Monday Science Links

This week's heaping helping of sciency goodness:

• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science blogs on research on how we judge fair play: Human beings seem to be strongly motivated by a social sense of justice. Those that play fairly are rewarded, and those that don't, like you friend here, are punished. Now, Daria Knoch and colleagues at the University of Zurich have discovered that this desire for justice is influenced by a small part of the brain - the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or DLPFC - which constantly suppresses our more selfish urges.


• Carl at The Loom blogs on Irish elk and their antlers: I can’t help finding the Irish elk wonderfully ridiculous. The reaction probably has something to do with the fact that we are all familiar today with deer, moose and other animals that look for the most part like the Irish elk, except for that extravagant rack. Irish elk grew the biggest antlers ever recorded, stretching over ten feet across and weighing about 90 pounds. Of course, for the people who lived alongside the Irish elk in Europe and Asia before its extinction 7000 years ago, it probably didn’t seem terribly ridiculous at all–no more ridiculous than an orangutan or a river dolphin look to us today. And the way things are going, orangutans and river dolphins may not be long for this world. After they’re gone, people will look back at pictures of them the way we look at pictures of the Irish elk, and imagine they were just made up by a bored zoologist.


• Kim at All of My Faults Are Stress-Related blogs about teaching about disasters: I say "geoscientists," because every one of these examples is the sort of thing that we study. And in a world in which geology is often left behind by adults, limited to memorizing rock types in grade school, those of us who teach general education science courses may have the last chance to give people access to the wealth of knowledge that geoscientists have accumulated. So that will be the theme of my course introduction: how humans deal with a planet that, though perfect for life, can also be deadly.


• At Skulls in the Stars is a post on optical coherence: An astute observer of nature, however, will find something fishy about this whole discussion of interference: it does not seem to manifest itself in everyday experiences with light. Sunlight streaming through a window, for instance, doesn’t interfere with the light emanating from a lamp inside the room. Something is missing from our basic discussion of interference which explains why some light fields, such as those produced from a single laser source, produce interference patterns and others, such as sunlight, seemingly produce no interference. The missing ingredient is what is known as optical coherence, and we discuss the basic principles of coherence theory and its relationship to interference below the fold.


• John at John Hawks Anthropology Website blogs on a paper showing that apes like cooked food: They put their paper into the context of the evolution of food preference and cooking in hominids. Cooking clearly has some benefits for hominids: it transforms some indigestible foods into useful ones, facilitates energy release from some foods with less digestive requirements, and it reduces the wear and tear on teeth. The question: When did the hominid taste system adapt to match the dietary benefits of cooking? Did hominids start out with a taste for cooked food, which they could satisfy when they invented fire? Or did hominids invent fire for other reasons (e.g., light, protection) and only later adapt their sensory systems to tolerate cooked food?


• And as a bonus, Mark at Language Log blogs on uptalking and why it probably isn't what you think is: In her 1991 dissertation, Cynthia McLemore suggested that final rises iconically signal some kind of connection. This might be a connection between ideas, as in non-terminal list items; or it might be a connection between speaker and hearer, as in a question and the answer or a statement and the listeners' attention. But she pointed out that this kind of reaching out to listeners need not be a sign of insecurity or even politeness. And in her data, taken from a careful study of the role of intonation in a University of Texas sorority, final rises were associated with statements by more senior and more powerful members that required audience attention and action.

Enjoy!