Anthropology posts
- May 15, 2013
- 05:59 PM
- 96 views
DNA analysis unearths origins of Minoans, the first major European civilization
by Perikis Livas in Tracing Knowledge
DNA analysis is unearthing the origins of the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established the first advanced Bronze Age civilization in present-day Crete. The findings suggest they arose from an ancestral Neolithic population that had arrived in the region about 4,000 years earlier.... Read more »
Stephanie Seiler. (2013) DNA analysis unearths origins of Minoans, the first major European civilization. The University of Washington. info:/
- May 14, 2013
- 07:30 AM
- 72 views
Learning About Life From Death in Akhenaten’s Egypt
by Katy Meyers in Bones Don't Lie
The city of Amarna was a 17 year period of change and drama in Egypt’s ancient history. It was established as the capital city of Egypt in 1353 BC during the late 18th dynasty by Pharaoh Akhenaten. He founded the city on virgin land in order to be ”seat of the First Occasion, which he had made … Continue reading »... Read more »
Barry Kemp, Anna Stevens, Gretchen R. Dabbs, Melissa Zabecki, & Jerome C. Rose. (2013) Life, death and beyond in Akhenaten’s Egypt: excavating the South Tombs Cemetery at Amarna. Antiquity, 64-78. info:/
- May 14, 2013
- 04:32 AM
- 82 views
Internationalization of Higher Education, 1933
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
While the internationalization of higher education is a hot topic at the moment and is widely seen as unique to the present, internationalization of higher education is not new. The politics of internationalization at Istanbul University in the early years … Continue reading →... Read more »
Ergin, M. (2009) Cultural encounters in the social sciences and humanities: western emigre scholars in Turkey. History of the Human Sciences, 22(1), 105-130. DOI: 10.1177/0952695108099137
- May 13, 2013
- 11:11 AM
- 107 views
How to Convince People WiFi Is Making Them Sick
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
All it takes is an antenna on a headband. If you've got a breathless video report on the dangers of wireless internet connections, that will help your case. It doesn't take much, though, to turn an ominous hint into a real headache.
Some people consider themselves sensitive to electromagnetic fields. They report symptoms such as burning skin, tingling, nausea, dizziness, or chest pain, and they blame their malaise on nearby power lines, cell phones, or WiFi networks. A recent Slate article described such people moving to a remote West Virginia town where radio-frequency signals are banned. (The town is within the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone, an area that's enforced to keep signals from interfering with radio telescopes there—telescopes that work because they receive the radio-frequency signals constantly hitting our planet from space.)
There's no known scientific reason why a wireless signal might cause physical harm. And studies have found that even people who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields can't actually sense them. Their symptoms are more likely due to nocebo, the evil twin of the placebo effect. The power of our expectation can cause real physical illness. In clinical drug trials, for example, subjects who take sugar pills report side effects ranging from an upset stomach to sexual dysfunction.
Psychologists Michael Witthöft and G. James Rubin of King's College London explored whether frightening TV reports can encourage a nocebo effect. They recruited a group of subjects and showed half of them a clip from a BBC documentary about the potential dangers of wireless internet. (The BBC later acknowledged that the 2007 program was "misleading.") The remaining subjects watched a video about the security of data transmissions over mobile phones.
After watching the videos, subjects put on headband-mounted antennas. They were told that the researchers were testing a "new kind of WiFi," and that once the signal started they should carefully monitor any symptoms in their bodies. Then the researchers left the room. For 15 minutes, the subjects watched a WiFi symbol flash on a laptop screen.
In reality, there was no WiFi switched on during the experiment, and the headband antenna was a sham. Yet 82 of the 147 subjects—more than half—reported symptoms. Two even asked for the experiment to be stopped early because the effects were too severe to stand.
Witthöft says he expected to see a greater effect in people who had watched the frightening documentary. This wasn't the case overall. Instead, the movie mainly increased symptoms in subjects who described themselves beforehand as more anxious.
"It suggests that sensational media reports especially in combination with personality factors (in this case anxiety) increase the likelihood for symptom reports," Witthöft says.
Plenty of symptoms were reported without the sensationalist TV show, though. The antenna on the head, the researchers' allusion to a "new kind of WiFi," and the instructions to monitor their bodies closely were enough to trigger symptoms in many people who watched the other video.
Witthöft points out that his study would have been stronger if there were a third group of subjects who didn't wear the "WiFi" headband at all, but were simply told to pay attention to their bodies for 15 minutes. This kind of attentiveness might trigger symptoms on its own.
Still, Witthöft says, "I think the high percentage of symptom reports nicely shows how powerful nocebo effects are."
Though the researchers set out to show how irresponsible reports in the media can trigger a nocebo effect, they ended up showing how easy it is to make a person feel sick with just a a prop and a few choice words. Even a National Radio Quiet Zone can't protect against that.
Witthöft, M., & Rubin, G. (2013). Are media warnings about the adverse health effects of modern life self-fulfilling? An experimental study on idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF) Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 74 (3), 206-212 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychores.2012.12.002
Image: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid (via Flickr)
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Witthöft, M., & Rubin, G. (2013) Are media warnings about the adverse health effects of modern life self-fulfilling? An experimental study on idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields (IEI-EMF). Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 74(3), 206-212. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpsychores.2012.12.002
- May 12, 2013
- 05:01 AM
- 57 views
Online skeletal and dental datasets (links links links!)
by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology
Jean Jacques Hublin has a commentary [1] in the current issue of Nature, about making fossils available for scanning, digital replication, and ultimately hopefully open dissemination. As Hublin points out, it's a bit ridiculous that a fossil is a rare enough thing as it is, but even after their discovery, fossils "can become unreachable relics once they are in storage." Fortunately, Hublin goes on to point to online collections that are available to anyone interested. Somewhat ironically, the article about free-ish data is behind a paywall, so here are the resources Hublin describes:The Ditsong CT Archive, created by the collaboration of Hublin's group at Max Planck and the Ditsong (formerly Transvaal) Museum in South Africa, which contains digitized hominin fossils from the site of Kromdraai (see also [2]).You can download CT scans of the Skhul V early human fossil, thanks to the Harvard Peabody Museum.Wanna see the the oldest possible animal embryos, early humans, insects, and other crazy fossils? Check out the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility's microCT database.Get free CT scans of 2 human skulls, thanks to the Virtual Anthropology program at the University of Vienna.Finally, the NESPOS initiative is a large repository of Pleistocene hominin fossil scans, which I somehow don't know enough about.In addition to these sources, here are 2 other datasets that are pretty badass:As I've pointed out before, the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University has a very impressive collection of primate CT scans on their website. You can manipulate & look inside the 3D images online, and potentially download the original scans (although I've not had luck with registering with them).The American Association of Orthodontists Foundation has published several sets of X-rays from longitudinal studies of craniofacial growth. It's quite a remarkable and useful collection for both research and teaching.I haven't had much opportunity to look into these datasets Hublin pointed out, but they look promising. If you know of other good resources, please do share!References[1] Hublin, J. (2013). Palaeontology: Free digital scans of human fossils Nature, 497 (7448), 183-183 DOI: 10.1038/497183a[2] Skinner MM, Kivell TL, Potze S, & Hublin JJ (2013). Microtomographic archive of fossil hominin specimens from Kromdraai B, South Africa. Journal of human evolution, 64 (5), 434-47 PMID: 23541384... Read more »
Hublin, J. (2013) Palaeontology: Free digital scans of human fossils. Nature, 497(7448), 183-183. DOI: 10.1038/497183a
Skinner MM, Kivell TL, Potze S, & Hublin JJ. (2013) Microtomographic archive of fossil hominin specimens from Kromdraai B, South Africa. Journal of human evolution, 64(5), 434-47. PMID: 23541384
- May 11, 2013
- 09:43 AM
- 61 views
Arm and leg modelling
by zacharoo in Lawn Chair Anthropology
No, I'm not looking for people with lithe limbs to be photographed for money. Much more sexily, I'm referring to a recent paper (Pietak et al., 2013) that's found that the relative length of the segments of human limbs can be modeled with a log-periodic function:Figure 2 from Pietak et al. 2013. Human within-limb proportions are such that the length of each segment (e.g., H1-6) of a limb, from fingertip to shoulder (A) and to to hip (B), can be predicted by a logarithmic periodic function (C).In other words, within a limb, the length of each segment is mathematically fairly predictable on the basis of the segment(s) before and after it. As the authors state, "Being able to describe human limb bone lengths in terms of a log-periodic function means that only one parameter, the wavelength λ, is needed to explain the proportional configuration of the limb."The biological significance of this pattern is difficult to discern. The length of a limb segment is determined by a number of factors, including the spacing between the initial limb condensations embryonically, and thereafter the growth rates and duration of growth at proximal and distal epiphyses. As a result, limb proportions aren't static throughout life, but change from embryo to adult. For instance, here are limb proportion data for the coolest animal ever - gibbons! - from the great anatomist Adolf Schultz.An important question, and follow-up to Pietak et al's study, is whether human limb proportions can be described by such log-periodic functions throughout ontogeny, and if so how these change. Plus, it's also not clear to what extent human proportions might happen to be describable by log periodic functions, simply because each segment is shorter than the one preceding it proximally. In short, this study raises really interesting and pursuable questions about how and why animal limbs grow to the size and proportions that they do.ReferencesPietak A, Ma S, Beck CW, & Stringer MD (2013). Fundamental ratios and logarithmic periodicity in human limb bones. Journal of anatomy, 222 (5), 526-37 PMID: 23521756Schultz, A. (1944). Age changes and variability in gibbons. A Morphological study on a population sample of a man-like ape American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2 (1), 1-129 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330020102... Read more »
Pietak A, Ma S, Beck CW, & Stringer MD. (2013) Fundamental ratios and logarithmic periodicity in human limb bones. Journal of anatomy, 222(5), 526-37. PMID: 23521756
Schultz, A. (1944) Age changes and variability in gibbons. A Morphological study on a population sample of a man-like ape. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2(1), 1-129. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330020102
- May 11, 2013
- 01:42 AM
- 32 views
How Not to Be Eaten
by Mini Watsa in SurroundScience
In the soft jungle sun, a thick-limbed primate—with heavy fur and a strong grasping tail—is poised for flight. This is Lagothrix poeppigii, or Poeppigi’s woolly monkey, and it is the … Continue reading →... Read more »
Papworth Sarah, Milner-Gulland E. J., Slocombe Katie, & Noë Ronald. (2013) Hunted Woolly Monkeys (Lagothrix poeppigii) Show Threat-Sensitive Responses to Human Presence. PLoS ONE, 8(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062000.s004
- May 8, 2013
- 03:15 PM
- 61 views
Internationalization and Englishization in Higher Education
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
The Intercultural Communication Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics is hosting a seminar at Newcastle University next week devoted to “Intercultural Communication in Higher Education – principles and practices.” Given that internationalization of higher education is … Continue reading →... Read more »
Cho, J. (2012) Campus in English or campus in shock?. English Today, 28(02), 18-25. DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013) Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society, 42(01), 23-44. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887
- May 8, 2013
- 12:00 PM
- 67 views
Microbial Misadventures: Anthrax, Hippies & Drum Circles
by Rebecca Kreston in BODY HORRORS
When you think of drum circles taking place in the United States, visions of hippies, Birkenstocks and the vibrant green lawns of private colleges may appear. The bacteria Bacillus anthracis, or anthrax, does not often materialize alongside the skunky mix of patchouli and ganja hovering above the crowd in one’s visions of (ar)rhythmic drumming events.
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2010) Gastrointestinal anthrax after an animal-hide drumming event - New Hampshire and Massachusetts, 2009. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report, 59(28), 872-7. PMID: 20651643
- May 7, 2013
- 10:28 PM
- 69 views
Is Blogging Really the Future of Public Anthropology?
by Kristina Killgrove in Powered By Osteons
In a new short article out in the British Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Martijn de Koning asks what challenges anthropologists face in using blogs as a method of anthropological outreach. He begins by highlighting some of the motivations for anthropologists to blog: "[M]any anthropologists have suggested that for them the primary reasons for blogging are self-realization, creativity and networking, sharing research experiences and outcomes, and commenting on current affairs" (de Koning 2013:394).
As blogs have been around since the late 1990s, it seems a little strange that academic anthropologists are just now getting around to interrogating the utility of blogs and asking reflexive questions about our employment of the medium. de Koning quotes my 9 February 2012 blog post, "Blogs as Anthropological Outreach," to illustrate why some of us value blogging, although he only excerpts the first of these two paragraphs:
I blog because I find it rewarding - there's excitement in knowing that people who probably wouldn't touch my journal articles are reading about my work and about other developments in bioarchaeology; there's joy when I get emails from up-and-coming researchers, as young as middle schoolers, who want advice on how to make bioarchaeology a career; and there's the interaction with my readers that doesn't come across in the unidirectional, static medium of a publication.
Blogging is an exercise in writing for a different public, an exercise in taking all that jargon you learned in your coursework, distilling it, injecting your own ideas, and making it interesting. Writing a blog has helped me refine my research and my prose, and I think that my public lectures and my successful grant proposals in particular have greatly benefited from the practice. I always wish I had more time to blog. There's just so much cool stuff out there to talk about, and so little time to write...
Logo for PbO
Strangely, towards the end of the article, de Koning concludes that, "we can tentatively say that anthropology blogs appear to reach out mostly to fellow academics" (2013:396). Considering the brevity of the article and the lack of any sort of concrete assessment of the range of anthropology blogs (see Anthropology Report for a good ecology of the anthro blogosphere), I was surprised by de Koning's conclusion. After all, he cites my blog, one of whose prominent, recurring features is a critique of the forensic anthropology on the popular FOX TV show Bones each week. Those posts are aimed at the general public, and I can say with certainty from my analytics, comments, and emails that non-academics are the main consumers of that information. Further, my posts have been picked up by a variety of internet sources such as The Daily Beast, The Browser: Writing Worth Reading, and CounterPunch. My most popular blog post of all time, "Lead Poisoning in Rome - The Skeletal Evidence" is based on my own research but is written for the public; to date, it has garnered over 28,000 views but the article it's based on (Montgomery et al. 2010) has just one citation according to Google Scholar. This is quantifiable public outreach.
Logo for AnthInPractice
de Koning also cites Krystal d'Costa's Anthropology in Practice, which is similarly aimed at a non-academic audience in spite of its location at Scientific American, and Krystal's writing has been showcased by such pop culture websites as BoingBoing. Other blogs by anthropologists enjoy broad readership as well: bioanthropologist Barbara J. King writes at NPR blogs; archaeologist Rosemary Joyce writes at Psychology Today; the American Anthropological Association has a high-profile platform at The Huffington Post, to which dozens of anthropologists have contributed posts. While many of these sites are directed at an educated audience, that audience is not composed entirely of academics. Anthropologists are talking to the public. And all of these anthropologists can tell you that the public is listening and responding in comments, tweets, Facebook shares, and email forwards. Those stats are also quantifiable public outreach.
Flyer for T. Harrenstein's Foursquare
anthro outreach project in Pensacola FL
I will agree with de Koning, however, that the majority of anthropology blogs are likely focused on talking to academics in the language of academia, although I have not surveyed the blogosphere to test this hypothesis. If true, it is unfortunate, since a whole world of audiences exists if we are only willing to learn how to write for and engage them in our discussions. We definitely, in de Koning's words, need to "realize the full potential for public anthropology by blogging," (2013:397), and it was to this end that I required each of the graduate students in my Presenting Anthropology seminar this semester to create and maintain a social media presence. What I found interesting from reading the students' reports this past weekend was that the majority of them felt most comfortable with Tumblr, a short-format blogging platform, and were wary of the often lengthy, academic-style posts that show up on such sites as Savage Minds. My students by and large reported more engagement, in quantity and quality, through their Tumblr posts than through more traditional blog posts, even when those posts were the same content. So one of the questions we need to reflect on as anthropologists interested in engaging the public is: Who is our audience, and how can we best reach them? Is blogging the key? If so, what platform, what format, what language do we use? Or should other social media avenues be explored? Rhetorical question, of course; the answer is a resounding YES! Web 2.0 is founded on dynamism, and if we want to talk to the public, we need to be similarly flexible in our approach to reaching out. For example, my grad student Tristan Harrenstein devised a ... Read more »
M. de Koning. (2013) Hello World! Challenges for blogging as anthropological outreach. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(2), 394-397. info:/10.1111/1467-9655.12040
J. Montgomery, J. Evans, S. Chenery, V. Pashley, K. Killgrove. (2010) 'Gleaming, white, and deadly': using lead to track human exposure and geographic origins in the Roman period in Britain. Journal of Roman Archaeology. info:/
Sabloff, J. (1998) Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Communication and the Future of American Archaeology. American Anthropologist, 100(4), 869-875. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1998.100.4.869
- May 7, 2013
- 10:55 AM
- 73 views
What's the Point of Making This Face When We're Scared?
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
If cartoonists ever pause in their sketching to ponder human evolution, they must feel grateful to the forces that shaped our fear expression. All it takes is a pair of extra-wide eyes to show that a character is freaking out. There may be a point to this expression beyond making artists' lives easier: widening our eyes expands our peripheral vision, and might even help other people spot the cause of our alarm.
"Our lab is interested in the evolutionary origins of emotional expressions," says Daniel Lee, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Toronto—in other words, "why they look the way they do." When we feel afraid, for example, is there a point to stretching out our eyelids and raising our eyebrows to the ceiling?
To explore this question, Lee and his coauthors first asked whether widening our eyes helps us see better. They had 28 volunteers look at a fixed spot on a computer screen while holding their eyes in a neutral expression, an expression of fear, or one of disgust. (Subjects acted out these expressions rather than, say, having a chair pulled out from under them before each trial. Lee points out that emotions themselves may also change our perception, but he wanted to study the effects of widened eyes separate from any psychological effects of fear on the brain. "We coached each participant on how to make fear and disgust expressions based on the Facial Action Coding System," he says.)
Subjects were tested with flashing images on the screen in their peripheral vision. Lee found that people making a disgusted expression—with the eyelids narrowed as in "Ew, get that out of my face"—scored the worst. People making a wide-eyed fear expression scored the best, with a useful field of vision 9% larger than that of people with a neutral expression.
Being afraid, then, may help us gather more visual information about whatever's threatening us in our environment. But does it also help us communicate that threat to our companions?
The researchers next used pictures of models' eyes expressing different emotions to create simplified, graphic eye images. (They didn't use real eyes because those might have conveyed extra emotional information, instead of only varying in wideness.) Subjects saw these eye images flash briefly on a screen, looking toward the right or left by varying degrees. Lee found that when the eyes were wider, subjects had an easier time telling which way they were looking. The results are reported in Psychological Science.
"We believe the widening eyes of fear...[are] a functional response for vigilance toward threat," Lee says. When we're scared, he thinks, widening our eyes helps us to see threats and to communicate their location to our group.
The researchers point out that human eyes are uniquely suited for this kind of communication: we're the only primate with a white sclera (the area outside the iris). In other apes and monkeys, this part of the eye is dark. It's yet another factor that cartoonists, no doubt, appreciate.
Lee, D., Susskind, J., & Anderson, A. (2013). Social Transmission of the Sensory Benefits of Eye Widening in Fear Expressions Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612464500
Image: by Tom Check (via Flickr)
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Lee, D., Susskind, J., & Anderson, A. (2013) Social Transmission of the Sensory Benefits of Eye Widening in Fear Expressions. Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1177/0956797612464500
- May 7, 2013
- 06:41 AM
- 102 views
Plague of Justinian: The Older Brother of the Black Death
by Katy Meyers in Bones Don't Lie
The Black Death, or Bubonic Plague, was one of the most devastating pandemics to sweep through Europe. In only four years, this single disease wiped out half the population and set back the progress of the nations of Western Europe. Its rapid spread was attributed to fleas, who traveled throughout the countrysides and cities on … Continue reading »... Read more »
Harbeck, M., Seifert, L., Hänsch, S., Wagner, D., Birdsell, D., Parise, K., Wiechmann, I., Grupe, G., Thomas, A., Keim, P.... (2013) Yersinia pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague. PLoS Pathogens, 9(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1003349
- May 2, 2013
- 12:12 PM
- 53 views
Starvation Cannibalism at Jamestown
by Katy Meyers in Bones Don't Lie
If you’ve read any news in the past day, you’ve seen reports regarding cannibalism in colonial Jamestown. It was known prior that the colonists had undergone a number of starvation years where they were forced to eat foods that they wouldn’t normally. The trash pits from the sites hold the remains of animals who aren’t … Continue reading »... Read more »
S. JONES, H. WALSH-HANEY, & R. QUINN. (2012) Kana Tamata or Feasts of Men: An Interdisciplinary Approach for Identifying Cannibalism in Prehistoric Fiji. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. info:/
- April 30, 2013
- 05:45 PM
- 81 views
Vervets: Flavor & Social Transmission
by Diapadion in Lord of the Apes
This week is vervet week. I have declared it. Coming from me, this means a lot, since I've never been particularly interested in vervet monkeys. But, two articles have been released in science recently: both on vervets, both so intriguing that I have been compulsively rereading them.
The first of these comes from Andy Whiten of primate culture fame. He has done impressive work in the past, and this latest vervet paper is an extension of that, though perhaps not the intuitive extension. The authors presented their wild vervet subjects with two types of food, varying two attributes of each type. First, the food was either colored blue or pink. Second, the food either tasted good, or tasted terrible.
Taste aversion can be found in pretty much all mammals; a type of learning that most humans are familiar with. By taste aversion, I mean that when you taste something bad you learn very quickly not to eat it again. Often it only takes one exposure to learn this, which in the animal behavior world is very very fast. Not only will animals learn to avoid foods that taste digusting, but they will also learn to avoid foods that they think made them sick, even if they didn't eat anything that tasted bad.
There is a broad literature on taste aversion in rats (a literature I happen to know pretty well), and in rats you will find even stranger, related phenomena. Rats possess the ability to socially transmit taste preferences through their sense of smell. They will actually smell the breath of other rats, and later, they will show a preference for food that smells and tastes like the odors they smelled on the other rat.
It turns out that vervets can do basically the same thing. The authors of this paper have shown that while vervets quickly learn to avoid the color of food that they know tastes bad, they can learn socially through watching other vervets to ignore their earlier preferences. For example, if a male vervet learns that pink food tastes gross, and then the male disperses to another group where everyone learned a long time ago that blue food doesn't taste good, the newcomer male will watch and learn to eat blue food, in spite of his earlier memories.
Rats possess a unique neurochemical mechanism for learning this kind of stuff, and cannot learn taste preferences socially. Yet this is exactly what vervets do: watch other members of their own species and using that information, learn new preferences and extinguish old ones.
To see this in vervets is striking. If someone reported these results in chimpanzees, it would not be particularly surprising because chimps are extremely smart and adaptive. Vervets are not great apes, not lesser apes, they're just old world monkeys whose brains are smaller than many other old world monkeys, notably macaques and baboons. If we see this kind of behavior in vervets, it really does suggest that this cognitive ability is fundamental in all old world monkeys.
Moreover, the authors refer to this type of learning as "cultural learning". I am not sure if I fully agree with this; the line between cultural and social learning is not clear. However, I would certainly say that this type of learning is at least an evolutionary antecedent to cultural learning.
van de Waal, E., Borgeaud, C., & Whiten, A. (2013). Potent Social Learning and Conformity Shape a Wild Primate's Foraging Decisions Science, 340 (6131), 483-485 DOI: 10.1126/science.1232769
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van de Waal, E., Borgeaud, C., & Whiten, A. (2013) Potent Social Learning and Conformity Shape a Wild Primate's Foraging Decisions. Science, 340(6131), 483-485. DOI: 10.1126/science.1232769
- April 30, 2013
- 01:18 PM
- 104 views
Whale Turns Down Its Hearing When Expecting Loud Sounds
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
We can knit sweaters for oiled penguins, but it's harder to protect whales and dolphins from the harm of having us as neighbors. Loud underwater sounds from activities like sonar and drilling may damage these animals' hearing and even lead to mass strandings. Though we can't chase cetaceans around with homemade earmuffs, we might be able to teach them to tune us out.
Like squinting or letting one's pupil shrink in bright light, some animals can adjust how sensitive their ears are. When we're making loud noises, humans reflexively squeeze the muscles of the middle ear to dampen our hearing. Some bats do the same thing while echolocating.
"Generally speaking, mammals have evolved mechanisms to protect their auditory systems from self-produced intense sounds," write Paul Nachtigall of the University of Hawaii and Alexander Supin of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2008, the pair showed that a false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens) could adjust its hearing while it echolocated. So they set out to see whether the species could also dial down its hearing in response to sounds made by someone else.
They taught their whale (a female, originally caught in the wild and now thought to be 30 or 40 years old) that hearing a quiet warning sound meant a louder sound was coming soon. The subject wore suction-cup electrodes on her head during the experiment. Waiting at an underwater listening station, she first heard a series of tones while the electrodes measured which ones her ears responded to. Then, a variable amount of time later, she heard a sudden loud sound (170 decibels).
Over hundreds of trials,* the researchers saw that the whale learned to anticipate the loud sound. If it came within 35 seconds of the warning sound starting, the whale was able to desensitize her ears before it played. (With a longer delay, her response wasn't as strong.) The authors report their results in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
Nachtigall can't say how a whale turns down its hearing. "No one knows for sure how the cetacean middle ear works," he says. Whales don't have eardrums like humans or other land animals, he says, because the sounds they hear must travel through tissue instead of air. So his whale subject probably doesn't squeeze her ear muscles to dampen sound, as a human or bat would. He speculates that it's more likely a top-down control from the brain.
However she does it, the whale can make her ears less sensitive when she knows a loud sound is coming soon. The biggest decrease in her hearing sensitivity was about 13 decibels. That's "about what your hearing changes if you stick your fingers in your ears," Nachtigall says. If you—or the whale—are trying to protect your hearing from a loud noise, he says, "That helps. This would help."
When humans must make a racket underwater, it's possible that we could help whales and other animals by making quieter warning sounds beforehand. This could teach the animals to anticipate the sound and "plug" their ears.
Since he's only studied one animal so far, Nachtigall doesn't know how the abilities of other marine mammals to desensitize their ears compare. "To ask whether [warning sounds] would prevent whale hearing damage is sort of like asking whether ear plugs would prevent deafness in people who work next to jet engines," he says. "I believe the possibility is great, but there are more questions to be answered."
Image: by MichiKimmig (Flickr)
Nachtigall, P., & Supin, A. (2013). A false killer whale reduces its hearing sensitivity when a loud sound is preceded by a warning Journal of Experimental Biology DOI: 10.1242/jeb.085068
*If you're wondering how one convinces a whale to participate in so many trials, the answer is "fish reinforcement."
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Nachtigall, P., & Supin, A. (2013) A false killer whale reduces its hearing sensitivity when a loud sound is preceded by a warning. Journal of Experimental Biology. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.085068
- April 30, 2013
- 12:26 PM
- 108 views
Material loss protects teeth against fatigue failure
by Perikis Livas in Tracing Knowledge
Scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt together with dental technicians have digitally analysed modern human teeth using an engineering approach, finite element method, to evaluate the biomechanical behaviour of teeth under realistic loading.... Read more »
Sandra Jacob. (2013) Material loss protects teeth against fatigue failure. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. info:/
- April 30, 2013
- 10:08 AM
- 77 views
Between Death and Burial
by Katy Meyers in Bones Don't Lie
There are many things that can happen to a body between death and burial. A good example of this process is Weekend at Bernie’s. Bernie Lomax is murdered within the first twenty minutes of the movie, but he remains an important character as Richard and Larry feign that he is alive in order to continue to … Continue reading »... Read more »
André, A., Leahy, R., & Rottier, S. (2013) Cremated Human Remains Deposited in Two Phases: Evidence from the Necropolis of the Tuileries Site (Lyon, France: 2nd Century AD). International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. DOI: 10.1002/oa.2317
- April 28, 2013
- 03:21 AM
- 86 views
About Those Toltecs
by teofilo in Gambler's House
With increasing evidence for Mesoamerican influence at Chaco in recent years, it’s worth taking a close look at what was going on in Mesoamerica itself during the Chacoan era. As I’ve mentioned before, there is some reason to believe that the most likely area to look to for direct influence in the Southwest is West Mexico, [...]... Read more »
Healan, D. (2012) The Archaeology of Tula, Hidalgo, Mexico. Journal of Archaeological Research, 20(1), 53-115. DOI: 10.1007/s10814-011-9052-3
- April 26, 2013
- 11:05 AM
- 141 views
The Shambulance: Reflexology and Other Stories
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
The Shambulance is an occasional series in which I try to find the truth about bogus or overhyped health products. Helping me keep the Shambulance on course are Steven Swoap and Daniel Lynch, both biology professors at Williams College.
Sticking a Q-tip up one’s nose is not the source of many great insights. Yet it’s how an American doctor in the early 20th century developed the theory that became modern reflexology. He would be proud—though maybe a little confused—to see people today flocking to reflexology spas, where practitioners treat all their problems via the soles of their feet.
The American doctor in question was William H. Fitzgerald, an ear, nose and throat specialist. In a 1917 book, he explained the genesis of his big idea:
Six years ago I accidentally discovered that pressure with a cotton tipped probe on the muco-cutinous margin (where the skin joins the mucous membrane) of the nose gave an anesthetic result as though a cocaine solution had been applied . . . Also, that pressure exerted over any bony eminence of the hands, feet or over the joints, produces the same characteristic results in pain relief . . . This led to my ‘mapping out’ these various areas and their associated connections and also to noting the conditions influenced through them. This science I have named "Zone Therapy."
Chapter titles from Zone Therapy include "Zone Therapy for Women" (tongue depressor into the back of the throat for menstrual cramps), "Painless Childbirth" (rubber bands around the toes, among other interventions) and "Curing Lumbago with a Comb."
A nurse and physical therapist named Eunice D. Ingham extended the idea of zone therapy in the 1930s and 1940s, eventually mapping the entire body onto the soles of the feet. She called each important point on the foot a “reflex” because it reflected back to a certain organ or body part. Ingham wrote two books on the subject, now called reflexology: Stories the Feet Can Tell and Stories the Feet Have Told.
Today, the International Institute of Reflexology describes its practice as as “a science which deals with the principle that there are reflex areas in the feet and hands which correspond to all of the glands, organs and parts of the body.” Stimulating these points “can help many health problems in a natural way.” The site insists, “Reflexology…should not be confused with massage.”
There has been some confusion and blending, though, between Western reflexology and traditional Chinese medicine. Ingham and Fitzgerald's idea of "zones" is similar to the Chinese principle of "meridians." In traditional Chinese medicine, meridians are paths that carry qi through the body and connect the acupuncture points. Reflexology groups like to say that Fitzgerald "rediscovered" the science from more ancient roots. They even claim that ancient Egyptians practiced it, based on tomb paintings showing people holding each other's feet.
Whoever thought it up first, the idea that the soles of your feet hold a miniature map of the entire rest of your body defies a scientific explanation.
“The problem is communication,” says physiologist Steven Swoap. “How does the foot talk to the pancreas?”
The foot is full of sensory nerves, Swoap explains. These can detect temperature, pain or position and send that information to the spinal cord. If the signal is something urgent—say, you stepped on a nail—the spinal cord will send a quick command back to the foot (“STOP!”). If the signal from the foot is a non-painful one (“Hey, I’m walking on grass”), it will travel all the way up the spinal cord to the brain.
“But in no instance do those sensory nerves bypass either the spinal cord or the brain and go directly to the liver, or the kidney, or the colon,” Swoap says. This means your foot can’t communicate directly with any other body part except your spinal cord or brain. Whatever stories the feet have told, they’ve had a limited audience.
Daniel Lynch, a biochemist, points out that sex organs are missing from some reflexology maps. “Why aren’t the gonads on there?” he asks. Other maps label a "testes and ovaries" region around the middle of the heel, but there's variation from one chart to the next.
Setting aside the map itself, Lynch says, “Where is the evidence that it actually works?”
The evidence is slimmer than a stiletto heel. In a 2011 review paper, complementary medicine researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth dug up every scientific study of reflexology they could find. Out of 23 randomized clinical trials, only 8 “suggested positive effects.”
The quality of the studies was “variable,” the authors write, “but, in most cases, it was poor.” Only four studies that found a positive effect used a placebo control—that is, did massaging the feet without regard to “zones” give patients the same symptom relief? In general, studies tended to use small groups of subjects and not to be replicated by other researchers.
Reflexology has been tested on conditions including asthma, premenstrual syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, and back pain. If reflexology does have a benefit, “The most promising evidence seems to be in the realm of cancer palliation,” or making patients more comfortable, the authors write. Overall, though, they found no convincing evidence that reflexology has power beyond the placebo.
Not that we should thumb our Q-tip-free noses at the placebo effect. The body has an impressive power to make itself feel better based on our expectations. A foot rub from a professional may very well ease a person’s pain. If that professional says anything about zones, though, it’s only a story.
Image: Foot reflexology chart by Stacy Simone (Wikipedia)
Ernst, E., Posadzki, P., & Lee, M. (2011). Reflexology: An update of a systematic review of randomised clinical trials Maturitas, 68 (2), 116-120 DOI: 10.1016/j.maturitas.2010.10.011
... Read more »
Ernst, E., Posadzki, P., & Lee, M. (2011) Reflexology: An update of a systematic review of randomised clinical trials. Maturitas, 68(2), 116-120. DOI: 10.1016/j.maturitas.2010.10.011
- April 24, 2013
- 09:27 AM
- 88 views
Update on Badgers, Basketmakers, and Boats
by Katy Meyers in Bones Don't Lie
In archaeology, we are constantly getting updates on old material. When results are released, it isn’t always when the study itself is complete. Further, new methods or techniques may lead to re-analysis of older sites and remains, revealing new conclusions. Updates on old topics can cause increased debate, or end arguments completely depending on the … Continue reading »... Read more »
Geib, P., & Hurst, W. (2013) Should dates trump context? Evaluation of the Cave 7 skeletal assemblage radiocarbon dates. Journal of Archaeological Science, 40(6), 2754-2770. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2013.01.034
Coltrain, J., Janetski, J., & Lewis, M. (2012) A re-assessment of Basketmaker II cave 7: massacre site or cemetery context. Journal of Archaeological Science, 39(7), 2220-2230. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2012.02.018
Martin, R., Naftel, S., Macfie, S., Jones, K., & Nelson, A. (2013) Pb distribution in bones from the Franklin expedition: synchrotron X-ray fluorescence and laser ablation/mass spectroscopy. Applied Physics A, 111(1), 23-29. DOI: 10.1007/s00339-013-7579-5
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