Virginia Hughes

A few weeks ago, a NASA satellite caught a tiny star making a big show. EV Lacertae is a small, red dwarf star, located about 16 light years from us (which, amazingly, makes it one of our closest star-neighbors). EV Lac has about 1/3 the mass of our Sun, and normally shines with about 1 percent of the Sun’s light. Normally.

But every once in awhile, the star sets off a massive flare. That’s because it rotates once every four days, which is extremely fast (for comparison, our Sun rotates once every four weeks). The star is made up of ionized gas, which has an electric charge. The charge, when moved so quickly, produces incredibly strong magnetic fields. The energy stored in the fields builds and builds until….boom!

“This star has a record of producing flares, but this one takes the cake,” Rachel Osten, a Hubble Fellow at the University of Maryland, College Park said in a NASA press release. “Flares like this would deplete the atmospheres of life-bearing planets, sterilizing their surfaces.”

(Hat tip: Phil)

I’m not the only one obsessed with this video: It’s almost hit 48 million views on YouTube.

I found a delicious historical nugget tonight while researching for an article-in-progress about the link between autism and prenatal infection.

In 1971, Stella Chess published a paper about the 1964 rubella epidemic in New York City. She found that an unusually high number of kids with autism in 1970 were born to women who had been infected with rubella. That’s interesting (especially for my article). But what really shocked me was something Chess mentioned briefly at the end of the introduction:

A 1964 British survey of children in Middlesex aged 8 to 10 years found that 4.5 per 10,000 children were autistic….We recognize that the diagnosis of autism requires rigorous justification. The condition is often loosely defined and overdiagnosed.

Wait a minute…4.5 per 10,000 and she thought doctors were overdiagnosing? Now a half-century since that survey, autism is found in about 1 of every 150 kids, and most researchers I’ve interviewed say that even that is probably an underestimate.

Of course, now I’m going to get a few anti-vaxers in the comments telling me that this is evidence of an “autism epidemic” in the last few decades. This is almost certainly not true, as I’ve reported twice. Still, it’s interesting to see how the field’s perspective has changed since then. And how it hasn’t: Autism, unfortunately, is still “often loosely defined.”

Watching the Oscars last night started me thinking about my favorite movies. And then about my favorite scenes in my favorite movies. The first time I heard Virginia Madsen say these words, in Sideways, I got the chills. I felt the same way on the second viewing, and the third, and the umpteen since. While drinking a glass of wine, she says:

Good Math’s Mark Chu-Carroll asks his readers: We have gaggles of geese, ostentations of peacocks, exaltations of larks. But what’s a good collective noun for a bunch of geeks?

Some funny responses so far:

“No question, a collection of geeks must be an array.” -Sandra Porter

“A pedantry of geeks” -Mickey Power

“You should get a great many hits on a google of geeks.” -chezjake

“A compilation of geeks.” -Jim Menard

…and one that I don’t entirely understand but is probably hilarious:

“Geek[] geeks;
geeks.size();” -Andrew Henninger

I can’t come up with anything clever…maybe a “dataset of geeks”? Eh. Anybody else have an idea?

Source: Digital Basement

A few months back I posted an amazing video from 2000 showing Ai, the then 23-year-old female chimp that had been trained to put in order numerals that appeared on a computer screen. Now her trainer—Tetsuro Matsuzawa from Kyoto University—is back in the press (on my local TV news, even!) for his new work on the amazing memories of three mother chimps (including Ai) and their babies.

The basic experimental set-up is the same as before. For months ahead of time, the six chimps learned how to order Arabic numerals 1 through 9. The experiment itself was a bit tougher. The nine numbers flashed briefly on the screen, all at once, and were then immediately replaced by white boxes. The chimps had to remember where the numbers had been and then touch the boxes in order accordingly. As published in today’s issue of Current Biology, Matsuzawa compared how well young chimps, their mothers, and university students completed the task.

The chimps beat us in every metric. Even when the numerals were only flashed for one-fifth of a second, the chimps had an 80 percent accuracy rate and the humans only 40 percent. Moreover, the young chimps completed the task faster than both their mothers and humans.

The findings still blow my mind. I will concede, however, to what a few of my readers pointed out on my last Ai post. This comparison between chimps and humans wasn’t exactly fair and square. If you gave the university students months of practice (maybe substituting chocolate for bananas) and then timed them, would the baby chimps still win?

Just browsing through the a-mazing winners of the Olympus “Bioscapes” 2007 digital imaging competition and this third-place winner caught my eye. It’s a chicken retina photographed (using an “Epi-fluorescence Widefield” technique) by Andy Fischer from Columbus, Ohio.

I remember the act of memorizing the cellular parts of the retina in one of my college neuro courses, though of course can’t recall the actual memorized information. Doh. So I Googled it. Here’s the neatly labeled diagram that the legendary Santiago Ramon y Cajal came up with, around 1905. (Picture’s a bit blurry here, click here to see it more clearly.)

(Hat tip: Neurophilosopher)

Starting about three weeks ago—yes, that’s two weeks before Thanksgiving—my morning visit(s) to Starbucks have been marred by an onslaught of holiday merchandise. There are paper trees, tinsel, Christmas coffee, Advent chocolates, tiny red stockings to package your Starbucks gift cards, the Sarah McLachlan holiday carols (over, and over, and over) and perhaps most nauseating, a boxed CD set titled “Listening is an Act of Love.”

This is all to say that I hate Christmas as much as the next heathen. Yet, even this Scroogette was annoyed to read that Lowe’s, the chain of home improvement stores that litter the Midwest like has-been celebrities at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser, has stripped “Christmas” from the object most tightly linked to the word. Apparently, to keep from offending those who don’t celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Lowe’s catalog now sells not Christmas trees, but Family trees. Seriously. Watch the video:

Did you see that? The pastor actually justified the ad!

(Hat tip: Greg Laden)

Golly, how many times have I cringed when somebody says, “For all intensive purposes…”

Yet is the error actually cringe-worthy? If you think about it, “for all intensive purposes” makes just as much, if not more sense as the standard phrase “for all intents and purposes.” The former, a spontaneous reshaping of a known expression, is called an eggcorn.

The term eggcorn was coined by UPenn linguist Mark Liberman, on Language Log, after a reader misspelled/mistook the word acorn as eggcorn. As an acorn actually has the shape of an egg, Liberman reasoned, the term eggcorn actually makes sense (that is, it’s not a malapropism, or a mondegreen, or a folk etymology).

Check out the procrastination-worthy Eggcorn Database, on which I found:

• jar-dropping (for jaw-dropping)
• mindgrain (for migraine)
• strum up support (for drum up support)
• a mute point (for a moot point)
• Old-Timers (for Alzheimer’s)
• wild awake (for wide awake)

And with that, I’ll say bye and bye!

(Photo from Flickr, by HatHome)