SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY - A Wet Towel In Space Is Not Like A Wet Towel On Earth

You just don't know (because who's going to tell you?) that when you leave Earth, travel outside its gravitational reach, hundreds and hundreds of everyday things — stuff you've never had to think about — will change. Like ... oh, how about a wet wash cloth?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/04/21/177949605/a-wet-towel-in-space-is-not-like-a-wet-towel-on-earth

CULTURE/SOCIETY: Predictions Of Death

Dan: At age 69, the artificial intelligence software you programmed becomes self aware and devours you. You will be saved to disk though, so no worries.

OlderMusicGeek: At age 92, you will die from wounds delivered by a blender after trying to make your sixteenth margarita of the day. (And it's on 3:00pm, shame on you!)

OlderMusicGeek's daughter: At age 62, your prototype flying machine will work, and while aloft on its maiden voyage a passenger jet will take you into it's jet engine, and throw you out as a mist.

OlderMusicGeek's cat: At age 38, you will be hit by a train while napping on the railroad tracks.

OlderMusicGeek's readers: At age 9, your head will explode after being exposed to Britney Spears for thirty-six consecutive hours!

YOU!: At age 14, aliens will abduct you and use your body for sick and often anally-oriented experiments before dropping you off outside of a local homeless shelter smelling of beer.

For your own prediction - http://evil.berzerker.net/death_predictions.php

A link to other Halloween posts on my blog

SCIENCE: Gorillas Lovers Lock Eyes

This is form Time. I found it through my NetVibes home page. - OlderMusicGeek

Gorillas in a Tryst
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008
By BRYAN WALSH

Leah was staring at George. A series of rapid, pulsating whimpers escaped her lips. She then drew near to George, who locked gazes with her, his face unreadable. His shoulders were relaxed, and when Leah was within his grasp he opened his right arm and embraced her. Leah lay on the ground and George looked into her eyes. He bent over to lie on her, while Leah wrapped her legs around George's waist...

Is this a missing letter from the Penthouse Forum? The steamy section of a well-thumbed romance novel? Try neither: The scene is actually taken from the April 2007 issue of the Gorilla Gazette, a primatology journal. Leah and George aren't star-crossed lovers caught in mid-tryst. They're western gorillas in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, observed by primatologists whose interest is far more scientific than it is prurient. There's reason to watch — Leah and George's moment in the Mbeli Bai forest clearing, captured on film by a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the Wildlife Conservation Society, is one of the only times gorillas have been seen mating face-to-face, rather than face-to-back. "It's an extremely rare behavior," says Thomas Breuer, the primatologist who photographed the pair through a telelens. "We haven't seen this in 13 years of observation. If you look at the photos it's a very nice piece of action."

I have, and it is. But what does the act mean? Is it a one-off, or the start of a gorilla sexual revolution? Breuer is hesitant to draw any conclusions, noting that scientists observe just a sliver of the life of wild gorillas, but he speculates that face-to-face mating (also known as "ventro-ventral copulation," for the Latinists out there) might engender a deeper relationship between the silverback male, George, and Leah, the female. After the mating was finished (roughly 2 mins., about par for the course for your average silverback), Breuer even observed George holding Leah's hand. Apparently, even the world's largest primates like the occasional cuddle. "Maybe there's a way the act forms a kind of bond between the silverback and the female," he says. "But we just don't know."

That might be unlikely — male gorillas, after all, are happily polygynous, mating with multiple females in their group. (It's good to be the silverback.) But there might just be something special about Leah. Breuer had earlier observed Leah (named inexactly after Princess Leia of Star Wars) using a crude tool — another first — testing out the depth of a pond with a long stick, rather than simply diving in. The very humanness of her experimentation struck him. "That observation was so interesting," says Breuer. "Very often they find solutions to problems in the same way as you or I would."

Perhaps that's why we find such stories so fascinating. More than just our neighbors on the evolutionary tree, primates are our doubles in the animal world. We look into their eyes and we see ourselves, and even experienced scientists who've spent years observing them struggle to avoid falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. It would be nice to believe, on a Valentine's Day, that when George and Leah lock eyes, they know a little bit of what we might feel when we look upon our loved one. And perhaps they do. But they don't need to. The life of a wild gorilla, caught only in glimpses from a distance, has richness and mystery that is wholly sufficient to itself, and which we'll never fully know.



A link to the original article

SCIENCE: Hotel Maids Challenge the Placebo Effect

This is a report from NPR that I found pretty interesting. I edit it to make it read more quickly. Here's a link if you want to read the complete article. - OlderMusicGeek

Hotel Maids Challenge the Placebo Effect
by Alix Spiegel
Morning Edition, January 3, 2008

In a recent study, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer decided to look at whether our perception of how much exercise we are getting has any effect on how our bodies actually look.

As any casual observer of the hospitality industry knows, hotel maids spend the majority of their days lugging heavy equipment around endless hallways. Basically, almost every moment of their working lives is spent engaged in some kind of physical activity.

But Langer found that most of these women don't see themselves as physically active. She did a survey and found that 67 percent reported they didn't exercise. More than one-third of those reported they didn't get any exercise at all.

Perceptions Matter

Langer says, despite the fact all of the women in her study far exceeded the U.S. surgeon general's recommendation for daily exercise, the bodies of the women did not seem to benefit from their activity.

She and her team measured the maids' body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, weight and body mass index. They found that all of these indicators matched the maids' perceived amount of exercise, rather than their actual amount of exercise.

So Langer set about changing perceptions.

She divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general's definition of an active lifestyle.

The other group was given no information at all.

One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.

One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids' behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way.

Essentially, what Langer is talking about is a placebo effect. She says that if you believe you are exercising, your body may respond as if it is. It's the same as if you believe you are getting medication when you are actually getting a sugar pill — your body can sometimes respond as if a placebo is actually working.

Placebo Effect Limited?

But Martin Binks, director of behavioral health at the Duke Diet and Fitness Center in North Carolina, says, "There's a very high likelihood that [the maids] behaved differently after they received that information, and they were being more active and eating more healthfully. And that resulted in their improvements in health."

But Binks has a more substantive criticism.

"Generally what placebos work on is subjective types of findings," he says.

In other words, a placebo can help change something like your perception of pain or perhaps your sense of whether you feel depressed, but it can't do something objective like shrink a tumor or cut three pounds off your waistline.

Or can it?

Howard Brody, the director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the author of the book, The Placebo Response, has spent years looking at this issue. He says that a number of relatively new studies challenge the old assumption that the placebo effect alters only subjective perception.

For example, Brody notes one study where researchers gave asthmatic patients a drug that actually makes asthma worse. When they gave the drug to the patients, they told them that it relieves asthma.

"A significant number of those patients said that my asthma got better when you gave them the drug," Brody says, "and they measured better when you measured the lung findings."

Alink to the complete article