Priming is a psychological phenomenon in which being exposed to a word or a stereotype can make us more likely to later act according to the prior stimulus, even if we have no conscious recollection of it. For example, people are more likely to complete a word stem like “TH” with “think” if they were previously exposed to that word. One widely cited study published in 1996 found that subjects exposed to words relating to old age in a word-scrambling task would walk more slowly down a hallway after completing the task. Slowness, of course, being a trait stereotypically associated with the elderly. The authors took this to be evidence that the word-task had primed the subjects to act old. But a new study led by Stéphane Doyen presents evidence that it may all be in the heads not of the subjects but of the experimenters.
In science, experiments are often double-blind, that is, neither subjects nor experimenters know which one of the possible conditions the subject is in. This is to prevent the unconscious expectations of either subjects or experimenters from influencing the outcome. Doyen attempted to replicate the 1996 findings, but devised a very strict protocol to ensure that the experiment was indeed double-blind, as expected. This experiment failed to reproduce the original findings. No one showed evidence of priming. However, Doyen then did another experiment, this time manipulating the experimenters’ expectations. Half of the experimenters were told to expect that the primed subjects would walk more slowly. The other half were told the subjects would walk faster. Lo and behold, that is exactly what Doyen observed. When the experimenters expected primed subjects to walk faster, they did; when they expected them to walk slower, they walked slower. (The actual measuring of walking time was done automatically using infrared sensors.)
The priming was real, but it had nothing to do with the unrelated word-task. It was all about what was going on in the experimenters’ heads, and how the subjects picked up on it and acted accordingly. Which, as Ed Yong points out, isn’t so different from Clever Hans, the horse who mastered arithmetic.
Cosmic Song is a work of art and cosmic ray detector embedded in the floor of one of the building entrances at CERN. It lights up with the constant rain of cosmic ray particles from outer space as people stand on the sculpture. The piece is made by the French artist Serge Moro.
Via Fresh Photons
Did you know that giant Pacific octopuses get “attached” to their aquarists—in a good way? These intelligent animals recognize our staff and may even embrace them after a long absence.
An octopus hug.
It’s true. They also remember people they don’t like - I read a fantastic article and one the things they talked about was that the octopus, Athena disliked an intern and would jet her with water whenever she got near the tank. She quit at one point because she had classes, but when she returned the following year, Athena remembered her and drenched her again.
(Source: montereybayaquarium)
Susana Soares’s design work is as fascinating as the science behind it:
Scientific research has demonstrated that bees have an extraordinarily acute sense of smell and can be trained to perform health checks by detecting a specific odour in peoples’ breath.
The project consists in a series of alternative diagnostic tools that use bees to diagnose accurately at an early stage of a vast variety of diseases.
Could this revolutionise medicine as we know it?
Via Fresh Photons
I asked my girlfriend about this crazy image I saw on her desktop. (above)
She said “These are mesenchymal stem cells that have gone through a differentiation process to change them into adipocytes, or fat cells. The red is a stain called Oil Red O that is used to confirm that the cells, in fact, have differentiated into adipocytes.”
So basically, the red bubbles are fat. Isn’t it weird that they look exactly like you would imagine them to?
The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. Pitch is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids which appear solid, most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very slow rate, taking several years to form a single drop.
The most famous version of the experiment was started in 1927 by Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, to demonstrate to students that some substances that appear to be solid are in fact very-high-viscosity fluids. Parnell poured a heated sample of pitch into a sealed funnel and allowed it to settle for three years. In 1930, the seal at the neck of the funnel was cut, allowing the pitch to start flowing. Large droplets form and fall over the period of about a decade. The eighth drop fell on 28 November 2000, allowing experimenters to calculate that the pitch has a viscosity approximately 230 billion times that of water.
This is recorded in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest continuously running laboratory experiment, and it is expected that there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years. To date, no one has ever actually witnessed a drop fall.
The image above features The University of Queensland pitch drop experiment with its current custodian, Professor John Mainstone (taken in 1990, two years into the eighth drop).
Credit: John Mainstone and The University of Queensland
the most beautiful symmetry in the fucking universe
I fucking love the world you guys
(Source: chaosexperiment)
Here is something to think about that was only casually mentioned in passing in the recent video that was posted.
The sunlight you may or may not have experienced today finally managed to reach you after a ~100,000 year long journey since it was originally created at the Sun’s core!
Since the speed of light is finite, about 300,000,000 meters/second (or about 671,000,000 miles/hour), it takes time for it to travel from one point in space to another.Given that the distance from Earth to the Sun is about 150,000,000,000 meters (about 93,000,000 miles) it takes about 8 minutes for light to reach us!
But this is just the time it takes light to reach us from the surface of the sun.
The light coming from the surface of the Sun is itself created as a by-product of nuclear fusion occurring deep in the Sun’s core.
Once light is created at at the Sun’s core it begins its journey to the surface of the Sun some 700,000,000 meters (430,000 miles) away from the core.
One might assume that this light takes the shortest path and heads straight to the surface, which would only take a couple seconds of travel time.
However, this is not the case because there is all kinds of star stuff that gets in the way.
An actual photon may only travel a mere fraction of a centimeter (anywhere between .01 and .3 centimeters depending on how close it is to the surface) before it makes a collision with other matter thereby diverting its path to some other random direction.
Photons continue moving in these seemingly random trajectories, bumping into other particles along the way, and don’t actually reach the surface until about 100,000 years later (give or take an order of magnitude)!
This kind of behavior characterizing the photons motion is modeled by something called a random walk, and is illustrated in a few different instances in the animations above.Random walks have widespread applications through out the sciences and mathematics. The idea of random walks are even used in some computer algorithms to allow for more efficient solutions to some problems.
One particular application of personal interest, and a rather abstract generalization of the idea, is the quantum random walk, in which the superposition principle of quantum mechanics is used to put the trajectory into a combination of multiple possible trajectories to assist quantum computers in solving problems. The workings of Grover’s search algorithm can be thought of in this way. This isn’t the only instance that relates quantum mechanics to the workings of the Sun (see here).
Anyway, next time you are out in the relentless light of the Sun you may wonder what was going on some 100,000 years ago when that light first originated in the Sun, or maybe even where you’ll be 100,000 years from now when the light being created in the Sun at this moment finally reaches Earth.
(GIFs created from this Java app)
Via spooky action at a distance
“Alexandria’s Genesis, a.k.a violet eyes (a genetic mutation).
When someone is born with Alexandria’s Genesis, their eyes are blue or gray at birth. After six months, the eyes begin to change from their original color to purple, and this process lasts six months. During puberty, the color deepens to dark purple, a deep purple, a royal purple, or a violet-blue color and remains that way. It does not affect the person’s eyesight.
Those who have this mutation will never grow any facial, body, pubic, or anal hair (not including hair on their head, on their ears, noses, eyebrows and eyelashes). Women also do not menstruate, but are fertile”
