Question of the Day

If it’s bad luck when a black cat crosses your path, what kind of omen is it when a slug crosses your path?

Door #9: The Parasite Behind Crazy Cat Ladies?

Filled with reports of off-beat research (or off-beat implications of otherwise garden-variety research), the annual “Year in Ideas” issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine has become a highlight of my December.

This year’s most amusing item:  Rebecca Skloot’s piece on a possible biological explanation for why “some humans develop an unhealthful attraction to cats and apparently become immune to the smell of their urine.”

Just the first paragraph had me and my housemate in stitches:

Here’s a little-known and slightly terrifying fact: According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 60 million people in the United States are infected with a parasite that may migrate into their brains and alter their behavior in a way that — among other things — may leave them more likely to be eaten by cats. New research into this common parasite — Toxoplasma gondii — may offer clues to the phenomenon known to the unscientifically-minded as “crazy cat lady” syndrome.

Door #3: Poetry of the Seamounts

My sister Mars and I share an affinity for the crazy common names applied to creatures. Her Web site features a list of whimsical bird names from the bristle-thighed curlew to the rufous-breasted fruitpigeon.

Today I came across an equally wonderful list of fish species trawled from the underwater mountain ranges (some over a mile below the surface) in the Tasman Sea off Australia. The list links to pictures of some of the most fantastical fish I’ve ever seen.

Go ahead, read these aloud. The list is like a strange, gothic poem:

Australian Burrfish
Ballina Angelfish
Beaked Salmon
Blue Grenadier
A deepsea anglerfish (no common name)
Duckbilled Eel
Dwarf Dory
A fanfin anglerfish
Fangtooth
Fathead
Gelatinous Blindfish
Gilbert’s Halosaur
Gulper Eel
Hammerjaw
Humpback Blackdevil
King Gar
Largescale New Laternfish
Little Red Gurnard Perch
Longray Spiderfish
Orange Roughy
Plunket’s Dogfish
Portuguese Dogfish
Ribbon Barracudina
Sharpnose Sevengill Shark
Shortsnout Lancetfish
Short-tail Torpedo Ray
Silver Lighthouse Fish
A snaggletooth (no common name)
Snubnosed Eel
Soft Leafvent Angler
Southern Spineback
Spangled Tubeshoulder
Sparkling Slickhead
Spiky Oreo
Stoplight Loosejaw
Triplewart Seadevil
Viperfish

Who needs science fiction, when science fact is this amazing?

Bee Movie in My Bonnet

Am I the only one who’s bothered by the fact that Jerry Seinfeld voices the lead in Bee Movie?

It’s not that I have objections to Seinfeld, but aren’t worker bees female?

Anthropology Projects Ripped From the Headlines

I don’t think a week goes by without my finding a great idea for a social/cultural anthropology project in some newspaper or magazine article. (Of course, someone may already be working on these projects, but that’s okay. It seems like there’s no shortage of possible topics.)

After reading a Salon.com review of Scott Weidensaul’s Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding, I realized that someone should do for birders what Gary Alan Fine does for mushroomers in his book Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. That is, an anthropologist should do a sustained ethnographic study of a group of birders, looking at the meanings nature takes on in this specific cultural context, analyzing the stories birders tell and teasing out the complicated (and sometimes overlapping) relationships between amateurs and professionals.

To Sleep, Perchance

This is going to be a fairly short post, because I have to go to sleep now.  As it does every year, the recent time change has kicked my butt. I know that this will happen; and yet each time we spring forward or fall back, I forget to make allowances, and somehow manage to stay up even later than usual.

And that’s not the only reason I should know better.

My mother was the poster child for lack of sleep. I was well into my thirties before I realized that normal people did not have to replace their car every few years because they fell asleep at the wheel and totaled their old car.

So, instead of posting something long winded tonight, I’ll just leave you with these links and head off to get some shut-eye:

• Slate.com reviews some recent studies on how the switch to and from daylight savings time messes with your circadian rhythms.
• Harvard Magazine profiles some of the sleep scientists on the faculty. (This was the article an old boss told me about to convince me that all those people who say they can survive just fine on less than seven hours of sleep a night are  deluding themselves.)
• New York Magazine talks about new research that shows that sleep deficits so affect kids’ school performance that, for example, over-tired sixth graders end up performing at a fourth-grade level. (This begs the question of what lack of sleep does to us folks in our forties who are losing brain cells by the minute.)

Who Says Scientists Aren’t Funny?

I stopped by the RCSB Protein Data Bank only to find out that the Molecule of the Month was anabolic steroids.

Best. Caption. Ever.

Or at least the best photo caption I’ve read in a while.

Mike Turner sprayed herbicide recently on the weed Salvinia molesta on Caddo Lake near Uncertain, Tex. The weed suffocates all life beneath it.

I don’t know which part I enjoy most: the botanical name of the plant (Salvinia molesta), the location (Uncertain, Texas) or the whole suffocating all life thing.

Via a New York Times article about an invasive plant that’s threatening to take over the only natural (i.e., non-human-made) lake in Texas.

Where Do I Sign Up For This Job?

This past weekend, John Tierny from the New York Times blogged about Jaak Panskepp, a Washington State University scientist who’s studied the chirping sounds rats make when they play to see if these sounds are equivalent to human laughter.

Best quote from Panskepp: “Then one day we decided to tickle some animals.”

To get the full effect you really need to watch the video of Panskepp tickling some rats. Their ultrasonic vocalizations are amplified by a device called a bat detector so you can hear the chirping. The ticklish rodents cheered me up so much, I’ve watched the clip three times already.

At first I wondered if the rats were really trying to communicate something more along the lines of “get away from me you big, hairless hand,” but Panskepp found that they will run mazes or perform other tasks in order to get tickled. They also seek out the company of other chirping rats, and the rats in the video chase Panskepp’s hand around the cage for more tickling.

I don’t think this is enough evidence to definitively equate chirping and laughter, but it does seem like the rats are enjoying themselves and that their sounds express that enjoyment.

Incidentally, Panskepp has what may be the best academic title I’ve heard: Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science.

Eavesdropping Nuthatches and Chirpy Chickadees

The science headline of the day comes from New Scientist: Eavesdropping Nuthatches Act on Chickadee Warnings.

The article reports the findings of two University of Washington scientists, Christopher Templeton and Erick Greene, who studied red-breasted nuthatches and black-capped chickadees. In an earlier study, the scientists found that chickadees varied their call depending on the size of the predators. The smaller the predator, the more vocal the call and the more vigorous the response of the flock:

“It doesn’t seem intuitive. The big predators, with huge beaks and talons, seem dangerous to us. But big, nasty weapons are only useful if you can catch your prey. And the maneuverability of predators is determined by their wingspan,” says Templeton. Small predators are more adept at hunting chickadees than large ones.

Now Templeton and team have found that the nuthatches can understand the small differences in the chickadees’ calls and adjust the vehemence of their response accordingly.

Templeton says the nuthatches probably discriminate fine-scaled features in the “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” call such as the number of harmonics in the “dee” notes, or the length and timing of different syllables.

I grew up watching both these species of birds on the feeders outside my parents’ kitchen window, so it’s pretty cool to find out that they’re up to more than just gorging on sunflower seeds.

P.S. Is it just me, or does the word nuthatch look odd? Now that I see it in print, it’s almost like I can’t decide whether to parse it as nut-hatch or nu-thatch.