FieldNotes: Hallucigenia is back on its head again.

Ancient mystery worm found to have surprise eyes and teeth by Hannah Devlin at Guardian:

Nature has produced many oddities, but an ancient creature resembling a prickly sea worm is one of the few to have left scientists so baffled they were unable to distinguish its head from its the rear. The organism, called Hallucigenia sparsa, was once one of the world’s most common creatures, but its unearthly appearance has led it to be regarded as an evolutionary misfit - not least because this basic anatomical question has remained unresolved. Now the discovery of a pair of simple eyes and a ring of needle-like teeth, has finally confirmed which way around the animal faced. ....

What Killer Whales Can Teach Us -- It Might Surprise You by David Neiwert at AlterNet:

Orcas live a dream of man. They soar effortlessly, free of gravity, like birds or fairies through the air, gliding above the landscape and observing it from far above. Men have had this dream for as long as they have dreamed. It is why one of their greatest inventions is a machine that lets them fly. It is why, when we create a mythological ideal of a human and call him Superman, one of his chief attributes is that he can fly with grace and ease, as though gravity does not exist for him. That describes the ethereal daily life of killer whales: gliding sylphlike through their element, their large pectoral fins spread like wings, soaring above the canyons and cliffs of the ocean floor, swooping and diving weightlessly at their leisure, with intelligent minds that rule over all they survey.......

Does faster-than-light travel lead to a grandfather paradox? by Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction:

........While it’s hard to see what conspiracy would prevent you from killing your grandpa, it is fairly easy to see that closing the loop backwards in time is prevented by the known laws of physics. We age because entropy increases. It increases in some direction that we can, for lack of a better word, call “forward” in time. This entropy increase is ultimately correlated with decoherence and thus probably also with the restframe of the microwave background, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter so much exactly in which direction it increases, just that it increases in some direction. ......

Will Humans Survive the Sixth Great Extinction? by Nadia Drake at National Geographic:

In the last half-billion years, life on Earth has been nearly wiped out five times—by such things as climate change, an intense ice age, volcanoes, and that space rock that smashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, obliterating the dinosaurs and a bunch of other species. These events are known as the Big Five mass extinctions, and all signs suggest we are now on the precipice of a sixth. Except this time, we have no one but ourselves to blame......

Neuroscience: The hard science of oxytocin by Helen Shen at Nature News & Comment:

In April 2011, Robert Froemke and his team were reprogramming the brains of virgin mice with a single hormone injection. Before the treatment, the female mice were largely indifferent to the cries of a distressed baby, and were even known to trample over them. But after an injection of oxytocin, the mice started to respond more like mothers, picking up the mewling pup in their mouths. Froemke, a neuroscientist at New York University's Langone Medical Center in New York City, was monitoring the animals' brains to find out why that happened......

Is The Fish Kick the Fastest Swim Stroke Yet? by Regan Penaluna at Nautilus:

I tug my black swim cap over my hair, strap on my pink goggles, and keep a focused calm, like Michael Phelps before a race. It’s lap swim on a Monday afternoon at my local YMCA, and I’m going to attempt the fish kick. Most fish move through the water with a horizontal wiggle. The fish kick challenges you to copy this movement: You completely submerge yourself underwater, position yourself on your side, keep your arms tight above your head in a streamline, and propel yourself forward with symmetrical undulations. After decades of swimming, some of it at the competitive level, I think I might have a shot. Pushing off the wall, and after what I can only describe as a struggle, the water resists my forward motion and I float to the surface, not unlike a dead fish. .....

Big Question: Can My Brain Get Too Full? by Danielle Venton at Wired:

You remember your first kiss. You remember your childhood phone number, where you parked your car, and the last time you got really drunk. You probably remember the digits of pi, or at least the first three of them (slacker). Each day you accumulate fresh memories—kissing new people, acquiring different phone numbers and (possibly) competing in pi-memorizing championships (we would root for you). With all those new adventures stacking up, you might start worrying that your brain is growing full. But, wait—is that how it works? Can your brain run out of space, like a hard drive? It depends on what kind of memory you’re talking about......

Leader of the pack: fleshing out Velociraptor behaviour in Jurassic World by Zen Faulkes at NeuroDojo:

...........For some reason, when Michael Crichton wrote the book Jurassic Park, he took that idea of Deinonychus as pack hunters and applied it to velociraptors. I’m guessing that the reason he did this was so he could call them “raptors,” which people knew as birds of prey. Crichton was very big on emphasizing the relationships between birds and dinosaurs. It comes up over and over again in the book, and was carried through to the movie. (When I rewatched Jurassic Park in the last month in preparation for Jurassic World, the “just like birds” didactic dialogue felt the most dated.)............

I once tried to cheat sleep, and for a year I succeeded by Akshat Rathi at Quartz:

In the summer of 2009, I was finishing the first—and toughest—year of my doctorate. To help me get through it, while I brewed chemicals in test tubes during the day, I was also planning a crazy experiment to cheat sleep. As any good scientist would, I referred to past studies, recorded data, and discussed notes with some of my colleagues. Although the sample size was just one—and, obviously, biased—I was going to end up learning a great deal about an activity that we spend nearly a third of our life doing. With looming deadlines and an upcoming thesis defense, I was determined to find more hours to fit in work and study. The answer came from reading about the famous American inventor Buckminster Fuller, who, Time reported in 1943, spent two years sleeping only two hours a day......

5,200 Days in Space by Charles Fishman at The Atlantic Monthly:

When humans move to space, we are the aliens, the extraterrestrials. And so, living in space, the oddness never quite goes away. Consider something as elemental as sleep. In 2009, with the expansive International Space Station nearing completion after more than a decade of orbital construction, astronauts finally installed some staterooms on the U.S. side—four private cubicles about the size of airplane lavatories. That’s where the NASA astronauts sleep, in a space where they can close a folding door and have a few hours of privacy and quiet, a few hours away from the radio, the video cameras, the instructions from Mission Control. Each cabin is upholstered in white quilted material and equipped with a sleeping bag tethered to an inside wall. When an astronaut is ready to sleep, he climbs into the sleeping bag......

More on the science of 'Inside Out':
Two philosophers explain what Inside Out gets wrong about the mind by Antonia Peacocke and Jackson Kernion at Vox:

Inside Out, the latest from Disney-Pixar, is an adventure into the great depths of the human mind. But it’s not set in the brain; it’s set in a fantasy world that represents the abstract structure of the mind by way of towering architecture and colorful landscaping. It’s an immensely clever concept, and makes for a funny and moving film. But it’s not how the mind actually works at all. This is obviously true in the literal sense. Real 11-year-old girls don’t have a gleaming control center staffed by five key emotions — Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and Joy, with Joy as captain of the ship — managing their moods and behaviors like Inside Out’s protagonist, Riley, does; the brain doesn’t store memories in glowing orbs before consigning them to the bottom of the cavernous Subconscious, where they eventually disintegrate into wisps of gray smoke. But the components of Riley’s mind don’t work well as metaphors for how real minds operate, either. Here are a few things about the mind that Inside Out gets, well — inside out........

Meet Inside Out’s Emotion Coach by Annie Minoff at Science Friday
Finding Sadness in Joy by Dan Kois at Slate
What ‘Inside Out,’ a film about feelings, gets right about the brain by Amy Ellis Nutt at To Your Health
The Curse of the Pixar Universe by Richard Brody at The New Yorker
Why The Key Character In 'Inside Out' Is The One Who Isn't There by Linda Holmes at Monkey See



And if that is not enough, more readings for later this weekend:
Rethinking Invasion by Jason G. Goldman at Hakai Magazine
Update: What's killing fin whales in Alaska? by Sarah Keartes at Earth Touch
So Apparently There Are 4 Kinds of Introversion by Melissa Dahl at Science of Us
Let's Quit It with the Introvert/Extrovert Nonsense by Thorin Klosowski at Lifehacker
How can life emerge from nonliving matter? UNC scientists find new evidence. by Joseph Dussault at The Christian Science Monitor
Commenters exposed to prejudiced comments more likely to display prejudice themselves at Lunatic Laboratories
Genetics: No more addictive personality by Maia Szalavitz at Nature | Outlook
Singing show tunes helps fight off dementia, Alzheimer's disease: study by David Harding at NY Daily News
Scientists film death of white blood cell for first time and discover alert system by Melissa Davey at Guardian




You’d Be Fine if You Ate the French Mutant Lamb by Danielle Venton at Wired
How Machine Vision Solved One of the Great Mysteries of 20th-Century Surrealist Art at MIT Technology Review
The Pain That Is Back Pain – Part One by Doctor Ramey at David Ramey, D.V.M.
Bugs on My Window by Helen Fields at The Last Word On Nothing
The Birth of Biodiversity by Neil Losin at National Geographic Voices - Explorers Journal
How The Turtle Got Its Shell by Nell Greenfieldboyce at The Two-Way
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head: A Mosquito’s Lament by Robert Krulwich at Curiously Krulwich
The Foods Americans Once Loved to Eat by Li Zhou at Smithsonian
Why looking at the light makes us sneeze by Jason G Goldman at BBC - Future
Headlines tout Jurassic World in offing but scientists, journalists separate fact from fiction by David Despain at Genetic Literacy Project
Hunting Dinosaurs on the American Prairie Reserve by Denver Fowler at Dinosaur Postcards
You Won’t Be Able To Recognize These Modern Animals Drawn Like Dinosaurs by Natasha Umer at BuzzFeed



How NASA Broke The Gender Barrier In STEM by Melissa Jun Rowley at Fast Company
What's Really Warming the World? Climate deniers blame natural factors; NASA data proves otherwise by Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi at Bloomberg
Blue-ringed octopus venom causes numbness, vomiting, suffocation, death by Megan Cartwright at Slate
It Coulda Been a Contender: A Paleontologist Reviews Jurassic World by Donald Prothero at Skeptic
Horses that heal: how equine therapy is helping people find peace of mind by Joshua Thaisen at The Guardian

Next up on physics curriculums: “Interstellar”/ by Adam Epstein at Quartz
Who ya callin’ bird brain? by Kiona Smith-Strickland at Washington Post
California passes pro-vaccine bill, protects children by Steven Salzberg at Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
Meet the Belgian Colt Born with Five Limbs by Carley Sparks at Horse Collaborative
Who Let The Climatedogs Out? Unleashing Creative Climate Communication by Kirk Englehardt at The Leap



Paleo diet? Science has moved on since the stone age by Tim Spector at The Conversation
Celebrating a Failure, That Really Was a Success by Kevin M. Folta at Illumination

Researchers Examine Horses' Social Statuses by Christa Lesté-Lasserre at The Horse
Why A Post-Nuclear World Would Look Nothing Like “Mad Max” by Brian Gallagher at Nautilus
Meal, Worm by Jennifer S. Holland at The Last Word On Nothing
Female Anoles Retain Responsiveness to Testosterone Despite the Evolution of Androgen-Mediated Sexual Dimorphism (Cox et al 2015) by Christian Cox at Anole Annals
Social Interactions by Victor Ros at Wild Equus
Pigs Are Much, Much Weirder Than You Ever Realized by Esther Inglis-Arkell at io9
Animal behaviour: Nested instincts by Lauren Gravitz at Nature | Outlook
Here’s a meaty question: Why are hippos pushing in on lion kills in South Africa? by Ian Dickinson at Earth Touch
Hold Your Zorses: The sad truth about animal hybrids. by Jason Bittel at Slate
Blind Men & Elephant parable by Victor Ros at Wild Equus
To predict what Earth will look like after the next mass extinction, look to the past by David Bond at Quartz

How Information Builds a Community by Krystal D'Costa at Anthropology in Practice
Snapping at “Alphas” and submission in horses by Victor Ros at Wild Equus
What makes a good model organism? How are models different from one another? by Joe Ballenger at Ask an Entomologist



Why there is no Genic Selection by Charles Goodnight at Evolution in Structured Populations
From Here to Eternity—The Theory and Practice of a Really Long Experiment by Jeremy W. Fox and Richard E. Lenski at PLOS Biology
Rivers of Noise by Craig Childs at The Last Word On Nothing




Previously in this series:
FieldNotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
FieldNotes: The Word For World is Blue (or is it Gold?)
FieldNotes: Golden Mean, polite middle-ground, and optimal numbers of legs.
FieldNotes: speeding up and slowing down time
FieldNotes: from Captain Ahab to Jeff Goldblum, chasing the giants
FieldNotes: this is not your grandparents' neuroscience!
FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.
FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
FieldNotes: one thing leads to another leads to another
FieldNotes: Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
FieldNotes: do African horses do flehmen at the sight of Derby hats?
FieldNotes: How The Bird Got Its Beak
FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...
FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for Bohannon's cheap stunts
FieldNotes: Water, fire, origin of life, origin of cooking.
FieldNotes: Jurassic World, and other strange animals...
FieldNotes: Honey Badger Don’t Care!




Images: Colour reconstruction of Hallucigenia sparsa. Photograph: Danielle Dufault/ Nature; Screenshot from 'Inside Out' by Pixar/Disney.



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