According to researchers, when you remember a past event, you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it.
When you’ve wrapped your head around that you’ll see that this is why memories fade and distort over time.
For more information see
www.themarysue.com/memory-distortion-in-brain/
and
medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-memory-gameeach-recall-event-brain.html
Category Archives: science
Oddity of the Week: Yi qi
Scientific names can be wonderful for many reasons. [There is] a bird whose name has rhythm, a fish with a fascinating etymology, and a butterfly named for a pioneering (and amazing) woman in entomology. Today’s entry is Yi qi, a newly described dinosaur whose name is interesting in origin and sound, and also wonderfully and surprisingly short.
Actually, the dinosaur is pretty wonderful too. Yi qi was a feathered theropod dinosaur … about the size of a large pigeon. In addition to feathers, it has two really odd features: a bony rod extending from each wrist, and sheets of membranous soft tissue that are preserved near the arms [which seem to be] wing membranes …
… two things about Yi qi‘s name.
First: why “Yi qi” (pronounced “ee chee”)? Yi means “wing” and qi means “strange” in Mandarin … So Yi qi is the “strange winged” dinosaur …
Second: what’s up with just four letters? We’re used to scientific names being long … and difficult to spell or pronounce …
So is Yi qi the shortest scientific name? Well, for an animal no shorter name is possible, because according to the International Code for Zoological Nomenclature … genus and species names must have at least two letters each … As it turns out, though, the race for the shortest name is a tie***: the Great Evening Bat is Ia io, also just 4 letters (and the only scientific name I know without consonants). Yi qi and Ia io have a few things in common besides the succinctness of their names: both are from China, both are flying predators, and both fly on membranous stretched from their arms.
*** With honourable mention to the Australian sphecid wasp Aha ha, at 5 letters.
From Wonderful Scientific Names, Part 4: Yi qi
Your Interesting Links
OK, so here’s another round of links to interesting items you may have missed the first time. As always we start with the nasty, hard, scientific stuff and then it’s all downhill.
First here’s a long-ish piece on the fascinating world of chimeras. Although the article concentrates on humans, much the same applies to all animals and there is an interesting paragraph which explains how tortoiseshell cats are always female.
Why are some people are left-handed? Apparently some left-handed people have same genetic code abnormality as those with situs inversus, the condition where the major organs are on the “wrong” side of the body.
I’m one of those annoying people who crack their knuckles. Surprisingly scientists have only now shown why knuckles pop when pulled — and it’s all down to physics.
And here’s some more strange finger science. Professor William B Bean measured the rate at which his fingernails grew over a period of 35 years to discover that growth slows as one ages.
Still on new scientific discoveries, researchers have just worked out what sustains the human foetus during its first weeks, and it isn’t the placenta but womb milk.
Staying with food … Why do we crave specific foods? And no, it seems it isn’t because of some deficiency which the craved for food will satisfy.
Have you ever wondered how the medical profession came up with the stethoscope? Wonder no longer: it all started with Laennec’s Baton.
How do you teach trainee doctors (and other healthcare professionals) to do breast and internal examinations? Yep, there are people who use their bodies to make a living as Gynaecological Teaching Associates, guiding the trainees what to do with their hands.
Well after that I think we need a strong gin and tonic!
Italian man starts turning his property into a trattoria; goes to fix the toilet; and ends up years later with a major archaeological site.
Maps are so much more interesting than GPS! Here are 12 amazing maps which show the history, and fascination, of cartography.
Over 250 years ago British clockmaker John Harrison was ridiculed for saying he could make a pendulum clock accurate to a second over 100 days. He has finally been proven right.
The Paston Letters are one of the most valuable, and well known, sources of information on late medieval life in England. Now the British Library have digitised them and put the images online.
Coming a bit more up to date, the Victorians had plans to build a skyscraper taller than the Shard. Thankfully reality prevailed and they didn’t because the science of building materials was not nearly advanced enough.
Let’s end in the realm of human rights. First there is a new, and very powerful, resource which aims to bring human rights to life using beautiful infographics, stories and social media. It’s the brainchild of a top human rights barrister, so it should be reliable.
If, as many would claim, nudity is the ultimate test of self-acceptance. Why are we so afraid of it?
More next time!
Book Review: 100 Chemical Myths
Lajos Kovács, Dezső Csupor, Gábor Lente, Tamás Gunda
100 Chemical Myths: Misconceptions, Misunderstandings, Explanations
Springer, 2014
This is a science book, but one which should be relatively intelligible to the intelligent layman. It deals with popular, yet largely untrue, misconceptions and misunderstandings about the chemistry in our lives: food, medicine, the environment and industrial process.
The explanations are relatively concise (few are more than three or so pages) and seek to cut through fallacies and urban legends. Because of their concision the explanations are not highly technical, although some basic knowledge of chemistry or basic science will help.
So far, so good. However I found this an intensely irritating read on a number of levels.
Each of the short explanations is self contained, although copiously cross-referenced and with a section of sources and references in the back-matter. Nevertheless the refutations are stated often with little in the way of logical reasoning or explanation; just bald statements which sounded like “we now know that …” or even “we deny it”. Because of this, and the lack of technical detail, I found the explanations often superficial and unsatisfying.
This isn’t helped by the poor illustrations. Although relatively well illustrated the graphics vary between being too small, pointless and lacking helpful captions. The authors do rather assume that one either knows what a chemical structure means, or one is happy to gloss over it, which I find intensely irritating — even as a trained chemist some memory joggers would be helpful.
I also did not find this book a comfortable read. The language is clunky. In a way this isn’t surprising as the authors, and thus the original text, are Hungarian. But the translation doesn’t flow: too often the sentence structure is obtuse; and there are too many instances of just the wrong word being used — it is clear what the meaning is but an inappropriate synonym has been used. In fact the English feels like a machine translation which hasn’t been checked by a native English speaker for flow and sense.
The book was also physically uncomfortable. It isn’t a cheap book and is from a major scientific publishing house; the paper and the binding are good. Nevertheless the production feels like a print on demand product: the board cover has a laminated glossy illustration, rather than a dust jacket, and very sharp corners which made reading in bed rather uncomfortable.
So yes, that’s right, I was not impressed. The book might have been marginally acceptable as a sub-£10 paperback, but for £45 (from Amazon) it is not of the quality — of content or production — expected.
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
Your Interesting Links
There is a huge selection of links in this issue, because basically this is month’s worth rather than the usual 2-or-so weeks. So let’s get going with the tough stuff first, as usual …
For those who aren’t scientists, here’s a rough guide on how scientists grade evidence to decide the robustness of their discoveries. [PDF]
This animated GIF shows, diagrammatically, the gestation of a human baby from conception to birth.
Allegedly old people smell different — not necessarily bad, just different. And yes, this does seem to be a thing because scientists have worked out the probably chemical cause.
Janet Vaughan, who changed our relationship with blood was “a very naughty little girl” at least according to the misogynist opinion of the day. [Long read]
From humans, now, to animals … Tardigrades are so tough it defies belief. [Long read]
Here’s a menagerie of medically useful, but venomous creatures. I can count use of one of these drugs. Can anyone beat that?
Mice. They’re much more common than we think, but here are seven things you didn’t know about Britain’s most common native rodent, the wood mouse.
And while on things we didn’t know, let’s bust a few of the myths about one of our most common crows, the magpie.
Meanwhile other avian predators are interrupting our mobile phone signals. Peregrine falcons are nesting on mobile phone masts, thus preventing maintenance etc. as it is illegal to disturb them. Peregrines 1, Vodafone 0.
Bridging towards history now … a major new study has found that people from specific regions of Britain have tell-tale genetic signatures which show the history of the country. And it isn’t everything you might think!
Here’s the story of London’s dreaded Millbank Penitentiary, which once stood on the site of Tate Britain. [Long read]
And another piece of lost London, the Pneumatic Railway: the world’s second oldest underground. [Long read]
Apparently the name of London, our capital, changed a few weeks ago — and no-one knew.
So to history of our lost colony of America, whose revolution was allegedly fuelled by rum.
Of course talk of the Americas reminds us of the Puritans who founded many of the colonies there. Puritans with bizarre names like What-God-Will Berry and Praise-God Barebone (who gave his name to the Cromwellian “Barebones Parliament”).
Do you ever feel that everything is awful, you’re not OK and you want to give up? If you’re depressive the answer is probably “Yes”. Well here are some questions you should ask before giving up.
Which leads naturally to comfort food … Veronique Greenwood looks at the science behind the perfect chip.
Remaining with food for a moment, here are six things you likely didn’t know about chopsticks.
Our penultimate item is, as seems traditional, on sex. Here are seven reasons why scientists suggest you should have sex daily.
And finally one for the engineers amongst you … this humongous 28.5-litre Fiat S76 has been rebuilt and the engine starts for the first time in 100 years. And here it is actually running. Just see the smoke and the flames!
Oddity of the Week: Erectile Ears
So what can marine animals actually hear? Seals are among the first to have their ears tested. They have developed different hearing mechanisms for land and sea and hear well in both environments. For example, seals have erectile tissue in their inner ear, which swells up with blood when they are underwater. “It’s like the penis of a man,” says Ron Kastelein at the Sea Mammal Research Company in Harderwijk, the Netherlands, who did the hearing tests. The blood in the engorged tissue helps conduct sound waves to the inner ear, allowing seals to hear a slightly greater range of frequencies in water than on land.
From New Scientist, 11 April 2015
Fruit Fly
I was looking at a fruit fly (actually probably more likely a fungus gnat or sciarid fly) a couple of days ago. It was about 2mm long walking up the side of my tea mug.
Aside from the ability of flies to walk up vertical, shiny surfaces (and indeed walk upside down on the ceiling) I marvelled at how Nature can make something so tiny which can function at all.
Look at the legs. They’re as fine as silk. How do you pack into such a tiny diameter an exoskeleton, muscles, nerve fibres and some rudimentary circulation? It defies belief.
And the antennae are much the same. And the wings.
What’s more … How on earth does anyone dissect such a leg or wing to understand the structure? I just cannot get my head round that. Just how do you do such delicate work?
It does make one see how people can believe in intelligent design — for surely engineering something this intricate just isn’t possible. And yet that is exactly the marvel Nature has achieved via evolution.
Incredible!
Oddity of the Week: Moon
Did you know that the moon has a tail? Turns out, it has two.
Data from NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which spent seven months orbiting the moon in 2013 and 2014, has revealed a tail of nanoscale dust particles.
The finding follows the discovery of the first lunar tail in 1999, when ground-based telescopes spotted a faint stream of sodium gas stretching out behind the moon.
Anthony Colaprete, who leads LADEE’s spectrometer instrument, thinks the second tail is the result of dust particles thrown up when asteroids crash into the surface and are pushed away by the sun’s radiation pressure.
From New Scientist, 31 March 2015
Book Review: Come As You Are
Emily Nagoski
Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that will Transform your Sex Life
Simon & Schuster, 2015
If you take away only one message from this book it should be that YOU’RE NORMAL! Whatever the size and shape of your genitals and whatever your sexuality and sexual response, that’s fine. YOU’RE NORMAL!
Emily Nagoski is Director of Wellness Education and Lecturer at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she teaches Women’s Sexuality. So naturally this is a book about female sexuality. It has little to say directly about male sexuality — because the standard narrative of male sexuality is pretty well understood — although that doesn’t mean you guys won’t get quite a lot from it as it seems to me that many of the underlying principles discussed are still important to us.
In describing this book I can’t do a lot better than to quote the blurb from Amazon UK:
An essential exploration of women’s sexuality that will radically transform your sex life into one filled with confidence and joy. After all the books that have been written about sex, all the blogs and TV shows and radio Q&As, how can it be that we all still have so many questions? The frustrating reality is that we’ve been lied: to not deliberately, it’s no one’s fault, but still. We were told the wrong story. Come As You Are reveals the true story behind female sexuality, uncovering the little-known science of what makes us tick and, more importantly, how and why. Sex educator Dr Emily Nagoski debunks the common sexual myths that are making women (and some men!) feel inadequate between the sheets. For example, she shows: There is no such thing as a sex drive. Current research shows that sexuality comprises sexual brakes and sexual accelerators, which are largely determined by context. Not everybody experiences spontaneous desire. Some of us experience only reactive desire, some of us only spontaneous desire, and some of us both and that’s normal. Genital response does not always mirror mental arousal in fact, for women the overlap is just 10%. Underlying almost all of the questions we still have about sex is the common worry: Am I normal? This book answers with a resounding yes! We are all different, but we are all normal and once we learn this, we can create for ourselves better sex and more profound pleasure than we ever thought possible.
Well, yes, but a lot of that, at least in my view, is also true for men — although the balances and sensitivities are (often very) different. Which is why I say I think many guys will get something from this book, both in terms of understanding a female partner’s sexuality but also for a deeper understanding of their own. Oh and guys: YOU’RE NORMAL too.
The book is a chunky nine chapters, a couple of appendices and almost 400 pages. Nagoski’s style is chatty, friendly and easy to read, although to this Brit that style is at times irritatingly, and over-enthusiastically, American. Being a scientist and sex nerd (her description!) the book is copiously annotated and referenced, with 40 pages of notes and references — yes the content is based firmly in current scientific understanding; it is not just the author making up a theory on the fly with no supporting evidence.
I’ve been reading Emily Nagoski’s weblog, The Dirty Normal, for several years so I’ve seen most of the ideas in this book before — and indeed over the years she has honed those ideas on her blog audience. But to have all of the ideas put together, with more backup information and explanation, rather than in 1000 word “blog bites”, is still highly valuable. However what this did mean is that I didn’t get any “Wow!” moments of sudden realisation. But that doesn’t mean you won’t! Indeed I suspect most people will get some sudden insight.
So in summary … go get a copy of this book and read it. Girls, even if it doesn’t massively change your sex life you will at least have a much better understanding of how you work. And guys, you should read it too, you’re likely to get some insights into both yourself and your partner.
And remember: YOU’RE NORMAL! Just everyone varies.
Overall Rating: ★★★★☆
More Interesting Links
OK, guys and gals, here’s another round of links to articles you may have missed — and it contains all sorts of weird and interesting stuff. As usual we’ll start with the more scientific and end up with, I hope, something a bit easier.
All vertebrates have single eyes as we do. But most insects have compound eyes and they work in a rather different way to our vertebrate eyes.
We probably all know by now that our guts are host to many different microbes. But so are most other parts of our bodies. So girls, here’s a look at what lives in your vagina. And no, I don’t imagine that male parts are too much different!
And while we’re on the subject, here are 10 things you maybe didn’t know about vaginas.
So just how does one link from there to Neanderthals? Oh, right this is how! It is being suggested that hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals. Which would mean we were beginning to domesticate canines a lot earlier than previously thought.
But by then the Neanderthals were turning eagle talons into jewellery (right) — that’s only some 130,000 years ago.
It seems my scepticism in the last set of links was well founded because apparently the research was NOT showing that gerbils were to blame for the plague; it was badly interpreted by journalists.
Good news for the gerbils, but it seems there’s bad news for the Celts. Apparently research on Britons’ DNA is demonstrating that the Celts are not a single genetic group.
From Celts to computer programmers … here are nine truths computer programmers know that most people don’t have a clue about.
And here are five languages which could change the way you view the world.
And continuing our recurrent theme on nudism, here’s a piece on the benefits of social nudity, especially stress reduction. (Long read)
On the other hand what could be better at reducing stress than the perfect gin & tonic?
Which actually brings us on to things historical … First off here’s a piece on the rivers of London from artist and cartographer Stephen Walter’s forthcoming book The Island: London Mapped.
Second up the history of something familiar to all Londoners, and much overlooked: the London Plane Tree.
And yet still on the history of London, here is a piece on the Elizabethan Theatre in London.
Finally something we hope doesn’t happen for many years … a look at what might happen when the Queen dies. It could be the most disruptive event in the last 70 years, but I suspect it is all a bit more planned than this article implies.
That’s all, Folks!