Making Science More Better For You on 12/03/07

That’s Mr. Little Monkey to you Bub.

5-year-old chimp beats college kids in computer game

According to CNN and AP, Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.

That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

"No one can imagine that chimpanzees -- young chimpanzees at the age of 5 -- have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.

Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology. One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.

One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.

This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence.

When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.

But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.

That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.

From our “your name is destiny” file
Crandon man bail set for donut truck theft

Mike Miller — 11/29/2007 The Capital Times—Madison .Com


Cash bail of $2,100 was set today for Warren G. Whitelightning of Crandon, the man who allegedly led police on a high-speed chase through Madison's west after stealing a Krispy Kreme Donut truck when he was drunk early Saturday morning.

Whitelightning was officially charged in Dane County Circuit Court today in a criminal complaint alleging several offenses. He is being charged with shoplifting eight giant red hot pickled sausages from the Open Pantry on University Avenue, stealing the doughnut truck, ramming a University of Wisconsin Police car, attempting to elude pursing officers, operating after revocation, his fourth time drunk driving, and a hit and run.

Assistant District Attorney Michael Verveer conceded that the scene described in the criminal complaint of several squad cars chasing a donut truck around the west side could elicit laughter from many.

"Because what you have is two different police agencies chasing the defendant in a stolen Krispy Kreme donut truck with donuts flying out of the back of the truck," he said.

But he said the episode, "really is a danger to the community given the great recklessness of this stunt."

Hot pickled sausages and donuts—the breakfast of champions.
What are the chances he had a glazed expression when they took him into custody? What could be cruller than that?


Headline of the day
Dead Head wins Cambodian Open
(LA Times)
We thought Pol Pot retired that trophy


It’s called City of the Big Shoulders, Not the City of the Clean Hands
1 in 5 samples of ice from restaurants, bars in Chicago found to have high levels of bacteria

December 2, 2007
BY ART GOLAB AND LEONARD N. FLEMING Staff Reporters/agolab@suntimes.com, lfleming@suntimes.com

Next time you go out to eat or to a bar, it might be a good idea to say, "Hold the ice."

In a test of ice cubes from 49 fast-food and casual-dining restaurants and hotel bars in the city and suburbs, the Chicago Sun-Times found that more than one of every five samples contained high levels of bacteria.

Samples taken at three of the restaurants contained an undetermined amount of fecal coliform, according to the findings of a government-certified laboratory that performed tests on the samples for the newspaper.

By comparison, a water sample taken from a toilet in a men's room at the Sun-Times tested cleaner than the ice obtained at 21 of the restaurants and bars.
11 score worst

Drinking-water standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mandate average levels of less than one colony of coliform bacteria per milliliter.

Still, bacteria -- even fecal coliform -- aren't necessarily dangerous for most people. But they can lead to illness, experts say, especially among those who are very old or young,


"It's not like you'll see people dropping over dead or huge numbers getting sick because it's going to take just the right bacteria and the right person to make them ill," said Penn State University's Brian Swistock, co-author of the university's publication "Water Tests: What Do the Numbers Mean?"

Really Brian, that’s comforting.


But Captain and Tennile promised that love will keep us together

Maryland scientists hope to build a telescope to explore the secrets of a mysterious effect called dark energy that is pushing the universe apart

By Dennis O'Brien | Sun Reporter
December 2, 2007

It might seem as if astronomers and astrophysicists have had enormous success at unlocking the mysteries of space.

Impressive evidence has been gathered to support the theory that our universe was created about 13.7 billion years ago with an explosion of energy that eventually formed the innumerable galaxies still spinning away from one another to uncharted expanses of space.

We've discovered distant planets that might be friendly to life as we know it and have estimated distances to remote pulsing stars to help map the universe. We've assessed the power of black holes and remain awestruck by the extraordinary beauty of images of distant galaxies, young and old, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Key cosmological concepts
• Dark energy: In the late 1990s astronomers discovered an effect causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Lacking any deep understanding of this effect, and unable to probe it directly with existing technology, physicists coined the generic term "dark energy" to describe it. One of today's greatest scientific challenges is understanding what is causing the acceleration, and that's what the dark energy mission is about.

• Dark matter: We also know very little about dark matter other than how much there is - about 25 percent of the universe's mass. Dark matter can be measured indirectly, by calculating the mass required to create enough gravity to make galaxies behave the way they do.

• Cosmological constant: When Einstein formulated his General Theory of Relativity in 1915, he assumed the universe was neither expanding nor contracting. But he knew that gravity would tend to make the universe contract, so he postulated that even empty space would still contain an energy-a "cosmological constant"-that counters gravity to maintain the balance. When Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of our universe in 1929, Einstein rejected his own idea and called it his greatest scientific blunder. In fact, his constant reflected the apparent existence of dark energy

But central mysteries of the universe remain unsolved, and from a scientific viewpoint, there are still more questions than answers. Most scientists would agree that we know very little about what really makes up our universe - and little about its origin and possible fate.

Once we thought the universe was filled with shining stars, dust, planets and galaxies. We now know that about 20 percent to 25 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter, a force that keeps stars speeding around galaxies, emits no light and bends space and time.

And dark matter is only part of the story. Scientists have recently discovered a more abundant and mysterious substance called dark energy that makes up 70 percent to 75 percent of the universe.

Dark energy's existence and the mysteries that surround it have prompted astronomers and physicists to fundamentally re-examine their theories.

Scientists generally agree that dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe but are sharply divided over other implications.

Some theorize that it signals the existence of parallel universes that may someday collide. Others say that, depending on what dark energy turns out to be, our visible universe might gradually disappear, or tear itself apart in a Big Rip, or collapse in a Big Crunch down to a universe the size of nothing, ready to be reincarnated in another Big Bang.

Now, researchers in Maryland and elsewhere are preparing proposals for a new space telescope aimed at exploring dark energy's secrets.

"It addresses arguably the biggest problem physics is facing right now," said Mario Livio, a senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Dark energy makes up 74 percent of the universe, it's the dominant type of energy in the universe, and we haven't a clue of what it is."

Plans for a dark energy space telescope won major support this fall when a National Research Council panel recommended that NASA and the Department of Energy make it a top priority. Government scientists plan to formally call for proposals next year to build and operate a $600 million to $700 million dark energy telescope.

The Maryland team of astrophysicists that hopes to capture a NASA dark telescope contract includes astrophysicists from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, the Goddard Space Flight Center and other institutions. The group is led by Charles Bennett, a professor of astrophysics at Hopkins.

For Maryland, winning the contract would mean added prestige for a scientific community that already employs hundreds of people who help operate the Hubble Space Telescope and are planning for launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Bennett is unsure how many scientists and researchers would be hired if they secure the contract. But it would guarantee some work not only leading up to the launch, tentatively slated for sometime around 2015, but for years of operations.

The Maryland group has avid competitors.

"It's always frustrating if you're the scientist planning these projects because we're always raring to go," said Saul Perlmutter, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California who is credited with co-discovering dark energy and is heading a team competing with Bennett's group.

NASA awarded the teams headed by Bennett and Perlmutter, along with a group from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona, between $1.5 million and $2 million each last year to develop preliminary mission designs.

Six teams competed for the awards, but any number could submit proposals when a mission design contract is formally announced by NASA and the Department of Energy, said Jon Morse, NASA's director of astrophysics. NASA is expected to solicit design contract proposals by September 2008, he said.

Bennett and the dozen scientists on his team have spent much of the past two years drawing up preliminary plans. Being beaten by a competitor would be a blow.

Yeah, sure. $600 million so some geek can watch the neighbors get undressed. That’s all for today’s episode of “And Whitey’s on the moon….”




Does Bishop Berkely know about this?
First stars might have been invisible

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- A U.S. study suggests the universe's first stars might have been invisible and much larger than our sun.


The study -- conducted by scientists from the Universities of Utah, Michigan, and California-Santa Cruz -- suggests the first stars contained so much dark matter that the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium was delayed for millions of years. Dark matter is thought to make up 23 percent of the universe, although its existence has never been proved.

Both dark matter and dark energy have been proposed to account for observations that cannot be explained by the amount of visible matter and energy in the universe.

University of Utah Professor Paolo Gondolo, the study's first author, said gigantic stars might still exist, and could be detected from the gamma rays and other material ejected from them.

"They could last months. They could last 600 million years. Or they could last billions of years and still be around. We have to search for them," he said.

Gondolo said the research is the first to calculate how dark matter might influence the formation of the first stars.

The study is to appear in next month's issue of Physical Review Letters.