Here is what I am reading today:
“Over the past decade, I have developed a computer program to do this sort of analysis of writing style, based on literally millions of different features. This program will take a sample of writing and determine, on the basis of similarity, who among a set of authors was most likely to have written that sample. In July, I received an email from a reporter for London’s Sunday Times asking if I could help them solve a mystery. The reporter had received a tip that J. K. Rowling had secretly penned a novel under a pen name: The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith, who was described as a former member of the Royal Military police, and whose novel had grown “directly out of his own experiences and those of his military friends.” The tip was at least plausible. Rowling and Galbraith had the same agent and editor. “
“The burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides is, honestly, kind of gross. It lays its eggs on the carcasses of mice, birds, and the like. When the larvae hatch, the parents crawl around regurgitating predigested carrion into their offspring’s hungry mouths (as pictured above). The larvae beg for the barf by poking the parents’ mouthparts with their legs. Researchers wondered what exactly was going on with the begging. Do babies beg all the time, or only when they’re really, truly hungry? It’s most definitely the latter, according to a new study. The team found that begging comes with a major risk: cannibalism”
“Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, whose team has been collaborating with Saudi Deputy Minister of Health Ziad Memish, is one of the few scientists who have had access to animal samples from the region where MERS occurs. In October 2012, Lipkin and other researchers went to the home of the first known MERS patient in Saudi Arabia, a man who died in June 2012 in Bisha, in the country’s southwest.”
“To understand the mechanisms behind this effect, Sarah Leibowitz, a behavioural neurobiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York, and her colleagues injected pregnant rats with small doses of nicotine — which the researchers say are comparable to the amount a pregnant woman would get from smoking one cigarette a day — and then examined the brains and behaviour of the offspring. “
“”The mechanisms of memory consolidations regarding motor memorylearning were still uncertain until now,” said Masako Tamaki, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and lead author of the study that appears Aug. 21 in the Journal of Neuroscience. “We were trying to figure out which part of the brain is doing what during sleep, independent of what goes on during wakefulness. We were trying to figure out the specific role of sleep.””
“The songs were popular tunes her husband recognized when she sang or hummed them. But she herself could not identify them.
This is the first known case of a patient hallucinating music that was familiar to people around her, but that she herself did not recognize, according to Dr. Danilo Vitorovic and Dr. José Biller of Loyola University Medical Center. The neurologists describe the unique case in the journal Frontiers in Neurology.”
“And how do those actions among humans compare to those of our chimpanzee cousins and other nonhuman primates?
Through two separate studies, UC Santa Barbara anthropologists Adrian Jaeggi and Michael Gurven found that reciprocity is similar among monkeys, apes, and humans, even when considering other factors that might otherwise predict helping behavior.”
I had the pleasure to observe a Marine Corp Retirement. I am faculty advisor of Cal Poly’s Semper Fi Club.