Pile of Links: Science!

I've got a bunch of science articles saved for blogging purposes, which I thought were interesting but not quite enough for a post all their own, so I just hung on to them for a while.  But a pile of links is enough for a post, if it's big enough, so here we go!

I mean, not quite what I meant, but fine.

Just in case you're more up on science than I am, here's a quick summary before the cut:  blah de blah

First up, in Cooooooool!, we have:

Researchers studying mice find and fuck with a neural filter that learns to suppress movement sounds.  When I was taking cognitive science classes in undergrad, I learned about how bats are able to hear the faint echoes of their clicks off of bugs and surfaces, without going deaf from the loudness of making those clicks (in other words, "Why don't bats go deaf from their own sonar?).  The short version is that their muscles more or less clamp down on their ear bones only while they are clicking, and not in between clicks (because they can get an echo back before they're finished clicking).  This means that they clamp down about 200 times per second (IIRC), to stifle the click production without also stifling the click echoes.  And now it turns out that other mammals - specifically, mice - also stifle the noises of their own footsteps.  This isn't done by clamping down on their earbones, though, but instead with a neural filter that learns to filter them out.  Scientists figured this out by using acoustical VR (aVR) to manipulate what the sounds of their footsteps sound like, and watching as the brains of the mice then adapted to the aVR manipulation.

Researchers studying apes have found enormous overlap between the gestures used by chimpanzees and human infants.  Also in cognitive science, I read about some "grunts" and such that were found to be about as universal and uniform as microexpressions (the science of which serves as the real-world backdrop for the TV show Lie to Me).  Now in the same vein, we're finding gestures that are also universal and uniform - not just among human cultures, but also among other great ape species.  Human infants use 52 gestures to communicate, and chimps share 46 of those, not just in isolation but sometimes in sequence!  This leads me to speculate that there's some kind of hard-wired syntax in the brain that, with a little bit of abstraction, could easily explain how language exploded from there - the easy but tenuous connection between the gestures/"grunts" and abstract language could also show why some languages are very different in some ways but also super-samey in others.  Noam Chomsky, get on this!  Also, this could drop the bottom out of the stupid Kekulé problem (which I want to talk about, but that's a topic for another day).

Antibodies from HIV+ patients might enable us to make a vaccine!  I'm reminded of an old episode of the X-Men Saturday morning cartoon, when Cable came back in time to expose Wolverine to Apocalypse's mega-plague thing, and then he made antibodies which were used to vaccinate people against the plague, thereby saving the future.  For the benefit of any lay folk who may have wandered in, here's a quick & dirty run-down of immunology & HIV:  in general, when an antigen enters your system, your body doesn't know what to do at first; then your body figures out what to do; then it does it.  The "figure it out" step is the real magic:  every living cell basically has little Friend-or-Foe tags on the outside to help other cells know what to work with (and how), what to leave alone, and what to fight.  In viruses, these "FoF tags" are called "envelope proteins," because they're on the envelope surrounding the viral capsid (the protective "jacket" around the payload-bearing "undergarments").  When you're fresh out the box, your immune system doesn't really know what to do with all the antigens coming your way, and has to figure it out:  babies are under a more or less constant assault of antigens as their bodies figure out what's harmless and what sucks - this process can go wrong, as in allergies, or very wrong, as in lupus.  Once it figures out to fight something, it "remembers" it (your immune system has a "bank" of those "FoF tags" which it stores for future reference), and the next time it shows up there's an immediate response before the antigen can really do any damage - you are now immune to that antigen.  This is also how vaccines work for viruses, more or less:  the envelope has a capsid-ectomy and you're injected with that, so your body can "practice" on a "dummy version" of the virus, and you get the immunity without any negative effects of infection (with some limited exceptions that are well beyond the scope of this already-long-yet-paradoxically-oversimplified run-down).

HIV fucks with that whole process by basically telling your helper B cells - the "generals" to your immune system's "army" - "No, don't worry, this is fiiiiiiiine, everything is fiiiiiiiine," so no antigens' tags get spotted at all for the purposes of bodily defense (and hence its name, human immunodeficiency virus).  This is why HIV+ folks die not of HIV itself but of some usually innocuous and highly treatable disease like pneumonia:  the immune system is basically unable to tell what's a foe any more.  But some people, somehow - not sure quite how, not even the scientists know - are able to develop antibodies before their immune systems are completely shut down, and those antibodies can be used to develop a vaccine that could send HIV the same way as polio!

Next up, in the Not So Cooooooool! department, there is:

Children of color face racist attitudes from adults who volunteer and work with them.  I'll let ANU speak for itself: "New research from The Australian National University (ANU), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the University of Michigan has documented young children and youth of colour in the US face significant racial stereotyping from adults who work with them.

"For the first time this national study has analysed stereotypes held by White adults who work or volunteer with children across the US, examining their reported attitudes towards adults, teenagers and children from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. This includes attitudes towards Black and Hispanic/Latinx groups, but also towards those from Native American, Asian and Arab backgrounds.

"Lead author Associate Professor Naomi Priest of the ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods said the study found high levels of negative racial stereotyping towards non-Whites of all ages among adults working or volunteering with children."

A third kind of physiological stress response was found.  We already knew about nerves and hormones, how the former jacks us into overdrive right away and the latter keeps us going - and now we've found a third, delayed, and lasting mechanism that dilutes through cerebrospinal fluid.  Researchers think this will open new pathways to understanding chronic stress, PTSD, burnout, and associated issues.  I wonder what it'll indicate about the gigification of the economy and massive student loan debt?

BPA researcher finds the same bullshit in BPA-free plastics.  Patricia Hunt, who linked BPA to germ-line problems in her lab mice, is now finding the same kinds of effects in BPA alternatives, which... I mean... OK, so the alleged "problem chemical" was bisphenol A, and so they tried replacing it with bisphenol S and ran into the same stuff.  And with BPF, BPAF, and diphenyl sulfone.  At this point, can we maybe just say that bisphenol is the problem, and maybe plastic in general?  Just sayin'.  But she's got a cool nickname now that she basically stumbled into all this:  they call her "the accidental toxicologist."

Our final category is SPAAAAAAAACE!, featuring:

Theoretical exotic matter in neutron stars might be - stick with me here - special.  OK, so the idea here is that in the weirdness of a neutron star, you can get exotic matter that can't normally come to exist in any other part of the Universe, and while we can't go out & find any of it, we can make models that tell us how it would probably behave.  Because of the absolute bonkerballs environment of neutron stars, simulations indicate that the material would form into weird configurations - sphaghetti-like chains and lasagna-like sheets - which they therefore call "nuclear pasta."  Which is probably about the most innocuous name possible for something that's about ten billion times stronger than steel.

Finally, we may have some evidence for cyclic cosmology!  Scientists pretty much all agree that the Universe as we know it started about 14 billion years ago, mainly because the results of the CoBE mission agree so incredibly closely with our predictions of what they ought to be if the Universe was that way.  Well, lots of people then go and think, "What if there were other universes caused by other big bangs?"  And while we look to be headed for the Big Freeze rather than the Big Crunch,the latter of which could more obviously give rise to another big bang, the Big Freeze could also be cyclical.  See, if everything is uniformly distributed and nothing changes any more, then the concept of distance becomes meaningless - a giant uniform space is, mathematically speaking, pretty difficult to distinguish from a tiny uniform space, because WTF are rulers even, when all mass and energy has petered out?  To make a measurement, you have to have reference points; and if everything is uniform then everything's indistinguishable and there are no reference points and there's no possibility of measurement.  Moreover, it's less the idea that "well, distance is still real, but we just can't tell it" than "these two ideas seem different but are really just mathematically identical ways of describing what is in reality the same situation," like how vacuum fluctuation can be seen either as a particle-antiparticle pair spontaneously forming, parting, reuniting, and annihilating; or one particle doing little donuts in time.  The big idea isn't that it "could be one way, could be the other" - the big idea is "the thing is happening and how you choose to describe it is just a language game."

So this guy Penrose thought, "Wait, but what if the last things to die left tiny little imprints," and ran some numbers, and it came out "hotspots" in the White Noise of the Universe.  Other physicists scoffed and said, "Of course you'd have hotspots, it's random and sometimes you get anomalous-looking things when you roll dice a bunch of times."  So Penrose & pals ran eight thousand simulations and not one of them had hotspots like his theory predits (and finds).  Now, this is all still highly questionable, since a simulation is by definition an oversimplification, but the overall point that Penrose is making is that if you roll a d20 enough times, you will eventually get 20 twenties in a row, but you'll never ever roll a 47.  So, more research is needed, but this is an interesting avenue of research!