Monday Science Links

This week's science:

• Mark at Good Math, Bad Math explains how data compression works while taking apart a stupid claim about it: See, aside from the religious stuff, he's a technical visionary. He's invented a method where he can take a source document, and repeatedly compress it, making it smaller each time. This is a stupid idea that I've seen entirely too many times. But instead of just making fun of it, I thought it would be interesting to explain in detail why it doesn't work. It touches on a bunch of basic facts about how data compression works, and provides a nice excuse for me to write a bit about compression.


• Scicurious at Neurotopia v2.0 asks where do you think about yourself: No, not where ARE you when you think of yourself. Where does it happen? What part of the brain? This question has become very important to the world of cognitive neuroscience recently. We used to think of self-reflection as taking place only in the prefrontal cortex. This would mean that only animals with a well-developed prefrontal cortex would be capable of self-reflection. However, another brain area has recently been implicated in self-reflection, the insula. The insula is hot in neuroscience right now. It's a weird little bit of your brain, a bit of cortex that is actually INSIDE the rest of your cortex. We all know that the human brain is full of folds, known as sulci. One of the most obvious sulci is the lateral sulcus, located between the frontal lob and the termporal lobe, just above your ears.


• Kim at All My Faults Are Stress-Related says spring can be science: I know it doesn't feel like spring on the East Coast of the US, what with the big snow day yesterday. But it's been in the 60's here for the past three days, and in the 50's before that. At my elevation (6800 feet), the snow is gone except in the shade and on north-facing slopes. It's nice, but worrisome: my mountains are the headwaters of the Rio Grande and part of the Colorado, and our snow is the water supply for cities and farms from Texas to California. March is supposed to be the big snow month here. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm watching spring arrive. And this year, I'm going to try to turn my random observations into data.


• Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on altruism in an odd place: army ants: Army ants are some of the deadliest hunters of South America. Amassing in legions of over 200,000 ants, they become a massive predatory super-organism that fan out across the jungle floor leaving dismembered prey in their wake. Behind the killing front, the corpses of the ant's prey are taken back to the nest by foragers. But the route back home is not a smooth one. At an ant's size, small twigs and leaves can be the equivalent of a bumpy, unpaved motorway. Scott Powell and Nigel Franks from the University of Bristol found that at least one species of army ant (Eciton burchellii) solves this problem with living paving.


• Chris at Ediacaran visits a Darwin exhibit: I've been meaning to blog this for a while, but have been too busy. I went to see the exhibition on Darwin at the National Museum of Australia, here in Canberra. It's good. It's very good! The exhibits cover the world before Darwin, the young Darwin, the Beagle trip, the development of the theory, the theory and aftermath, and evolution today. It's not large exhibition, but it does cram a fair amount in. The displays include writings, specimens, a mock up of Darwin's study, and AV displays - including three short films featuring evolutionary scientists such as Francisco Ayala, Francis Collins, Niles Eldredge, and Kenneth Miller. They also feature Genie Scott from the join the NCSE today). By far the most impressive pieces (and worth the price of admission on their own), are the writings of Darwin - notebook entries, manuscript pages and letters. Not copies, the real thing, pages, hand-written by Darwin himself.

Enjoy!