News for Nerds - February 17, 2012
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- 2/17/2012 |
- 10:00 am
Welcome back to another edition of News for Nerds! This week we'll look at why Adele's music makes us cry, how to tell if someone's lying to you online, and what your heartbeat has to do with your Twitter password. But first: we're gonna need a bigger boat.
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Piranhas are fierce, destructive creatures. Native to South America, they use teeth as sharp as kitchen knives to eat just about everything they come into contact with.
Everything, that is, except the mysterious fish called the arapaima. The arapaima is a pretty unusual animal to begin with -- a relic of evolutionary history, it still has lungs and needs to come to the water's surface to breathe air like you or I would. But even beyond that, it is immune to the attacks of piranhas. What gives?
Turns out the answer lies in the scales that line its body. Those scales are black-and-white and can grow to about 10 centimeters in length. But the key isn't the color or the length -- it's the material. A study conducted by a mechanical engineer at UC-San Diego has shown that the arapaima's scales are double-layered. On the inside is mostly squishy collagen, like the kind found in our own joints and bones. But on the outside: a harder form of collagen, cemented together by calcium. As a result, any attempt by piranhas to bite the arapaima can cause the attacker's teeth to shatter.
And why is this important? Ah, because scientists think they can someday mimic these materials in order to create super-duper lightweight body armor. As the article states: "Soldiers could charge into battle wearing fish scales."
Now that's cool.
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Whatever you do, don't let that last story keep you up at night. You need your sleep. No, really. You need your sleep.
Emerging research has shown that people who suffer from disrupted sleep are more likely to have memory problems, and possibly even Alzheimer's, later in life. This can be traced back to a high buildup of amyloid plaques, which are sticky clumps of protein that sometimes build up in the brain.
One study tested the sleep patterns of 100 people aged 45 to 80. They found that people who wake up frequently during the night, or who spent less than 85% of their time in bed sleeping, were more likely to have amyloid plaque buildup.
More research is needed, but the study's co-author says that this initial breakthrough "lays the groundwork for investigating whether manipulating sleep is a possible strategy in the prevention or slowing of Alzheimer's disease."
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Okay, show of hands: how many of you have had your passwords compromised and your accounts, like email or Facebook, hacked?
There are a lot of helpful suggestions out there for how best to secure your online life, but one forthcoming technology may make all of that obsolete.
According to this story in New Scientist, an encryption system that uses the unique pattern of your heartbeat as a 'secret key' could someday be used to make a hard drive that can only be decrypted in response to your specific touch.
Experts tell us that our heartbeats follow an irregular pattern that is completely unique, and that never quite repeats.Using an electrocardiograph (ECG), scientists in Taiwan have extracted the mathematical features that underly these patterns. That information can then be used to generate a secret key that forms part of an encryption scheme based on the high-concept math behind chaos theory.
There's no timeline yet for when we might actually see this, but the possibilities are intriguing.
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How do you spot a liar? According to researchers from UW-Madison and Cornell, there are linguistic clues that might help identify someone who is being, um, less-than-truthful. (Or, to quote a character from the movie State and Main: "It's not a lie, it's a gift for fiction.")
The UW/Cornell research focused on the area of online dating, which is notoriously rife with fabrications. They compared the actual height, weight and age of 78 online daters against their stated metrics and profile pictures. The findings showed that by using language indicators, it's possible to spot a liar about 65% of the time -- a much higher percentage than the average, which is about 50%.
You'll have to read the full story from Forbes to get a more complete picture, but one of the more interesting 'tells' is that liars tend to use the pronoun "I" much less. Experts say this is a way of distancing themselves from their deceptive statements.
And if you're wondering what people on dating sites are most likely to lie about, you can probably guess: their weight. Women tend to fudge their weight by about 8.5 pounds, and men by about 2 pounds. Half of this study's participants also lied about their height, nearly 20 percent changed their age, and 130% of men were found to be dishonest when asked, "Do these pants make my butt look big?"
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And finally, we get to the bottom of the question: what makes sad music... you know, sad?
In recent weeks, both The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal have weighed in on this topic. The Journal, in particular, got serious about the issue. They brought in a team of music professors, psychologists and neuroscientists, and what they found is that there is a specific formula for a tearjerker like Adele's 'Someone Like You'.
The songs that bring out the most melancholy of emotions in us tend to have a few things in common. They start off very softly and gradually become louder; they feature the "abrupt entrance of a new voice," such as a harmony or a new instrument; they involve an expansion of the frequencies played; and they contain unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony.
So there you have it. Now go out and write a song that will break the hearts of millions and win you six Grammys. No pressure.
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That's all for now! I'll be back with more News for Nerds next week, but be sure to follow me on Facebook and Twitter, and to sign up for the free e-Newsletter so that you can properly get your nerd on every single month! And please send any juicy News for Nerds tips to me right here!
