference between associative learning and planning: “If you have associatively learned something, like, ‘If I push the red button I will be rewarded,’ then that is of course an act for the future. But it does not include anything cognitive, more than the learning mechanism…. True planning is when you shut your eyes and you think about what you will have for lunch tomorrow.” Which are they doing? Nobody knows.
Right whales aren’t one of the better-known whales. They aren’t as charismatic as humpbacks or orcas, or as ginormous as blue whales. One story about where they got their name is that they were the “right whale” for whalers – not only are they coastal and slow-moving, but they float when they’re dead, which is a useful characteristic if you’re trying to manage their carcass from a ship.
The main thing I knew about right whales before I started to interview people about them yesterday was that they get hit by ships. North Atlantic right whales migrate up and down the coast of the Eastern U.S. and ships go in and out of the Eastern U.S., so they’re pretty much doomed to cross paths. And I’m sure most ships’ captains don’t want to kill whales. Today I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about one of the reasons why right whales get hit by ships. Read it here.
photo: NOAA
