Category: Informative

The 70 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex found with soft tissues has revealed its gender — female.

Fossil’s Bone Tissue Points to Sex of T. Rex

From BBC News:

Scientists say they have located the parts of the brain that comprehend sarcasm – honestly.

By comparing healthy people and those with damage to different parts of the brain, they found the front of the brain was key to understanding sarcasm.

A part of NewMexiKen’s brain that remains dangerously unshrunk.

From New Scientist:

It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had – you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.

NewMexiKen’s brain has shrunk so much from stress and depression that there’s no hope for me, but maybe it isn’t too late for you laid back, happy people.

The 11 steps.

First NewMexiKen learns that stress can cause your brain to shrink. I found that depressing. Now I learn that depression can cause your brain to shrink. I find that stressful.

Kramer presents a sustained case that depression, far from enhancing cognitive or emotional powers, essentially pokes holes in the brain, killing neurons and causing key regions of the prefrontal cortex — the advanced part of the brain, located just behind the forehead — to shrink measurably in size. He lucidly explains a wealth of recent research on the disease, citing work in genetics, biochemistry, brain imaging, the biology of stress, studies of identical twins. He compares the brain damage from depression with that caused by strokes. As a result of diminished blood flow to the brain, he says, many elderly stroke patients suffer crippling depressions. Is stroke-induced depression a form of ”heroic melancholy”? If not, then why pin merit badges on any expression of the disease?

Review of Peter D. Kramer’s Against Depression

Thanks to Veronica for the pointer about Kramer’s book.

Living under too much stress may harm your brain as well as your body.

Previous studies have already shown that stress hormones, such as cortisol, can increase the risk of heart disease and other ailments, but a new study shows that stress hormones may also shrink the brain.

WebMD

And I’ve been stressed lately thinking that my brain was shrinking. I’m caught in a vicious cycle.

A well-done report on the submarine San Francisco’s collision with an uncharted undersea mountain in The New York Times: Adrift 500 Feet Under the Sea, a Minute Was an Eternity.

The submarine crashed at top speed – 33 knots, or roughly 38 miles an hour – about 360 miles southeast of Guam. The impact punched huge holes in the forward ballast tanks, so the air being blown into them was no match for the ocean pouring in. The throttles shut, and the vessel briefly lost propulsion. As the emergency blow caught hold, mainly in the rear tanks, the sub was just drifting in the deep, its bow pointing down.

And Mother’s Day.

“Whatever children inherit from their parents – habits, skills, genes, contacts, money – seems to matter more today.”

For better or worse.

Quotation from Times article on Class in America.

The New York Times begins a series today on class in America. NewMexiKen will have more on it later. One interesting sidelight is their graphic for determining where you fit based on occupation, education, income and wealth.

The first humans who left Africa to populate the world headed south along the coast of the Indian Ocean, Science magazine reports.

Scientists had always thought the exodus from Africa around 70,000 years ago took place along a northern route into Europe and Asia.

But according to a genetic study, early modern humans followed the beach, possibly lured by a seafood diet.

They quickly reached Australia but took much longer to settle in Europe.

— BBC News

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page… .

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children… .

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you… . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.

Steven Johnson in Everything Bad Is Good For You speculating on the reaction if books were the “new” thing; as quoted in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell, as always, is excellent in his review of Johnson’s book. Highly recommended. Click the link!

This is just dreadful.

How to fold a fitted sheet.

Really. With photos. Very helpful. From Target Australia.

Of course, NewMexiKen finds the simplest approach overall is to have one set of sheets, take them off the bed, launder them, put them back on (usually the same day). No folding. No storage issues.

Scientific American has an article on the continuing debate, His Brain, Her Brain. An excerpt:

Several intriguing behavioral studies add to the evidence that some sex differences in the brain arise before a baby draws its first breath. Through the years, many researchers have demonstrated that when selecting toys, young boys and girls part ways. Boys tend to gravitate toward balls or toy cars, whereas girls more typically reach for a doll. But no one could really say whether those preferences are dictated by culture or by innate brain biology.

To address this question, Melissa Hines of City University London and Gerianne M. Alexander of Texas A&M University turned to monkeys, one of our closest animal cousins. The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the “masculine” toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred by girls. Both sexes spent equal time monkeying with the picture books and other gender-neutral toys.

Because vervet monkeys are unlikely to be swayed by the social pressures of human culture, the results imply that toy preferences in children result at least in part from innate biological differences. This divergence, and indeed all the anatomical sex differences in the brain, presumably arose as a result of selective pressures during evolution. In the case of the toy study, males–both human and primate–prefer toys that can be propelled through space and that promote rough-and-tumble play. These qualities, it seems reasonable to speculate, might relate to the behaviors useful for hunting and for securing a mate. Similarly, one might also hypothesize that females, on the other hand, select toys that allow them to hone the skills they will one day need to nurture their young.

Tracker Trail tells how to make a fire from a can of Coke and a chocolate bar.

Getting deodorant in your eye is not a good thing. (Don’t ask.)

Update: Actually I would like to recommend putting deodorant in your eye as a way to relieve the symptoms of everything else that’s bothering you. Believe me, you will be focused on the one pain.

At Slate, the Explainer answers: Can We Get Sucked Out of Airplanes?

“If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”

Steven D. Levitt, quoted in Inside the Astonishingly Curious Mind of Steven D. Levitt by Stephen J. Dubner (2003).

Important scientific breakthrough.

The annoucement in English said baggage for the flight would be on Carousel 11. In Spanish it was on Carousel seis.

The New York Times reports:

An eye surgeon in Germany has discovered the world’s largest known prime number – or at least his computer did. …

The number, rendered in exponential shorthand, is 2^25,964,951-1. It has 7,816,230 digits, and if printed in its entirety, would fill 235 pages of this newspaper.

You too can join the search for more prime numbers.

From The New York Times:

In Kenya, a 10-year-old elephant named Mlaika seems to think she’s a truck. At least she has been heard imitating the low rumble that trucks make on a nearby highway.

Mlaika’s mimicry is described in the journal Nature, along with a report of an African elephant that lived in a Swiss zoo with Asian elephants and learned to imitate the chirping that only the Asian species makes.

The two findings show for the first time that elephants – like primates, birds, bats and some marine mammals – are capable of vocal learning. The discovery has important implications for understanding how elephants communicate.

Audio clip of elephant sounding like truck (sort of).

At last count, 11 comments on the obsessiveness of NewMexiKen and some of his children and grandchildren. My god, we’re even having former colleagues chiming in.

Yes, it’s true at CYO camp as a 10-year-old, while others were winning awards for swimming, or softball, or even beadwork, I got the neatest camper in my tent award — and true to form I still have the felt insignia they gave me nearly 50 years ago.

Did I inherit this, or was it the doing of years of Catholic nuns?

When I was a kid the nuns had little clickers. When we went to church before class they would click so that we all could genuflect in unison, or stand in unison. Even in high school, I remember we were lined up by height to kiss the bishop’s ring and receive our diploma.

Interestingly enough though, I come out a strong “P” on the Myers-Briggs Personality Type. [A Perceiving (P) style takes the outside world as it comes and is adopting and adapting, flexible, open-ended and receptive to new opportunities and changing game plans.] I test so strongly as a “P” that I was once singled out with a couple others during an experiment.

So, “How come,” I asked the instructor after, “if I am such a strong P, I alphabetize my CDs (within each genre) and have most of my books shelved according to Library of Congress call number?”

“Were my parents opposites?” he asked. [The opposite of P is J (Judging), one who approaches the outside world with a plan and is oriented towards organizing one’s surroundings, being prepared, making decisions and reaching closure and completion.]

“No, I think they were P too,” I replied.

“Did I go to Catholic school?”

His point was that the stong P of my parents (especially my mother) conflicted with the strong J of most nuns. Hence, I was confused.

Coincidentally the person who told me that is mentioned in Sunday’s New York Times in an article about early risers:

“I’m an early riser, I’m achievement driven, and oh, my, has it served me well in the business world,” said Otto Kroeger, a motivational speaker and business consultant in Fairfax, Va. Mr. Kroeger, who says he routinely rises at 4 a.m., preaches about the advantage of getting up before dawn to audiences and clients. “For 13 years,” Mr. Kroeger said, “I never allowed myself more than 4 hours in any 24-hour period. It was all ego driven. My psyche was saying, ‘I can do it, I can outlast.’ It’s a version of the old Broadway song from ‘Annie Get Your Gun’: ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.'”

Which type do you think he is?

Average total cost for a U.S. eighty-year-old to live out the rest of his or her days on a luxury cruise ship: $230,497 [Lee Lindquist, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine (Chicago)]

Average cost to live them out in an assisted-living facility: $228,075

Harper’s Index for February 2005

From a report in The New York Times:

Regular use of low-dose aspirin does not prevent first heart attacks in women younger than 65, as it does in men, a 10-year study of healthy women has found.

The participants in the Women’s Health Study who took 100 milligrams of aspirin every other day were no less likely to suffer heart attacks than the participants in another group who took placebos. Each group had about 20,000 members.

But aspirin did appear to help protect the women against one kind of stroke – something the drug has not been found conclusively to do for men.

What’s Special About This Number? provides a distinctive fact about each of several thousand numbers.

60 is the smallest number divisible by 1 through 6.