FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie

Watching an orangutan sleep is like watching a giant, orange baby slumbering sweetly. These huge great apes like to get into bed, and nestle down for a long and deep night’s sleep, their eyes occasionally dancing behind their eyelids, perhaps dreaming a fleeting orangutan’s dream. Watching a baboon sleep is more like watching a small bitter paranoid person desperately trying to get some shut eye. They sleep badly; sitting upright, balancing on their bottoms, minds whirring, constantly fearful that something or someone is after them. Which begs an important question: why does an orangutan sleep so soundly, whereas its primate relative, the baboon, suffers a fretful night’s rest?......

Live with a dog, and you’ve probably met the “guilty look.” It all happens so fast — you come home, the plants are knocked over, soil is tracked all over the floor, and there’s the dog, frozen, averting gaze, and tail thumping. Whip out your phone to record the behavioral evidence for YouTube, and bam, you’ll not only get millions of views, but you can even be invited on ABC’s Good Morning America. All hail the dog’s “guilty look.” But there’s a problem. Research to date, including a new, open-access study published earlier this year, has not found that a dog’s “guilty look” necessarily corresponds with dog’s knowledge of a misdeed. Additionally, scolding or punishing a dog in an attempt to tell them that what they did is wrong will not necessarily lead to a decrease of that “bad” behavior in the future. This is because a dog’s supposed “guilty look” does not have the same meaning that it has for humans.....

.........This replication provided an opportunity to emphasize two general points: first, it is highly unusual to reproduce previously published data with such ease and to such an astonishing degree. Second, I reiterated what I had already said during the lecture: there is no genetic determinism. Even humble fruit fly larvae show that different genotypes do not necessarily mean different fate – it depends strongly on the environment, if any genotypic differences manifest themselves in phenotypic differences..........

.............Why do some cobras spit their venom? Herpetologist Thomas Barbour, who published one of the first studies on spitting cobras, thought that spitting cobras evolved venom spitting for much the same reason that rattlesnakes were thought to have evolved their rattles—to alert large ungulates to their presence and avoid getting stepped on...........

Since its invention in 1816, the stethoscope has become one of the most iconic symbols of the medical profession. Yet there was a time when doctors had to assess the inner sounds of the human body unaided. In 350 B.C., Hippocrates—the ‘Father of Medicine’—suggested gently shaking the patient by the shoulders, while applying one’s ear directly to the chest in order to determine the presence of thoracic empyema, or pus in the lungs. For over a thousand years, medical practitioners would follow in Hippocrates’s footsteps, relying on only their ears to diagnose chest infections in patients.....

..............I see this as a case study in how quickly the scientific community and the media can jump on a discovery or paradigm shift before it has been proven. True, it is a case study from 100 years ago, but it seems prescient today in a world of 24-hour cable news cycles, instant news coming from the Internet, and the tendency to hype in the science reporting. Why did The NYT not issue a correction on the true cause of typhus and why did they continue to credit Plotz when it was clear he was wrong? And how did I become so obsessed with this inconsistency?.......

............Why does this technique seem to fail so often? In theory this technique could work. All moss cells are totipotent, meaning each individual moss cell can regrow an entire moss plant. However, moss species are often very specific to where they grow. Some species grow only on soil, others on trees, and still others on rocks. The success rate will probably be low if mosses that usually grow on soil or wood are painted onto concrete or brick walls. Another reason they may not grow is that the surface is not moist enough.......

.........Setting aside the question of whether plastics (or obesity or carbonated corn syrup-laced beverages or the presence of step-dads or hormones in beef or any other factor) are behind changes in our patterns of sexual maturity, what about the possible future? Does evolutionary theory support the idea that xenoestrogens and other endocrine disruption could lead us limping to a kind of slow rolling human apocalypse, as people like McMahon suggest?........

Inside and outside the kitchen, chefs have been known to get into the weeds–but the majority of culinary cannabis creations have been mainly limited to a few cakes, cookies, and of course, the archetypal pot brownie. In GQ, writer Jesse Pearson opined, “We’re a nation that obsesses over food and chefs as much as we secretly obsess over drugs, but to judge by the sad trifles on display at legal weed dispensaries, the evolution of the pot snack stalled back when Janis Joplin was still alive. It’s mostly just variations on a theme: cookies, cupcakes, fudge… Yawn. Sickly sweet and uninspired.” That may be changing, though. Laurent Quenioux is a classically trained French chef based in Los Angeles. He has been approaching cannabis in a way that emphasizes its flavor profile, rather than its effect. Describing himself as neither pro- or anti- cannabis, he says, “I’m not talking about whether cannabis is good for you or not. As a chef, there is a very interesting flavor profile that should be experienced.”....

...............What did our ancestors actually eat? In some cases, researchers can enlist modern technology to examine the question. Researchers study the chemical makeup of fossil dental enamel to figure out relative amounts of foods the hominid ate derived from woody plants (or the animals that ate them) versus open country plants. Other scientists look in ancient tooth tartar for bits of silica from plants that can be identified to type – for example, fruit from a particular plant family. Others examine the small butchering marks made on animal bones by stone tools. Researchers have found, for example, that hominids even 2.6 million years ago were eating the meat and bone marrow of antelopes; whether they were hunted or scavenged is hotly debated.............

Would an all-female crew make sense on a deep space journey to Mars? Would the spacecraft rotate to simulate gravity? What's being done now to prepare for such a journey?.....

Many animals behave aggressively towards one another. This is usually when they are fighting for something like territory, mates or food. However, an animal’s decision to become aggressive isn’t a simple on-off switch and many factors feed into how aggressive an animal is. For example, many animals become less aggressive after losing a fight against another individual and are therefore more likely to avoid or lose fights in the future (the ‘loser effect’). On the other hand, winning a fight can have the opposite effect: the individual can become more aggressive, self-assured and more likely to win fights in the future (the ‘winner effect’).....

First of all, I’m writing about how adult ADHD feels in my personal experience. As such, there’s a chance that none of what I say will sound familiar to others with ADHD. Or it might all sound familiar. But given how helpful it’s been to me to read about other people’s ADHD experiences, I figure it can’t really hurt to add my perspective. Drop in the ocean. Pointless, yet possibly not......

On the afternoon of January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from New York’s La Guardia Airport bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. Several minutes after taking off, the aircraft’s engines met with a flock of Canada geese. In airplane parlance, it’s called a “bird strike,” and the Airbus A320 hit enough birds to take out both of its jet engines. After realizing that the plane was unable to land at LaGuardia or nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, the plane’s crew decided that the safest thing would be to land in the Hudson River near midtown Manhattan. All 150 passengers and 5 crewmembers survived the crash, but the birds were (obviously) not so lucky........

Every spring in the Sonoran Desert a new crop of gardeners ponders the mystery. Someone or something is leaving the foliage of flowering plants in a lacy tatter. Perfect semicircles are cut from the leaves of blue plumbago, yellow bells, bouganvillea and others. Some leaves have more than one missing piece. According to Pima County Extension Master Gardener, Ted Cline, the culprit is the leafcutter bee. Unlike the honeybee that originally came from Europe and now often interbreeds with aggressive African bees, the leafcutter bee is a native species. This small bee doesn’t live in a hive like the honeybee......

Last summer I published the weirdest paper of my career. It’s called “On whimsy, jokes, and beauty: can scientific writing be enjoyed?”, and it asks whether humour and beauty are possible, and advisable, in scientific writing. (If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because I mentioned it here). I want to explain how I came to write and publish the paper. This is not entirely self-indulgent: I think story reveals some interesting things about us as scientists and about our publishing system. Bear with me and I’ll get to that......