Science & Technology Category
Mechanical Creatures Try to Mingle Author: Bilig May 13,2008
Researchers study animal behavior through mechanical doppelgangers
To learn more about how animals communicate, researchers are developing robotic copies capable of signaling real-world creatures, then analyzing how the non-battery-powered respond. Most recently, Hampshire College researcher Sarah Partan, for example, has been working with a mechanical squirrel she calls Rocky.
The robo-squirrel can imitate a few squirrelly motions, and she also stocked it with a number of realistic sounds that she and her team can activate via remote control. In one experiment, they planted Rocky in the midst of real squirrels, had the robot “bark,” and set his tail through a series of motions meant to indicate danger. Then they studied how the other squirrels in the area responded.
Rocky isn’t the only robo-squirrel, and there are plenty of other researchers using mechanical animals to learn more about the real thing. In other projects, robots have not only mingled successfully—they’ve drawn real creatures to follow their lead.
Via LiveScience
Science Confirms the Obvious: Emotions Can Be Evoked Unconsciously Author: Bilig May 13,2008
Psychologist: “How are you feeling?”
Patient: “I feel like I want to punch the lights out of…out of…this anger management pillow printed with my boss’s photo!”
Psychologist: “So that emotion would be called…”
Patient: “Annoyance. Anger.”
Psychologist: “And why do you think that is?”
Patient: “Because he made me mad.”
Psychologist: “And…”
Patient: “Because I am insecure about being passed over for that promotion?”
Psychologist: “Go on…”
A fundamental credo of therapy is to first be aware of your emotions, preferably before they hijack your actions. But often we don’t immediately recognize that we’re feeling irritable, fearful, or disgusted, especially when our significant other is there to notice it first. And sometimes it takes a moment to pinpoint why.
A study in this month’s issue of the journal Psychological Science offers the first empirical evidence that humans don’t need to be aware of what triggered their mood in order to be affected by it. In fact, the authors—Kirsten Ruys and Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in The Netherlands—mention in the paper that “most researchers deny the existence of unconscious emotions.” Who knew this phenomenon wasn’t common knowledge among psychologists?
Ruys and Stapel used a neat trick to prove their dissenting theory. They subjected study participants to 120-millisecond flashes on either the right of left side of a computer screen and asked them to quickly indicate the position. The “flashes” were actually fleeting images of growling dogs or unflushed toilets, which, the researchers discovered, unconsciously elicited feelings of fear or disgust.
It may seem strange we’ve developed a mind that can be unaware of its own feelings, but there is an evolutionary advantage of the ability. Read on to today’s post of Future Human—my online column on the continued evolution of humankind.
The Pregnant Male Author: Bilig May 13,2008
By observing the seahorse’s unusual sex roles, scientists hope to learn more about how they came to be
The seahorse is a strange fish. Many of the traits it possesses have evolved in a direction unlike any other family of animals underwater—its bent S-shape; its head at a 90-degree angle to its body; its prehensile tail; and, most curiously, the male’s brood pouch. A lab at Texas A&M University led by Adam Jones is currently studying these structures in the hope of understanding how it was that male pregnancy evolved in seahorses and how it affects the traditional sex roles in the fish.
Male seahorses don’t just carry the eggs and young in their brood pouch. Once they receive the female’s eggs, the outer shell of the eggs break down and the male’s tissues in the pouch grow up around them. After fertilization, the male tempers the environment as they develop, maintaining blood flow, salt concentrations, and providing nutrients and oxygen just as a mother’s placenta would. The traditional male and female roles are as well reversed with mating behavior—the males are choosy, while the females compete.
Observing the rituals in this way—with males and females in opposite roles—has given the researchers a unique look into the workings of the reproductive process and is informing their hypotheses about how they came to be.
Via PhysOrg
