The Hackerspace Revolution

"I don't do what I do because of hope, I do what I do because it feels right." - Mitch Altman

#CCCAMP11 - Mitch Altman, Tvbegone/Noisebridge [EN] from Owni on Vimeo.

Can a love of making stuff fix the world? Let's find out!

Too Close For Comfort

Relationships are usually way more complicated than they appear. Case in point, new evidence from a study conducted jointly by the University of Chicago and Cornell University, which suggests that men whose wives are friendly with their male buddies are significantly more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction.

What’s going on here? It’s not as simple as straight-up insecurity or jealousy. Rather, the results appear to indicate that the friendly wife interferes with the social connections that maintain her husband’s male identity. In this kind of “partner-betweenness” situation, men were an astonishing 92% more likely to report erectile dysfunction than men of a similar age not in a betweenness situation. As men entered old age, though, the correlation faltered. Old men do not define their masculinity by their buddy friendships, but have identities supported more by relationships with family members.

What makes a man a man? Certainly not the ability to coerce, threaten, or control his wife – to forbid her to socialize with his friends – or to play upon her insecurities to keep her compliant. The results of this study beg more examination, but in the meantime I might suggest: if you’re a man who wants to keep up keeping it up all through middle age, take the time to figure out who you are without your buddies around to remind you.

Read more here: Is impotence linked to dating within your group of friends? Via io9.com

The 10,000 Year Explosion

The University of Utah’s own Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran have co-authored a new book about the ways that the human genome has evolved during the past 10,000 years – the blink of an eye in terms of the life of our species. From detailing the development of lactose tolerance and malaria resistance, to the startling suggestion that we may have improved our capacity for intelligence by interbreeding with Neanderthals, this book is a compelling and well-written exploration of this fascinating subject.

The 10,000 Year Explosion is available in local bookstores and via Amazon.com

I Said, and We Heard

What do your emails reveal about your relationships with those around you? More that just the details of the subject, apparently. Psychologist James Pennebaker has been studying the use of pronouns in written language, and he has uncovered a startlingly robust correlation: in correspondence between people of unequal rank, the lower ranked person will use more “I,” “me,” and “my” pronouns, and the higher ranked person will use more “we,” “us,” and “our” pronouns. This gives a whole new spin to the “royal we.”

Read more here: The Secret Language Code via Scientificamerican.com

Up From Down's

Trisomy 21, in which an extra copy of the 21st human gene is coded for in a person's cells, is the root cause of Down's Syndrome. Down's people tend to have lower-than-average cognitive abilities, but new works suggests that this particular symptom of the syndrome may be avoidable if certain brain-stimulating drugs are given to Down's patients as children. The cognitive effects of Down's seem to be associated with the neurons of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that forms and processes memory. In Down's, the hippocampus develops much more slowly than in unaffected children - so giving a drug that stimulates the hippocampus may improve the cognitive function. Early work with drugs intended for Alzheimer's sufferers appears promising.

Read more here: A Drug for Down Syndrome via NYTimes.com

Who's Domesticating Whom?

Certain troops of baboons have learned to keep dogs as pets, to work for them as dogs work for humans - to keep the baboons safe from predators, to help hunt, and to be petted and accepted as part of the family.

Life, Emerging and Merging.

Way back in the early days when life was just getting going on this planet, the raw "life soup" that made up the oceans had some pretty weird stuff going on in it. At first, (we think) it was just raw strands of DNA, RNA, and amino acids floating around, interacting and replicating. At some point those informational molecules got their act together inside a lipid wall, and the first cell was born.

Very early cells didn't have a nucleus or a cellular membrane. The cells that make up our human bodies (and the bodies of all animals, fungi, and plants) do have both of these. So what happened? Apparently, these complex eukaryotic cells arose when two different kinds of primitive cells (one archaebacteria and one eubacteria) merged together, instead of one eating the other.

New evidence suggests that the genes of these two primitive cell lines, to this very day, metabolize and work very differently inside all of our cells - a symbiosis that is 1.5 billion years old. We are all chimeras - the cellular equivalent of a blending of fish and fowl. Without this ancient cooperation, none of the life we see every day around us would exist.

Read more here: Human Cells a Chimera of Ancient Life via Wired.com

Beside the Seaside

Our fossil origins are being uncovered more completely every day, but the question still remains - when can we draw a line and say that after this point, we are "human" and before it, we were just hominids? Where did this population of recognizably-modern humans arise? What was their lifestyle like?

Some of these questions are being answered in more detail by a team of researchers working in South Africa. We have had genetic evidence of a "bottleneck" - an event during which almost all the human lineage died - for some time now, but it has been unclear exactly what happened. Now it appears that we may have survived this bottleneck event, and gone on to prosper by living on the seashore, eating easily-available seafoods from intertidal pools, and expanding our brains both by the increased input of Omega-3 fatty acids and by the challenge of calculating the monthly cycle of spring and neap tides needed to know when it was safe to venture out onto the rocks to gather mussels and other shellfish.

More information here: Water’s edge ancestors via Sciencenews.org

Audio Illusion

What do you hear? This sound is like an audio Rorschach test - it is meaningless, but our brains try to insert meaning into it. What you hear often reflects upon your state of mind.