Monday Science Links

This week's heaping helping of science:

• At Language Log Mark Liberman posts on a bit of research on who sees what: Now there's increasing experimental evidence that phone conversations are not only cognitively more troublesome than in-person conversations for outsiders, they're more difficult for participants as well. One recent study interviewed pedestrians who had just walked along a 375-foot path across an open plaza where a clown on a unicycle was riding around. Only 2 out of 24 cell phone users reported seeing the clown. In comparison, the unicycling clown was reported by 12 out of 21 people involved in real-life conversations as they walked the same path.


• Brian at Laelaps discusses how lemurs might have reached Madagascar: Who doesn't love lemurs? The strepsirrhine primates, or wet-nosed cousins of ours, are favorite documentary subjects and extremely popular zoo attractions. And, in one of those bits of zoological trivia that everyone knows, lemurs only live on the island of Madagascar off Africa's southeastern coast. The question is how they got there.


• At Starts With A Bang Ethan tells us what it's like inside a gas giant (with pictures!): Some regions of the disk are slightly more dense than other regions. Gravity is this wonderful force where, when you have more matter, it becomes more attractive. In the early stages of formation, these slightly overdense regions grow and grow, limited only by the amount of matter around them. Something like Jupiter was pretty successful, eating up about a full 50% of the matter in the Solar System that wasn't eaten by the Sun. Something like Earth was far less successful, by a factor of about 300.


• At Neurophilosophy Mo looks at time dilation: The apparent prolonged duration of a looming or deviant stimulus is referred to as the time dilation illusion, and three possible, but not mutually exclusive, explanations for why it might occur have been put forward. First, the stimulus might be perceived as lasting longer because it has unusual properties which require an increased amount of attention to be devoted to it. Alternatively, the perceived duration of the stimulus might reflect the amount of energy expended in generating its neural representation (that is, duration is a function of coding efficiency). Finally, the effect might be due to the intrinsic dynamic properties of the stimulus, such that the brain estimates time based on the number of changes in an event.
  


• And finally, Darren at Tetrapod Zoology looks at Australia's alleged bigfoot: Like many people interested in cryptozoology (the study of animals - or alleged animals - known only from anectodal evidence), I'm of the opinion that the Australian Yowie is one of the most problematic of mystery beasts. It is, in fact, so ridiculous and inconvenient that it's difficult to take seriously. As if sasquatch, yeti and orang pendek aren't difficult enough, what are we to make of antipodean reports of a hairy, bipedal, ape-like creature? Back in 2006 (oh my god, four years ago already), Tony Healy and Paul Cropper collated everything known about the Yowie for their book The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot (Strange Nation, Sydney, 2006).

Enjoy!