For years now the generic PC was getting somewhat cheaper and that was generally good for science. Lots of PCs are running or assisting in many different ways experiments and measurements in laboratories of many sorts.

The generic PC could have been getting much cheaper and perhaps specialized, but the complicated interplay between the dominating operating system and consumer market social aspects lead to the development which simply happened. But somehow everybody in science was happy.

In the category of "Duh?" for the week, we have a new article from France looking at how parental beliefs regarding autism dictate treatment choices. Dardennes et al. (2011) put 78 parents through a questionnaire called "the Lay-Beliefs about Autism Questionnaire (LBA-Q; Furnham&Buck, 2003). This questionnaire explores beliefs regarding the etiology and treatment of autism. LBA-Q’s authors considered two main academic theories of the possible causes and treatment of autism: the psychogenic model and the biomedical model" (Dardennes et al.).

This is the best song I have heard all year. (Thanks to i'm a chordata! for the shout out.) I might even go so far as to say it's the best song I will hear all year. What could possibly be more awesome than this beautiful, bluesy explanation of why animals in the ocean undertake vertical migrations?

In Nanjing, that is close to Shanghai, and I suppose also in other places around here*, you cannot buy salt anymore. Every last grain has been bought up. Why? Apparently, some evil guy started the rumor that table salt, which is sodium chloride (NaCl), can protect you from radioactivity. We are not talking about iodide salt here, nor even sea salt either, which has some iodide in it, but simple salt, which there is already way too much in the Chinese diet.

*(Update: In the whole of China, the first person died already from eating too much salt!)

So I check my blog comments this morning, and guess who the culprit is? IT IS ME! According to the comments to my last article, I am the one to blame! How so?

Language may have an undervalued role in learning the meanings of numbers.   A study based on research using deaf people in Nicaragua who never learned formal sign language showed that people who communicate using self-developed gestures (homesigns) were unable to comprehend the value of numbers greater than three because they had not learned a language containing symbols used for counting.

Given the general fear regarding radiation levels around Japan, this seems the perfect time to give a short introduction to this important topic. There is a lot of confusion regarding radiation and radiation poisoning and this article will try and break it down. 

Radioactive decay

Japan Earthquake Increases Flood Risk In Fukushima


During the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake in Japan, the ground level sank along the coast near Onahama Port,  Fukushima Prefecture. This has caused recent average tide levels to rise by about 40cm.

A tide level recording from Onahama Port shows the tide level fluctuations at the time of the quake and the subsquent increase in tide levels.


Tide level at Onahama, Fukushima Prefecture.
image source: JMA

The CDF collaboration sent to the preprint arxiv a new paper a few days ago. In it, they report on a measurement of the mass difference of top and anti-top quarks. The result would not be worth discussing in detail, if it did not show a 2-sigma discrepancy which might be the first hint of a CPT violation. So let me discuss it here.

Recent research indicates that bilingual speakers can outperform monolinguals in certain mental abilities, such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on important information, said Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Penn State. These skills make bilinguals better at prioritizing tasks and working on multiple projects at one time.  Kroll said that these findings counter previous conclusions that bilingualism hindered cognitive development.

While any individual action in a zero-tolerance culture will be evidence of endemic racism, the plain fact is actual racism is below any level in history and dropping fast.   That makes it possible to again discuss variations in skin color to provide one of the best examples of evolution by natural selection acting on the human body.

Scientists have understood for years that evolutionary selection of skin pigmentation was caused by the sun. As human ancestors gradually lost their pelts to allow evaporative cooling through sweating, their naked skin was directly exposed to sunlight. In the tropics, natural selection created darkly pigmented individuals to protect against the sun.