Monday Science Links

This week's sciencey goodness:

• Mo at Neurophilosophy talks about loss of body ownership: Body ownership - the sense that one's body belongs to one's self - is central to self-awareness, and yet is something that most of us take completely for granted. We experience our bodies as being an integral part of ourselves, without ever questioning how we know that our hands belong to us, or how we can distinguish our body from its surroundings. These issues have long intrigued philosophers and psychologists, but had not been investigated by neuroscientists until recently. Now researchers from the Karolinska Institute report that they have induced a "body-swap" illusion, whereby subjects perceived the body of another person as belonging to themselves. Their findings are published today in the open access journal PLoS One.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy visits Mt Wilson and touches Hubble's telescope: Mt. Wilson has been around for a long, long time, and even better, we filmed in the dome of the Hooker 100″ telescope. When I found that out, I was ecstatic! This was the very telescope used by Edwin Hubble when he was investigating the nature of what they used to call simply "nebulae", what we now call galaxies.


• John at Cosmic Variance writes something he doesn't know much about: But that’s part of the problem… Imagine the sensation it would cause in the news media: a new disease appears in the US, killing hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands per year. The death rate closes in on 100,000 people per year. People are terrified, the medical community launches a massive campaign to control and eradicate the new pestilence, the federal government creates a new bureaucracy, a special arm of the CDC to deal with this growing death toll. Here’s the weird thing. It’s here, and we may well top 100,000 dead per year soon in the US. There is no media outrage, no massive federal programs, and precious little available public information at all about it.


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East blogs about the Zaraysk Venus and her kin: This is the lovely new lady made of mammoth ivory from Zaraysk, Russia. She's 16.6 cm (6.7") tall. Although popularly known as 'Venuses' -- and one can see why -- the four views of our naked lady shows that she's not particularly voluptuous as Venuses go (compare the Gagarino Venus, below right), quite flat-chested in fact, though her hips, belly, and bum are shapely and round. Zaraysk (about 150 km [95 miles] southeast of Moscow) is one of the mammoth hunter sites on the Russian plain, part of the Kostienki /Avdeevo culture during the Gravettian period of the last Ice Age. That's when humans were making the transition from functional tool-making to art and adornment. And Venuses were very much part of that story.


• William at Skiing Mt Improbable writes about distant echoes of the 1572 supernova: It's at moments like this, when some piece of history echoes back to you again, that it becomes evident not only how much we owe those first real scientists of four centuries gone, but also what we owe the current generation, which continues to make such incredible, breath-taking discoveries.

Enjoy!