New Scientist has this interesting article on human pheromones. It’s amazing to find that we are unconsciously able to detect information and messages about each other.

What are pheromones?
Actually, there is quite a lot of debate about that. Basically, pheromones are chemical messages emitted by animals that trigger responses in receivers.

For example a female moth will release a sex pheromone to signal that she is fertile. Male moths can detect and will react to the pheromone message.

There are many types of pheromones (see the Wikipedia article) including alarm pheromones, sex pheromones and food trail pheromones. They are actually fairly common in the animal world.

Pheromones in humans
Humans are animals so it would make sense that we would also produce and react to pheromones. They are evolutionarily useful after all.

For a variety of reasons (discussed in the article) there has been controversy about the existence of human pheromones. To me it seems pretty obvious that something is going on in humans too, and that is what the article is about.

Human examples
There are several examples of the unconscious effects of human pheromones:

• It has been shown that women living together will gradually synchronize their menstrual cycles. Later experiments showed that the sweat of women in different stages of their menstrual cycle could affect the cycles of other women. Sounds like pheromones.
• Brain scans have shown the ‘sex centre’ of women’s brains lighting up when they were exposed to the smell of a male sex hormone (found in men’s sweat). Interestingly the effect was only reliable when there was a man in the room.
• Alarm pheromones can also be subconsciously detected by humans. Test subjects were able to distinguish between the sweat of people who had watched scary movies and people who had watched funny movies. This was despite not being able to consciously tell the difference.
• In a similar experiment brain scans showed the fear centre of the brain lighting up when subjects were exposed to the sweat of first time skydivers.

Very interesting stuff. Luckily the effects seem pretty weak because it could get crazy if we learned to reliably affect people’s behavior using chemicals!

Wired has this article on “the world’s loneliest species” which was discovered living deep (3km down) in a South African mine. This is the first ecosystem ever discovered that is comprised of only a single species. That makes it “the tidiest package of life found yet” with everything necessary for maintaining life packed into a single genome.

Nice.

The Ig Nobel awards are a parody of the Nobels for ‘improbable science’

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes that are awarded for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The prizes generally go out for interesting but strange research.

This year’s awards for for research including:

• Nutrition: For electronically modifying the sound of potato chips to make a person chewing them believe they are fresher than they really are.
• Archeology: For measuring how armadillos scramble dig sites thereby confusing the order to history
• Biology: For discovering that fleas living a dogs can jump higher than fleas on cats
• Medicine: For showing that high priced placebos are more effective than cheap placebos. This actually makes sense to me (I have blogged about the effect on wines)
• Economics: For showing that lap dancers make more money when they are fertile (also blogged this one before)
• Physics: For mathematically proving that a heap of string will almost certainly tangle into knots (seriously)
• Chemistry: For discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicid

Very cool. Check out more detail on the winners and previous winners here.

Those who thought that only God could create life are in for a nasty surprise. Wired has this article about a team of scientists who are close to creating life from scratch. The scientists are able to build protocells using fatty molecules (for the cell membrane) and inserting bits of nucleic acids containing ’source code’ for replication.

These guys aren’t able to get the cells to replicate properly on their own yet - only certain DNA sequences get replicated. But they are close to creating a new form of life.

Science is awesome - get an idea about how the world works, create an experiment to test that idea, repeat. That simple process is how mankind has come so far.

Along the way there have been several cases where the scientific process has overturned conventional “knowledge”. For example people thought that the Earth was flat because that is what came naturally to them - but that was rubbish. Don’t be so smug though, I guarantee that today we believe things that are equally untrue (about human nature, morality, and consciousness for example).

The stories of the open minded scientists who made these breakthroughs are interesting reading. Here is an article discussing 10 great experiments of history: “moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to nature and received a crisp, unambiguous reply”.

I’ll summarise an example:

William Harvey - the heart actually pumps blood
In the 1700s conventional wisdom said that invisible spirits called “pneuma” caused the blood to “slosh back and forth like the tides” but Harvey thought the heart had something to do with it. He tested his theory but cutting open a live snake and pinching the main vein entering the heart. The heart became paler and smaller as it was starved of blood. When he pinched the main artery coming out of the heart the opposite happened, the artery swelled up with blood like a balloon. He had shown that the heart pumps blood around the body.

I recently read an unusual article in The Economist about a controversial phenomenon known as ball lightning. Basically ball lightning is a rare and unpredictable phenomenon where lightning forms a glowing ball which can persist and move around for several seconds rather than the normal flash.

Ball lightning appears to be inconsistent in color (pale blue, yellow, green, red and white), size (pea sized to several meters) and behavior (dropping form the sky, moving along the ground, and sometimes nailing people).

Yeah it sounds like bull, but they have been seen thousands of times by thousands of witnesses over the last few centuries. Several scientific groups are working on explaining ball lightning. Hell, even The Economist (normally very skeptical) has written a detailed article about the studies attempting to explain them.

Wikipedia has a detailed article on lightning balls which mentions that they were often sighted by fighter pilots during World War 2. Now we need a little aside: early in the war poorly trained Japanese pilots often flew erratic trajectories and the Allied pilots developed a derogatory term for them – foo fighters. The name came from a comic strip popular at the time, Smokey Stover, which often made use of the nonsense word foo.

So when the pilots repeatedly saw the erratically moving balls of fire they became known as foo fighters. Because lightning balls (foo fighters) were/are largely unexplained a lot of people think that they are UFOs (rubbish). Someone who is fascinated by UFOs is Dave Grohl who therefore chose the name for his band the Foo Fighters.

It’s like the whole 6 degrees idea but for concepts instead of people. Awesome.