Monday Science Links

Here's this week's heaping helping of yummy sciency goodness:

• Martin at Aardvarchaeology posts on Daycare Sociolects: I've blogged before about how academic middle-class ideals of gender homogenisation clash with more traditional views among working-class daycare ladies. And Saturday I had a conversation that opened my eyes to the effects of our daycare arrangements on language, too: on sociolect.


• Dave at Cognitive Daily looks at our ability to recognize faces and what happens when things aren't the way they 'should'b be: We've known for decades that the human perceptual system is especially good at recognizing faces, but that ability breaks down in predictable ways when the faces are upside-down. While it takes us a bit longer to recognize objects when they are inverted, faces take even longer compared to other things. For example, you might be able to tell whether two faces are identical or slightly different when they are upside down, but you'll be quicker to note a similar difference in, say, two houses. When people try to recognize inverted faces, different brain regions are activated compared to recognizing upright faces, but nonface objects activate the same regions whether upside-down or right side up.


• PalMD at Denialism blog takes on a particularly pernicious anti-vax lie and also explains how polio vaccines work: OK, time to explain how vaccines actually work. This is really cool...much cooler than the cultists would like you to believe. It is teh über-kool. And please forgive the over-simplification. We need an example: let's take polio vaccine---you know, the one they never used in Europe when the WHO wiped out polio in Europe. We have two choices, but the one we use the most in N.A. and Europe is the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). Both of the polio vaccines have advantages and disadvantages, but hey, I only have so much time.


• Bee at Back Reaction tells us about 10 effects we should have heard of (I hadn't, not all of them): The Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect, discovered by Walther Meissner and his postdoc Robert Ochsenfeld in 1933, is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor. Most spectacularly, this can be used to let magnets levitate above superconductors since their field lines can not enter the superconductor. I assure you this has absolutely nothing to do with Yogic flying.
  


• John Hawks at his Anthropology Weblog wonders how a new book on the Boskopoids and their fabulous intelligence came to be published: First, if you do a simple Google Scholar search for "Boskop", you will discover that this has not been a going topic in human evolution for nearly fifty years. Most intellectual effort on the topic of "Boskopoids" happened between 1915 and 1930. I want to emphasize how easy it is to discover these things by a simple Google search. This is obscure knowledge, but for a good reason -- it's obsolete and has been for fifty years!.

Enjoy.