Tomorrow marks the 3rd birthday of my Flickr photostream, and as it happens, I am also celebrating my 1000th picture there. Oh, and I even got used to the new design. Looks kind of cool as long as you don't scratch the shiny surface and it saves me money on the pro membership ...
The most-viewed photos are still the same ones as last year, so instead I'm posting a brand-new one here, photo number 1000:
This is of course Calatrava's Liege Guillemins station.
In my latest feature in Current Biology I've explored how science, after centuries of trying to shut out all emotional and subjective things, is now rediscovering emotion. After all, we now know that feelings show up in MRI scans, so they must be real. And in some contexts, from conservation through to medicine, they might even be useful.
Can science relate to our emotions?
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 12, R501-R504, 17 June 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.056
The blue marble that I got from Wallace J Nichols whose work is discussed in the feature. It symbolises our watery planet as it can be seen from space, and also points to his views on the "blue mind."
Update 5.8.2024. Wallace J. Nichols died in June 2024. Some links to reflections on his work:
I just came across an audio file of Shakira performing this song on tumblr and didn't recognise it (it doesn't appear on any of her CDs). Investigating further, I found the video:
The song is by Puerto-Rican composer Pedro Flores and according to this site it was recorded for an anthology of his work.
Each time I’m taking the Eurostar to continental Europe I am left wondering, why is a single passport check ok to travel out, but two or three are done on the way back?
Coming back from Germany via Brussels last Sunday (on the Eurostar departing Brussels at 19:52) we had our passports checked three times (by Belgian and UK authorities in Brussels, and then by UK people again in St. Pancras). The ticket was also checked three times, by the machine at checkin, by the UK passport control in Brussels and by a train manager on the train.
I don’t really see the need for any passport controls within the EU. If I can fly from Madrid to Helsinki or Athens under the Schengen agreement without border control, what’s so special about the UK and Ireland that they can’t join? I’m really not buying the argument that these countries are so attractive they need extra protection.
Then, if you do need passport controls, why not do them once in the right place, and be done with it? If I’m a legal traveller on the first contol, I’ll surely still be legal on the third one. To me, the third passport control on the same leg of the journey really is where security measures end and harassment begins. It didn’t improve my mood that a steward, as I was stepping up to the counter with my son who has autism and needs constant supervision and assistance, shouted at us “one at a time”. If he had actually looked at us before, he could have figured out why we went ahead together.
My personal gripes apart, surely, it can’t be good for the UK economy if people who may be travelling to London on business get harassed this way?
New art work suspended from the roof of St. Pancras station.
Recent research and the EU's temporary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides has brought the threats to bees and other pollinators on the agenda again. While manufacturers insist that neonicotinoids aren't toxic to bees in concentrations found in the environment, the interest now focuses on the more subtle effects the substances may have. For instance, by making bees forgetful, even sublethal doses can endanger the survival of the colony.
Read all about it in my feature that came out in Current Biology last week:
EU ban puts spotlight on complex effects of neonicotinoids
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 11, R462-R464, 3 June 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.05.030
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(one of my many bumblebees on Flickr)
Incidentally, in this month's issue of Chemie in unserer Zeit I also have a piece on bees' memories. Unlike the neonicotinoids, caffeine seems to improve it.
Pflanzeninhaltsstoffe: Koffein stärkt Gedächtnis der Bienen
Chemie in unserer Zeit
Volume 47, Issue 3, page 146, Juni 2013 DOI: 10.1002/ciuz.201390029
Over the last two decades, the world-wide web has rapidly evolved to become the focus of a world-wide super-culture shared by several billion people using it. This culture has developed new standards of communication and civility, virtual communities (some with their own distinctive cultures), and terminology.
Just with a brief discussion of the etymology and usage of 100 of the termini of the internet age, Tom Chatfield has achieved much more than just creating an annotated list of fancy new words. While one could use it as a reference to look up words that have remained unfamiliar or puzzling (though an index would help with this kind of use), a cover-to-cover reading conjures up a cultural history of the internet age. Each of the words and concepts discussed also serves as a mirror reflecting the behaviour of web users and online communities from a different angle.
Along the way there are lovely little factoids waiting to be picked up. My favourites include: Thomas Edison writing about “bugs” in his inventions; the patron saint of the internet (St. Isidore of Seville, apparently); the use of “OMG” in a 1917 letter addressed to Churchill; and the fact that there is a Wikipedia entry on the gender of connectors and fasteners.
In some cases, the the 3-pages standard length of the chapters left me yearning for more, but then again, the book might have easily become unwieldy, and for those who want to investigate further, there’s always the internet …
PS: on a related topic, also see my recent feature on the evolution of online culture.
I somehow managed to miss Neil Shubin's excellent book "Your inner fish" when it came out a few years ago. Now, however, I had the chance to read it and catch up with my inner fish on the occasion of the publication of the coelacanth genome.
Shubin's discovery of an intermediate fossil, Tiktaalik, and the genomic comparisons of coelacanth with other vertebrates tell us some amazing things on the transition from fish to land-living animals. What I find most mind-boggling, however, is this: If you look at the tree of life from the perspective of the coelacanth, you'll find that mice, chickens and humans are closer relatives than herring or zebrafish, or anything that lives in an aquarium, and never mind sharks and rays. Try to get that into your brain if you're just a fish.
By coincidence, the reference genome of the zebra fish was published almost at the same time, so I could combine one fish that tells us about our evolution with another that tells us about our development, into a feature that is now out in Current Biology;
What fish genomes can tell us about life on land
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 10, R419-R421, 20 May 2013
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.068
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Source (via H2origins)
Not that I've felt the need for brain doping (beyond caffeine) so far, but I've been following the field of cognitive enhancers from a safe distance for a while now and have summed up the current state of affairs in a feature for Chemistry & Industry, which is out in the May issue:
Smart New World
Chemistry & Industry No. 5, pp32-35
In the same issue, I have a review of the book:
Gold nanoparticles for physics, chemistry and biology
on page 47.
Maybe the smart pills could magically convert me into this guy:
This week's issue of Current Biology has a special section of food and biology. My contribution is a feature on the gut microbiome and what it can tell us about widespread problems like obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Does the gut microbiome hold clues to obesity and diabetes? Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 9, R359-R362, 6 May 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.047
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The issue looks like this:
The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has banned this ad:
according to this report in the Guardian, and I'm having a huge problem with this decision. The posters don't show anything at all apart from the drink, just words, and (as the ad slogan itself suggests) any associations are purely in the mind of the beholder.
If we've reached the point of not being allowed to use words that have several meanings because some readers may associate them with a meaning that they themselves will then find offensive, I think we've arrived in a kafkaesque nightmare of censorship. If people are offended by their own thoughts, it should be their own problem, right?
To use a visual analogy, if looking at a lighthouse makes you think of male genitalia, that doesn't give you the right to ask for images of lighthouses to be banned. The association is exclusively your own problem.
And that's essentially the point that the ad itself tried to make in a playful way. Clearly some people at the organisation in charge of such things were unable to grasp this subtle philosophical point.
During the preparations for the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5, controversies have raged over the broadening of diagnostic definitions. Critics have argued that the new manual, due to be published in May, will turn more people than ever into psychiatric patients.
So I wheeled out Moliere's imaginary invalid and investigated whether the shrinks are letting normality shrink away into oblivion. The resulting feature has now come out in Current Biology:
Has the manual gone mental?
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 8, R295-R298, 22 April 2013 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.009
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A stage production of Moliere's Le malade imaginaire in Argentina, via Flickr.
Why is tumblr like ancient Egypt? How do you recognise if a twitter user is part of a specific tribe? Will edit wars on Wikipedia end in peace deals or carry on forever? And why have some social networks turned into ghost towns?
All these questions and more are addressed in my feature on the cultural evolution of online social networks, which is out now in Current Biology:
What makes people click?
Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 7, R255-R258, 8 April 2013
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.03.047
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Twitter users grouped into tribes, annotated with words typically used by each group. Graphic: John Bryden, Sebastian Funk and Vincent Jansen
