It’s a question you wouldn’t be surprised to hear a toddler ask: Do butterflies have ears? Well yes, yes they do. And one species was recently discovered to have ears on their wings. The blue morpho butterfly from Central and South America has beautiful bright blue wings complete with a simple ear structure that picks up noise and relays it to the brain.
Via MSNBC.com
In the new study, Kathleen Lucas of the University of Bristol in England and her colleagues were interested in the odd-looking hearing membrane that sits at the base of the blue morpho’s wing. The tympanal membrane, as it is called, is oval-shaped with a dome at its center that kind of resembles the yolk at the center of a fried egg, Lucas said.
Researchers determined that the butterflies can distinguish high and low frequencies, uncommon in simple ears, and they speculate this could help them determine if a hungry bird is about to swoop down and attack.
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Image: flickr / DavidDennisPhotos.com
When Julian Asher hears a violin, he sees red wine. However, this Imperial College London professor isn’t crazy: One out of every thousand people is said to experience this neurological condition called synesthesia. It causes two senses to blend together, so that stimulation of one sense triggers an entirely different one, involuntarily and simultaneously.
Here’s a theory on how it works: When one region of a person’s brain talks with another region that is wired to perceive a certain sense, the pathways cross and allow the person to experience “crossed senses.” Synesthesia is different for everyone who has it— some people claim they can smell a sound, while others hear a color, and some can even “taste” words.
The latest research on the topic has come out of Oxford University, where scientists found that people hear low-pitched sounds when they see large, round images. Experimental psychologist Charles Spence asked twelve “non-synesthetes” if they could identify whether an image or tone came first, in order to see how “soft” or “sharp” sounds registered in their brains. The volunteers associated high-pitched sound with angular shapes, and recognized low-pitched sounds when they were shown large dots.
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Short people may be disadvantaged on the basketball court, in the workplace, and when trying to see over large crowds, but they just might be quicker in sensing the world around them—because, well, their signals don’t have to travel as far to get to their brains.
In effect, this means that tall people are living in the past, if only by a tenth of a second. This is all according to neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose essay entitled “Brain Time” suggests that “if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.”
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Think you might have a problem with body odor? Here’s a dose of perspective: A 41-year-old woman in Australia has smelled like rotten fish all her life. The pervasive smell emanates from her sweat, breath, and urine, and cannot be washed off or covered up. After being “sniffed” by doctor after doctor, all of whom waved her off as a hypochondriac or even prescribed vaginal cauterization, she was finally diagnosed with trimethylaminuria, or “fish malodor syndrome.”
Though she can now put a name to her condition, the bad news is that there is no cure. Trimethylaminuria is a rare genetic disorder that prevents the body from producing an enzyme that breaks down trimethylamine, a fishy smelling substance found in foods like meat, eggs, peas, soy beans, and er, fish. Only about 600 cases of fish malodor syndrome are known in the world. Cutting out trimethylamine from the diet can help, but there is no effective treatment.
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To be an expert is to know something like the back of your hand, or so the saying goes. But science suggests we don’t know our own limbs quite as well as we think.
For years scientists have used “rubber hand illusions” to show how the mind can be fooled: They cover a test subject’s real hand with a towel, and then put a real-looking rubber hand in the place where it should be. After a while, the subjects’ minds get the best of them and they “feel” sensations from the fake hand. In a new study [pdf, subscription required], Oxford University researchers went one step further and showed that the brain can begin to abandon a limb if it thinks it’s got a replacement.
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Earlier this month we wrote that alliteration can help you maintain your memory, and now it seems that patterns are also good for those whose brains are just developing.
Babies’ brains are the most active when they hear words with repeated syllables, according to Judit Gervain from the University of British Columbia, and that my help to explain why their first words are often words like “mama” or “papa.”
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No matter how hard you try, it’s often difficult to cheer yourself up from a funk just by thinking happy thoughts. But making yourself disgusted—that’s easy.
Researchers had already identified the part of the brain that activates when we feel grossed out—the anterior insula and adjacent frontal operculum, or IFO. But a Dutch study has found that even reading or thinking about something disgusting can cause the same region of the brain to light up.
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Scientists have long known that one of their favorite test subjects, the fruit fly, has a talent unavailable to humans: sensing magnetic fields. Now, researchers led by Steven Reppert of the the University of Massachusetts Medical School say that while fruit flies might not actually “see” magnetism, their perception of it is linked to their sight—specifically, to a molecule called cryptochrome, a receptor for blue and ultraviolet light.
In their experiment, Reppert and Robert Gegear trained test flies to associate a magnetic coil with food. When the scientists put the flies in a small maze with two coils, one working and providing a magnetic field and one not, the flies flew toward the live magnet, presumably sensing the magnetic field and associating that with a sugary snack.
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All right, no more complaining about “old people smell”—according to George Preti, it doesn’t exist.
Preti, a scent expert at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, became incensed at 2001 Japanese study concluding that the skin of people over 40 produces more chemicals with an unpleasant or greasy odor. Preti, being over 40 himself, set out to disprove that idea.
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You’ve seen them around—taking the stage after a few beers, perhaps a few too many, and belting out ear-splitting off-key versions of “Don’t Stop Believin‘” or “Livin’ on a Prayer.” They are bad karaoke singers. The question for scientists is: Can they not hear themselves butchering a tune, or do they know full well they can’t sing, but enjoy trying anyway?
Acoustics researcher Simone Dalla Bella says it’s mostly the former—bad singers truly have no idea how bad they are. Popular Science reports that he and his colleagues elicited volunteers to sings simple songs like “Jingle Bells” and found that the majority of the people who couldn’t carry the tune didn’t realize they were so far off-key.
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