People may perceive sound differently, depending on how in shape they are. Researchers have previously shown that women respond to oncoming noise sooner than men, supporting the view that stronger people require less time to react to impending danger. In the latest study from Ohio, scientists say that response time is not based on someone’s gender, height, or weight, but instead, relies on how fit a person is.
“This is the first evidence that our motor system and the perception of looming sounds evolved together,” John Neuhoff, an evolutionary psychologist at the College of Wooster and lead researcher on the study, told DISCOVER. Neuhoff tested 50 people, ranging from college students to 43-year-old couch potatoes, for strength and cardiovascular fitness. He categorized his subjects based on their fitness level, measuring their pulse rate for 60 seconds after they marched for three minutes.
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Despite years of fighting and ever-more-solidified scientific evidence, creationists are still gaining ground, or at least holding their own in the fight over science education. Are you tired of the incessant debate about evolution taking attention from massive issues like climate change? Think you and you alone can depict the process in a way that will change everyone’s mind? Then enter DISCOVER’s “Evolution in Two Minutes or Less” video contest and find out.
Entries must be no longer than 120 seconds, and must be submitted by noon EDT, June 1, 2009. The winner will be chosen by none other than evolution champion and celebrity (in the science realm, at least) guest judge PZ Myers. So turn on your Flip cams and start evolving!
For the complete contest rules and terms, click here.
Image: iStockPhoto
Are you religious, but find yourself with no time to pray? Then Information Age Prayer has the solution you need. For just $4.95 a month, this online service will have your prayers said for you.
The program uses text-to-speech synthesizers to say prayers in a voice designed to emulate the volume and speed of an average praying person. Choose from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and if you’re unaffiliated, no problem! They’ve got options for you as well.
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Here’s one the federal courts don’t hear every day: The relatives of Geronimo, the famed Apache warrior who challenged U.S. forces in the 1800s, are suing Skull and Bones, Yale’s notorious secret society that counts George W. Bush and John Kerry as members, alleging that its members stole the military leader’s remains decades ago and have been hiding them ever since.
The suit was filed this past Tuesday, which not-so-coincidentally happens to be the 100th anniversary of Geronimo’s death (who says litigation can’t be done with a little dramatic flair?). According to the AP:
Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo said his family believes Skull and Bones members took some of the remains in 1918 from a burial plot in Fort Sill, Okla., to keep in its New Haven clubhouse, a crypt. The alleged graverobbing is a longstanding legend that gained some validity in recent years with the discovery of a letter from a club member that described the theft.
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Just as humans and gorillas share a common evolutionary ancestry, the pubic lice that infuriate some members of the two species are also related. Pubic lice–known to scientists as Pthirus pubis and to most other people as “crabs”–are thought to have evolved from Pthirus gorillae, the structurally similar species that infests gorillas. Genetic analysis by David Reed at the University of Florida indicates that the lice lineages split about 3.3 million years ago, whereas it is believed that humans diverged from gorillas at least 7 million years ago. This suggests that “early humans somehow caught pubic lice from their gorilla cousins.”
But apparently the lousy parasite didn’t make the jump because humans and gorillas tried to reunite their bloodlines; no, University College London biologist Robin Weiss suspects that humans picked up crabs by hunting gorillas. Because a predator can easily pick up parasites from its prey, the lice could have jumped to early humans while they butchered gorillas for bushmeat. Some researchers say that HIV made its more recent jump from chimpanzees to humans the same way.
Image: Flickr / mrflip
Lucy flew all the way from Ethiopia for nothing.
Seattle officials paid $2.25 million for the fossilized remains of the 3.2 million-year-old hominid known as Lucy to be on display at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. The problem is that no one wanted to visit the world’s oldest and best preserved human fossil, even though this is the first time she has ever traveled outside of Africa.
So far, Lucy’s been in Seattle for 5 months, and only 60,000 people have visited the exhibit (officials had expected more like 250,000). As a result, the science center has lost half a million dollars, resulting in layoffs of 8 percent of its staff and a wage freeze.
Lucy was supposed to go on a six-year, 10-city tour. The event started out strong: Visitors in Houston loved Lucy so much that officials extended her stay for a few months. By the exhibit’s end, Houston’s museum had clocked in more than 170,000 visitors. But a poor turnout in Seattle is making museums cancel their plans. The Field Museum in Chicago has pulled out, and the Denver museum of Nature and Science was apparently worried that transporting Lucy might damage her fragile remains.
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The secret to everlasting youth may be an injection of formalin, alcohol, glycerin, salicylic acid, and zinc salts. Of course, you’d have to be dead first. Those ingredients, scientists now know, made up the embalming formula that has kept the body of a Sicilian toddler in nearly pristine condition for almost a century.
Known as the “Sleeping Beauty” for her still-life-like appearance, Rosalia Lombardo was only two years old when she died of pneumonia in 1920. Her grieving father hired innovative taxidermist and embalmer Alfredo Salafia to preserve her body, which to this day is on view in a glass-fronted coffin in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy.
Italian biological anthropologist, Dario Piombino-Mascali of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman, finally uncovered the secret of Salafia’s expert mummification technique by tracking down his living relatives. It turns out that Salafia had written down the recipe he used to preserve Rosalia in his personal memoir.
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Does simple arithmetic give you sweaty palms? Do you always show up late for appointments? Is it a nightmare to figure out the bill at restaurants? If so, you may have dyscalculia, sort of the mathematical version of dyslexia. People with dyscalculia often excel at languages or visual arts, but can barely pass middle school math. They have trouble with numerical concepts—specifically, with associating numerical quantities with their abstract representations.
Although it’s estimated that about five percent of people have dyscalculia, researchers disagree as to the cause of the disorder. The debate boils down to whether number sense is an innate or learned trait in humans. Some argue that we are born with the ability to understand exact numbers. Even babies, for example, will stare longer when they are shown two dolls moving behind a screen and then three dolls coming out, indicating they were expecting a different numerical outcome.
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Whatever our prehistoric ancestors were doing at Stonehenge, they were probably doing it to trance music, suggests a new study. Researchers conducted the first mathematical analysis of Stonehenge’s acoustical properties and found that, at its prime, the Bronze Age structure would’ve been the perfect venue for fast-tempo jams.
Since only about a third of the original 80 monoliths that made up Stonehenge are still standing, researchers Rupert Till and Bruno Fazenda used the next best thing: a full-scale concrete replica of Stonehenge located in Washington state. Acoustic tests at the replica site as well as computer simulations showed that a fast tempo of about 160 beats per minute—think trance, or samba, or your heartbeat after some energetic dancing—coincide with the echoes reflected by the stone structures.
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Scientists were stunned when they first heard Bonnie whistle. The 30-year-old female orangutan at the Smithsonian National Zoo had never been taught to whistle, but she figured out the trick all by herself back in the 1980s, according to her caretakers. That makes her the first documented case of a primate spontaneously mimicking the sounds of another species—in this case, humans.
Though she can’t carry a tune, Bonnie seems to enjoy whistling and will usually happily comply when asked to do it. You can even watch her whistle on Youtube. The researchers, who published a paper on Bonnie in the journal Primates [subscription required], say she also taught another orangutan, Indah, how to whistle. Bonnie and Indah dispel the theory that orangutan vocalizations are only involuntary reactions to stimuli, and are mainly determined by evolutionary factors.
Instead, whistling orangutans suggest that orangutans can learn and teach each other new vocalizations. This would explain why separate populations of orangutans in the wild seem to maintain different repertoires of sounds—which can include screams, grumbles, barks, raspberries, and kiss squeaks.
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