Discover Magazine | Senses

How Did LEGO Become More About Limits Than Possibilities?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:30:00 -0500

No matter what you do with it, it'll still look like Hogwarts.

Rip open that new LEGO set and your mind races at the possibilities! A simple repertoire of piece types, and yet you can build a ninja boat, a three-wheeled race car, a pineapple pizza, a spotted lion… The possibilities are limited only by your creativity and imagination. “Combine and create!”—that was the implicit war cry for LEGOs.

So how, I wonder, did LEGO so severely lose its way? LEGO now fills the niche that model airplanes once did when I was a kid, an activity whose motto would be better described as “Follow the instructions!” The sets kids receive as gifts today are replete with made-to-order piece types special to each set, useful in one particular spot, and often useless elsewhere. And the sets are designed for constructing some particular thing (a Geonosian Starfighter, a Triceratops Trapper, etc.), and you—the parent—can look forward to spending hours helping them through the thorough yet thoroughly exhausting pages.

LEGO appears to be doing very well for itself, and there’s no shame in helping to revolutionize model-building (and there’s an elegance to snapping together one’s models rather than gluing them together). But one has to wonder whether, at some deep philosophical level, the new LEGOs really are LEGOs at all, as they’re no longer the paragon of creative construction they once were and with which they’re still associated.

In fact, as I was bemoaning my kids’ LEGOs with the Guardian's Roger Highfield (and later with WIRED's Samuel Arbesman), it struck me that I have such data on LEGOs...

Big Idea: Seeing Crime Before It Happens

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:00:00 -0500

This past summer, at an undisclosed location in a northeastern metropolis, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was trying to predict the future. There were no psychics or crystal balls, just a battery of sensors designed to determine human intention through the subtlest of changes in heart rate, gaze, and other physiological markers.

Together, the sensors are called Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST, a $20 million federal project that aims to highlight airport passengers whose bodies betray hostile intentions. In theory, fast has the potential to detect terrorists in the final minutes before they act, but critics warn that the system may have other consequences, such as flagging innocent travelers through false positives while letting some with ill intent sneak by through false negatives. The DHS, for its part, maintains that fast is merely improving on a far older and more fallible crime predictor: human judgment.

About 3,000 DHS officers already roam the nation’s airports scanning for suspicious behavior and facial expressions in a program called Screening of Passengers by Observational Techniques, or SPOT. The automated fast system is intended to supplement SPOT by catching signals that are undetectable to the naked eye. fast is not designed to replace the decision-making of human screeners, but government officials hope it will eventually be able to passively scan airport passengers and single out those worth pulling aside for additional screening...

Impatient Futurist: Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Teaching well is hard. i can cite my direct observations of the hundreds of victims of my occasional efforts over the years as a teacher of physics and writing. As I have stood lecturing brilliantly to a few dozen purportedly eager collegians, it has not escaped my attention that at any one time only three or four seem awake enough to keep up with their text messaging.

Clearly the problem is not the content or presentation style of my lecturing, which, as I may have neglected to mention, is brilliant, or so I was once assured by a student who stayed after class to ask for a sixth extension on an assignment. Then again, from what I recall of my college days, I wasn’t exactly on the edge of my seat at my professors’ lectures, either. And most of my fellow lecturers don’t report much different. Could the problem be with the nature of lecturing itself?

To find some answers, I posed this question directly to Carl Wieman, associate director for science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. Wieman, to be blunt, knows zero. In fact, he won a Nobel Prize for his extraordinarily low achievement. During the mid-1990s in a University of Colorado physics lab, Wieman enlisted lasers to bring matter as close to absolute zero as anyone is likely to get—a temperature so low that atoms freeze together into quantum-mechanical clouds predicted by Einstein but never before observed. “That was challenging,” Wieman says. “But changing how people teach, that’s really hard.”

Wieman should know. Aside from having captained his share of undergraduate physics-for-poets courses, Wieman is now, in a sense, America’s First Science Teacher, in that President Obama took him on last year with the assignment of improving science education in America.

It’s no secret we’ve got some work to do along those lines. A widely accepted standardized test administered in 2009 to large samplings of high school students in industrialized countries found that U.S. students scored 23rd in science, with students from China scoring highest...

Mind Over Motor: Controlling Robots With Your Thoughts

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:20:00 -0500

Over recent months, in José del R. Millán’s computer science lab in Switzerland, a little round robot, similar to a Roomba with a laptop mounted on it (right), bumped its way through an office space filled with furniture and people. Nothing special, except the robot was being controlled from a clinic more than 60 miles away—and not with a joystick or keyboard, but with the brain waves of a paralyzed patient.

The robot’s journey was an experiment in shared control, a type of brain-machine interface that merges conscious thought and algorithms to give disabled patients finer mental control over devices that help them communicate or retrieve objects. If the user experiences a mental misfire, Millán’s software can step in to help. Instead of crashing down the stairs, for instance, the robot would recalculate to find the door...

Image courtesy of José Millán

The Brain: Sewing Audio to Video, and Rubber Hands Onto People

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:05:00 -0500

I don’t usually stream Netflix onto my television to probe the  inner workings of my mind, but it had that effect not long ago.  While I was catching an old episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the actors’ voices lagged a fraction of a second behind the movement  of their mouths, making me so disoriented it completely ruined the show. Soon my irritation turned to puzzlement, and some self-observation allowed me to track my frustration to a precise source. I didn’t care that the ominous soundtrack rose half a second late when Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe crept into the subway tunnel where they  were about to find a body. I didn’t care that the show’s trademark duh-dung! sound marking a new scene was still duh-dung-ing after the scene started. It was only when people talked that I went batty. I would watch the characters speak, and then I’d switch to listening to them, and then I’d watch them speak again. I just couldn’t meld the two streams of information in my head.

Thanks to Netflix, I was confronted with one of the most crucial tricks that the human brain uses to make sense of the world: combining input from all five senses into a single, coherent experience, updated many times a second in virtually real time. Because the techniques our brains use to meld the senses are far from perfect, it turns out, we can fall prey to a variety of illusions—and to maddening confusion when Netflix delivers audio and video out of sync.

One of the most famous such illusions is known as the McGurk Effect, named for its discoverer, Harry McGurk, a developmental psychologist at the University of Surrey in England. In the 1970s he filmed people repeatedly making the sound ga. Then he had a new audio track laid over the film so that ga was replaced with the sound ba. The new audio and video were perfectly in sync. Many people who watched the movie were sure that the speakers were actually saying da, a different syllable entirely. If they closed their eyes, they heard the correct ba. When they opened their eyes, it became da again. (If you don’t know about the McGurk Effect, you may want to experience it via this very impressive video)...

Big Idea: How Pot, Cocaine, and Hunger Intersect in the Brain

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:45:00 -0500

In June 2006 pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis began selling a new weight-loss drug called rimonabant in Europe. Rimonabant worked in part by reducing appetite, and the company claimed it could also treat addiction, harmful cholesterol, and diabetes. Lab tests even suggested the drug produced healthier sperm. But within six months, the company had received more than 900 reports of nausea, depression, and other side effects.

By the following summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had rejected rimonabant, noting that relative to a placebo, patients taking it were twice as likely to contemplate, plan, or attempt suicide. The European Medicines Agency soon asked Sanofi-Aventis to address the safety concerns, and on December 5, 2008, the company pulled the drug off the European market.

Rimonabant was a spectacular flop, and yet its lure today is stronger than ever. Researchers worldwide are pursuing novel drugs aimed at the exact same target: the endocannabinoid system, an elaborate network of receptors and proteins that operate within the brain, heart, gut, liver, and throughout the central nervous system. For drug designers, the system’s powerful role in regulating cravings, mood, pain, and memory makes it a tantalizing target. The challenge now is finding sharper, more refined ways to manipulate it without causing the sort of debilitating side effects that derailed rimonabant. “The system is very, very widespread and very effective at a variety of levels,” says neuroscientist Keith Sharkey, who studies the role of endocannabinoids in the gut at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. “It seems to be very important in the body, which is a concern when you develop drugs for it because you will get a range of effects”...

Discover Interview: The Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:25:00 -0500

John Soars/Wikimedia Commons

For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, a young linguistics professor gave a legendary presentation at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imitation, children are born with the innate capacity to master language, a power imbued in our species by evolution itself. Almost overnight, linguists’ thinking began to shift.

Chomsky also bucked against scientific tradition by becoming active in politics. He was an outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam and helped organize the famous 1967 protest march on the Pentagon. When the leaders of the march were arrested, he found himself sharing a cell with Norman Mailer, who described him in his book Armies of the Night as “a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”

Chomsky discussed his ideas with Connecticut journalist Marion Long after numerous canceled interviews. “It was a very difficult situation,” Long says. “Chomsky’s wife was gravely ill, and he was her caretaker. She died about 10 days before I spoke with him. It was Chomsky’s first day back doing interviews, but he wanted to go through with it.” Later, he gave even more time to DISCOVER reporter Valerie Ross, answering her questions from his storied MIT office right up to the moment he dashed off to catch a plane.

You describe human language as a unique trait. What sets us apart? 
Humans are different from other creatures, and every human is basically identical in this respect. If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa. This unique human possession, which we hold in common, is at the core of a large part of our culture and our imaginative intellectual life. That’s how we form plans, do creative art, and develop complex societies...

The Brain: Maybe You Do Need a Hole in Your Head—to Let the Medicine In

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:25:00 -0500

Neuroscientists these days regularly make spectacular discoveries about how the brain gets sick. They know much more today about brain cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and a host of other neurological disorders than they did just a few years ago. And from such discoveries come all sorts of encouraging possibilities for treating or even curing these diseases. If  only we could break down some rogue protein or bind a drug to  a troublesome receptor, it seems as if all would be well. There’s just one little hitch: Even if scientists invented the perfect cure, they  probably couldn’t get it into the brain to do its work.

Drugs can cross easily out of the bloodstream into most organs of the body. The brain is a glaring exception because it is protected by an intricate shield known as the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier serves a vital function: It keeps our brains free for the most part from infections or toxins that find their way into other parts of the body. Unfortunately, the brain’s barrier also gets in the way of most medicines that could help heal it. Neurologists sometimes open up the skull and inject drugs directly. That brute-force approach can work in an emergency, but it is hardly a practical solution for people who need to take drugs every day at home.

There is reason for hope that the blood-brain barrier will not block medicine’s path forever, though. Some scientists are working on ways to penetrate it—either by sneaking drugs through the barrier or by temporarily opening channels through which the drugs can pass...

How to Fix Our Most Vexing Problems, From Mosquitoes to Potholes to Missing Corpses

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:35:00 -0500

Researchers have spent three decades trying to solve the riddle of HIV, an endeavor that infectious disease expert David Margolis calls “as difficult as inventing a warp drive to travel to other stars.” A total AIDS cure is still not quite here, but researchers are getting remarkably close—and the quest has upended our understanding of the immune system and laid the groundwork for solutions to hundreds of other diseases. This process repeats again and again: Cures rarely happen with a flash of brilliance and cries of eureka, but their methodical unfolding fuels the dreams and enterprise of science. In this way, the world’s endless supply of problems becomes a valuable resource.

The list of ailments ripe for better treatments stretches far beyond AIDS, even far beyond medicine: traffic jams, radioactive fallout, and unsolved murders, to name a few. We all have someone or something we would like to cure, and big universities aren’t the only ones leading the charge. These days a growing do-it-yourself movement seeks solutions in garages and community labs. The only thing really needed to solve problems is tenacity. “When a scientist gets an idea in his head, he won’t stop until it’s tested,” says Robert Sabin, one of the leading DIYers.  “Scientists are possessed by their ideas.”

Aliment: Mosquitos
Cure: Chemical Invisibility Cloak

Since the 1940s the leading defense against mosquitoes has been the chemical  repellent DEET, but unless you remember to spritz yourself with it every few hours, you will eventually get chomped. Entomologist Anandasankar Ray and colleagues at the University of California, Riverside, aim to do better with bug sprays intended for bugs, not people. They are developing a set of chemicals that disrupt the mosquito’s sense of smell, effectively blinding the insects to humans.

Ray started with 50 compounds thought to disrupt the ability of mosquito olfactory sensors to detect carbon dioxide, the telltale sign of a living, breathing blood meal. He then turned the tables and jabbed the mosquitoes, inserting tiny electrodes into their sensors. One chemical, 2-butanone, acted as a carbon dioxide imitator, which could be exploited to lure the bloodsuckers. Another, butanal, prevented the co2 sensors from working, while 2,3-butanedione functioned as a blinder, flooding mosquitoes’ sensors with signals, thereby rendering them useless.

Ray has since teamed up with a group of investors to found OlFactor Labs, based in Southern California, to develop commercial mosquito deterrents...

When Good Tweets Go Bad

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:20:00 -0500

Songbirds may follow strict grammatical rules when they communicate.

Language seems to set humans apart from other animals (see page 66), but scientists cannot just hand monkeys and birds an interspecies SAT to determine which linguistic abilities are singularly those of Homo sapiens and which we share with other animals. In August neuroscientists Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University announced that they had devised the next-best thing, a systematic test of birds’ grammatical prowess. The results suggest that Bengalese finches have strict rules of syntax: The order of their chirps matters. “It’s the first experiment to show that any animal has perceived the especially complex patterns that supposedly make human language unique,” says Timothy Gentner, who studies animal cognition and communication at the University of California, San Diego, and was not involved in the study...

Of Mice and Men and Medicines

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 08:50:00 -0400

You won’t find more mentally ill mice per square mile anywhere than in Bar Harbor, Maine. Mice who seem anxious or depressed, autistic or schizophrenic—they congregate here. Mice who model learning disabilities or anorexia; mice who hop around as though your hyperactive nephew had contracted into a tiny fur ball; they are here too. Name an affliction of the human mind, and you can probably find its avatar on this sprucy, secluded island.

The imbalanced mice are kept under the strictest security, in locked wards at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical facility internationally renowned for its specially bred deranged rodents. Every day trucks carry away boxes and boxes of them for distribution to psychiatric researchers across the nation.

There are no visiting hours, because strangers fluster the mice and might carry in contagious diseases. The animals are attended only by highly qualified caregivers, people like neuroscientist Elissa Chesler. Sitting in her airy Jackson Lab office, accessible to germy and perturbing strangers, Chesler clicks open a series of photographs from a type of mouse personality test on her computer screen. The first picture shows a mouse sleeping on a nestlet, a stiff, square bed of compressed cotton. Mice typically gnaw vigorously at the cotton, shredding it to make soft igloos for sleeping and staying warm. The second image shows a mouse that has propped his nestlet against a wall, forming a makeshift lean-to. “When I see this guy, I’m thinking anxiety,” says Chesler, whose research delves into the genetics of stress. “This design isn’t trapping a lot of heat, but he’s secure under there.”

She smiles as she clicks open the last photo. “And here we have the ‘I can’t deal with it’ mouse,” she says. The image shows a mouse asleep, with his rigid nestlet balanced on his back. Personality, Chesler maintains, can be read from these nestlet styles more clearly than from a test of forced swimming or bar pressing...

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Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:30:00 -0400

Only a tiny fraction of the brain is dedicated to conscious behavior. The rest works feverishly behind the scenes regulating everything from breathing to mate selection. In fact, neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine argues that the unconscious workings of the brain are so crucial to everyday functioning that their influence often trumps conscious thought. To prove it, he explores little-known historical episodes, the latest psychological research, and enduring medical mysteries, revealing the bizarre and often inexplicable mechanisms underlying daily life.

Eagleman’s theory is epitomized by the deathbed confession of the 19th-century mathematician James Clerk Maxwell, who developed fundamental equations unifying electricity and magnetism. Maxwell declared that “something within him” had made the discoveries; he actually had no idea how he’d achieved his great insights. It is easy to take credit after an idea strikes you, but in fact, neurons in your brain secretly perform an enormous amount of work before inspiration hits. The brain, Eagleman argues, runs its show incognito. Or, as Pink Floyd put it, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

There is a looming chasm between what your brain knows and what your mind is capable of accessing. Consider the simple act of changing lanes while driving a car. Try this: Close your eyes, grip an imaginary steering wheel, and go through the motions of a lane change. Imagine that you are driving in the left lane and you would like to move over to the right lane. Before reading on, actually try it. I’ll give you 100 points if you can do it correctly.

It’s a fairly easy task, right? I’m guessing that you held the steering wheel straight, then banked it over to the right for a moment, and then straightened it out again. No problem.

Like almost everyone else, you got it completely wrong...

Image: iStockphoto

Eyes Are the Windows to the Soul; Skin Is a Window to the Brain

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:55:00 -0400

Some might call skin the unsung hero of organs. It provides waterproofing, mediates sensation, guards against germs, and—as if that’s not enough—now researchers believe it may serve as a valuable repository of brain cells.

Last spring, scientists at the Salk Institute in California announced the creation of a technique for transforming simple skin cells scraped from patients with schizophrenia into functional neurons, a major step toward more personalized, noninvasive approaches to drug testing. “Psychiatrists give patients first line, second line, third line drugs, hoping that one will work,” says Salk neuroscientist Fred Gage, who led the research. Pre-screening drugs on patient-derived cells could increase the odds of picking the right drug from the beginning...

The Brain: The Language Fossils Buried in Every Cell of Your Body

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:25:00 -0400

It is a shame that grammar leaves no fossils behind. Few things have been more important to our evolutionary history than language. Because our ancestors could talk to each other, they became a powerfully cooperative species. In modern society we are so submerged in words—spoken, written, signed, and texted—that they seem inseparable from human identity. And yet we cannot excavate some fossil from an Ethiopian hillside, point to a bone, and declare, “This is where language began.”

Lacking hard evidence, scholars of the past speculated broadly about the origin of language. Some claimed that it started out as cries of pain, which gradually crystallized into distinct words. Others traced it back to music, to the imitation of animal grunts, or to birdsong. In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris got so exasperated by these unmoored musings that it banned all communication on the origin of language. Its English counterpart felt the same way. In 1873 the president of the Philological Society of London declared that linguists “shall do more by tracing the historical growth of one single work-a-day tongue, than by filling wastepaper baskets with reams of paper covered with speculations on the origin of all tongues.”

A century passed before linguists had a serious change of heart. The change came as they began to look at the deep structure of language itself. MIT linguist Noam Chomsky asserted that the way children acquire language is so effortless that it must have a biological foundation. Building on this idea, some of his colleagues argued that language is an adaptation shaped by natural selection, just like eyes and wings. If so, it should be possible to find clues about how human language evolved from grunts or gestures by observing the communication of our close primate relatives.

This line of thinking raised an exciting possibility: Perhaps language left a fossil record after all—not in buried bones, but in our DNA. Yet for years biologists could not find a single gene involved in language...

How I Became a Master of Memory

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:20:00 -0400

Before he became an elite “mental athlete,” journalist Joshua Foer traveled to Oxford University in 2005 to report on the World Memory Championships for DISCOVER. There he watched contestants memorize ridiculously long strings of random digits, the names and faces of hundreds of strangers, and line after line of bad poetry. Most of the top memorizers, Foer realized then, rely on the same technique: building a “memory palace” in their mind’s eye and populating it with absurd but distinctive images that they can associate with the number or word that must be recalled. Inspired, he spent a year mastering the technique and exploring the meaning of memory for a book, Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. As his narrative makes clear, he became more than just a reporter. In front of a stunned audience at the next year’s U.S.A. Memory Championship, held in New York City, Foer memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards in 1 minute 40 seconds, then a U.S. record, and went on to win the event. 

Photo credit: Emil Salman/Haaretz

The U.S.A. Memory Champion turns out to be a minor (OK, very minor) celebrity. All of a sudden, Ellen DeGeneres wanted to talk to  me, and Good Morning America and the Today show were calling  to ask if I’d memorize a deck of cards on the air. ESPN wanted to know if I’d learn the NCAA tournament brackets for one of its morning shows. Everyone wanted to see the monkey perform his tricks.

But the biggest shock of my newfound stardom (or loserdom, depending on your perspective, I suppose) was that I was now the official representative of all 300 million citizens of the United States of America to the World Memory Championships. This was not a position I had ever expected to be in. At no point during my training did it ever occur to me that I might someday go head-to-head with the superheroes of memory I had initially set out to write about. In all my hours of training, I hardly ever thought to compare my practice scores with theirs. I was a beer league softball right fielder; they were the New York Yankees...

What You Don't Know Can Kill You

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:50:00 -0400

Last march, as the world watched the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear near-meltdown, a curious thing began happening in West Coast pharmacies. Bottles of potassium iodide pills used to treat certain thyroid conditions were flying off the shelves, creating a run on an otherwise obscure nutritional supplement. Online, prices jumped from $10 a bottle to upwards of $200. Some residents in California, unable to get the iodide pills, began bingeing on seaweed, which is known to have high iodine levels.

The Fukushima disaster was practically an infomercial for iodide therapy. The chemical is administered after nuclear exposure because it helps protect the thyroid from radioactive iodine, one of the most dangerous elements of nuclear fallout. Typically, iodide treatment is recommended for residents within a 10-mile radius of a radiation leak. But people in the United States who were popping pills were at least 5,000 miles away from the Japanese reactors. Experts at the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the dose of radiation that reached the western United States was equivalent to 1/100,000 the exposure one would get from a round-trip international flight.

We like to think that humans are supremely logical, making decisions on the basis of hard data and not on whim. For a good part of the 19th and 20th centuries, economists and social scientists assumed this was true too. The public, they believed, would make rational decisions if only it had the right pie chart or statistical table. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that vision of homo economicus—a person who acts in his or her best interest when given accurate information—was kneecapped by researchers investigating the emerging field of risk perception. What they found, and what they have continued teasing out since the early 1970s, is that humans have a hell of a time accurately gauging risk. Not only do we have two different systems—logic and instinct, or the head and the gut—that sometimes give us conflicting advice, but we are also at the mercy of deep-seated emotional associations and mental shortcuts...

Illustration: ILOVEDUST.

5 Things That Internet Porn Reveals About Our Brains

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:00:00 -0400

With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity,  the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world’s largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953.

Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa—a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world—Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.

LESSON ONE: Age is important, but youth is not the only attractor

The most influential male cue of all is chronological. Age dominates sexual searches, adult Web site content, and pornographic videos. On Dogpile, terms describing age are the most frequent type of adjective in sexual searches, appearing in one out of every six of them. When a man’s desire software evaluates a woman’s appearance, one of the most prominent criteria is age—and not just youth, either. Many sexual searches on Dogpile contain specific ages, such as “naked 25-year-olds” or “sexy 40-year-olds.” Though the popularity of adult women doesn’t quite reach that of teens, it is worth observing that more men search for 50-year-olds than search for 19-year-olds. There is a rather shocking number of searches for underage women, but you may be equally surprised to discover there is significant erotic interest in 60- and 70-year-olds. At one high-traffic porn site, the single most popular term users enter into the search engine is mom. On AOL, one out of four people who searched for sexually attractive mothers (MILFs) also searched for teens. Though the total number of granny searches amounts to less than 8 percent of the total youth searches, there are more sexual searches for grannies than for some common fetishes like spanking...

The Vexing Mental Tug-of-War Called Morality

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:25:00 -0400

You arrive at the hill early, eager to cheer the cyclists racing past. the sun is bright, the people on both sides of the road are in high spirits, and speculation about the race passes through the crowd in waves. A hot dog vendor has positioned his cart up the hill, and the aroma of simmering meat wafts by, summoning your best memories of summer. Suddenly shouts erupt. The racers are approaching. You lean forward and see a blur of colors at the summit. Then you notice something wrong. The hot dog vendor has stepped away to make change, and someone has jostled his cart off its moorings. It is rolling downhill toward the road, gathering speed, and poised to kill dozens of cyclists unless someone shoves the cart across the road—but that would kill three spectators instead. What should one do?

When researchers presented this nightmarish dilemma to volunteers participating in an innovative neuropsychology study of morality at Harvard’s Moral Cognition Lab last year, the responses were evenly split. After moments of mental calculus, half the participants said the most moral decision was to push the cart into the bystanders; the other half disagreed, saying that killing for any reason was wrong, even if it meant saving more lives in the end.

One day last year, cognitive scientists Joshua Greene and Fiery Cushman, who designed the study, pulled up a series of brain scans taken as volunteers resolved the dilemma while inside an MRI machine. The scans were all marked by ghostly yellow blobs indicating areas of increased blood oxygen levels at the moment of judgment, Cushman explained. All decision-making takes mental energy, so no surprise there. More intriguing were the scans from the volunteers who opted to save more lives. These showed noticeably brighter regions of yellow, suggesting that their decisions demanded significantly more brain power. To Greene and Cushman, it appeared that reason was overriding an automatic, instinctual response...

Image: Matt Mahurin.

The Brain: "I See," Said the Blind Man With an Artificial Retina

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:50:00 -0400

For 100 million people around the globe who suffer from macular degeneration and other diseases of the retina, life is a steady march from light into darkness. Until recently some types of retinal degeneration seemed as inevitable as the wrinkling of skin or the graying of hair—only far more terrifying and debilitating. But recent studies offer hope that eventually the darkness may be lifted. Some scientists are trying to inject signaling molecules into the eye to stimulate light-collecting photoreceptor cells to regrow. Others want to deliver working copies of broken genes into retinal cells, restoring their function. And a number of researchers are taking a fundamentally different, technology-driven approach to fighting blindness. They seek not to fix biology but to replace it, by plugging cameras into people’s eyes...

Image: human retina. Source: iStockphoto.

How Information Became a Thing, and All Things Became Information

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:35:00 -0400

The puzzle of information packing—how to cram knowledge into the tiniest space possible—has fueled technological development at least since the emergence of Chinese letters 8,000 years ago. In his new book, The Information, journalist James Gleick argues that information is “the blood and the fuel, the vital principle” of our lives. Delving deep into the history behind today’s data-driven world, Gleick explores the mysterious drumming language of the African talking drum, whose irregular rhythms carried messages through the jungles of the Congo. He considers musical compositions like Johann Sebastian Bach’s 18th-century “Well-Tempered Clavier” as data streams that could capture sounds as varied as wind, cricket chirps, or the clatter of a horse-drawn cart. But for Gleick the pivotal moment initiating our data-drenched era came in 1948, when mathematician Claude Shannon conceived of the bit as a unit of information. Shannon’s work propelled us headlong into the flood of blogs, emails, tweets, and news updates that shape our lives today.

In 1948 the Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of a tiny electronic semiconductor, “an amazingly simple device” that could do anything a vacuum tube could do and more efficiently. It was a crystalline sliver, so small that 100 would fit in the palm of a hand. In May scientists formed a committee to come up with a name. Transistor won out. “It may have far-reaching significance in electronics and electrical communication,” Bell Labs declared in a press release, and for once the reality surpassed the hype. The transistor sparked the revolution in electronics, setting the technology on its path of miniaturization and ubiquity. But it was only the second-most significant development of that year. The transistor was only hardware.

An invention even more profound and more fundamental came in a monograph spread across 79 pages of The Bell System Technical  Journal in July and October. No one bothered with a press release...

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