Category — Science

The new visitor center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden offers transparent passage to “a secret Eden,” reports Philip Nobel in the New York Times (5/9/12). Brooklyn Botanic has been around for 102 years and until now its “creaking turnstiles … served as the only public entrances to the place.” But starting next week, a new gateway will greet visitors “at the northeast corner of the garden” and “plant lovers will contend with architecture at the garden’s threshold.” The building, designed by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi, carries on their tradition of “integrating buildings with nature, albeit with a certain brashness.”

If you enter Brooklyn Botanic “from Washington Avenue, you climb a few steps, pass through monumental steel gates and find yourself on a bare concrete plaza … To your left is a wall of clear glass under an accordion-folded copper roof … Ahead, the roof continues past the edge of the glass over a wide entryway through which you can make out the green of trees beyond. On the other side of this pedestrian slot through the building is a high wall, the same clean, white concrete of the plaza ground. The effect is distinctly urbane … you approach nature now through the stuff of the city.”

And yet “most of the building remains out of sight, seemingly lost in nature, embedded in a grass-and-tree-covered berm. It’s a move that creates high-contrast oppositions between growing and built, and that also defends the garden against the asphalt and masonry of its neighbor.” The 10,000 square-foot roof is itself a garden of “grasses and flowering bulbs” and the “vertical steel mullions are kept short to match the rhythm of nearby tree trunks … The result is not a craven, apologetic attempt to deny that what was once nature is now architecture. It’s a model of one way those two opposed systems can coexist.” (image)

How we feel about ourselves has a lot to do with the prices we are willing to pay, reports the Economist (5/5/12). Ayelet Gneezy and a team of researchers at the University of California conducted a series of studies suggesting that “a desire to think of yourself as a good person” can drive how much you’ll pay for something. Their research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found “that allowing people to name their own price may result in fewer sales than the old-fashioned approach of simply setting a single price for everybody.” One experiment involved “53,000 customers of a theme park, who were photographed while riding a rollercoaster.” All customers were allowed to name their own price for the photo, but some were told that half of the price “would be donated to a children’s charity.”

Interestingly, the price offered by those giving half to charity was five times that of those who were simply asked to name their own price. However, “only half as many people” in the charity group chose to buy a photo at all. The researchers say that “the two results are linked: because the ‘right’ price for the charity-and-photo combination was felt to be much higher, a significant number of people preferred not to buy at all than to damage their self-image by offering a miserly price, and, by extension, a tight-fisted donation to a deserving cause.”

A second experiment involved buying photographs from a boat ride — with the price set at $15 for one group, $5 for another and “name your own price” for the third. All three groups were told that the normal price was $15. Demand rose at the $5 price point and fell among the “name your price” group. The researchers say this is because “an overly low price can feel unpleasantly parsimonious.” In a third experiment, restaurant patrons were allowed to pick the price, but some had to pay in public while others settled up in private. Those who paid in private “chose to pay more, on average, than those who paid in public.” Researchers conclude that this means “it is your conscience that prods you to be generous, as opposed to pressure from your peers.”

When we talk about ourselves it “triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money,” reports Robert Lee Hotz in the Wall Street Journal (5/8/12). “Self-disclosure is extra rewarding,” says Diana Tamir, a Harvard neurologist, who, along with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell, conducted “five brain imaging and behavioral experiments” into the brain’s response when we tell “others about what we feel or think.” According to Diana, “People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves.”

Most of the subjects of the experiment were “Americans who lived near the university.” They were offered “money if they chose to answer questions about other people, such as President Obama, rather than about themselves, paying out on a sliding scale of up to four cents. Questions involved casual matters, such as whether someone enjoyed snowboarding or liked mushrooms on a pizza … Despite the financial incentive, people often preferred to talk about themselves and willingly gave up between 17% and 25% of their potential earnings so they could reveal personal information.”

Diana and Jason also used brain scanners to track “changes in blood flow between neurons associated with mental activity, to see what parts of the brain responded most strongly when people talked about their own beliefs and opinions, rather than speculating about other people. Generally, acts of self-disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction.” James Pennebaker of the University of Texas thinks the results make sense. “We love it if other people listen to us,” he says. “Why else would you tweet?” The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Finding the shortest distance between multiple points — not just two — is one of the great unsolved problems of our time, reports Jordan Ellenberg in the Wall Street Journal (3/10/12). The problem is also the subject of In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman, by William J. Cook, a Georgia Tech professor of mathematics. The book goes to the heart of what’s known as The Traveling Salesman Problem, or TSP, a mathematical puzzler in which a theoretical merchant must meet customers in all 48 contiguous US states using “as little gas and time as possible.” How many options? 12413915592536072670862289047373375038521486354677760000000, to be as precise as possible. The salesman couldn’t consider them all, so William offers various formulas for finding the most efficient route.

For example, there’s the “greedy algorithm,” in which “you make the choice that offers the most immediate benefit without any attempt to plan for the future.” However, “unsupervised greed doesn’t always yield the most efficient outcome. In the TSP, you might do well at the beginning of your trip but then wind up in Seattle with just Tallahassee left to go.” Another strategy is known as “hill-climbing,” where you start at random and make “small-scale, local improvements” on the fly — “replacing the current path with a ‘nearby’ one that’s a little better.” You just keep making switches to shorter paths until you run out of options.

Using the Lin-Kernighan method of hill-climbing, it’s possible to find “nearly optimal solutions for some traveling salesman problems with 25 million cities on the itinerary.” The meaning of “nearly optimal” is another question, however. “Here you use an old mathematician’s trick called relaxation … In 1949, Julia Robinson had the great insight to apply this idea to the TSP” by looking not for “yes” or “no” answers “but some answer in between” and finding the “fuzzy path.” Using linear programming, she could prove that the fuzzy path was “almost as good as possible.” TSP is more than academic — it can be applied to computer-chip design, for example, and its potential solutions make possible the “serious study of complex systems like the American economy.”

The “risk-reward strategies and competitive awareness” of golfers “have real-world implications in business and management,” reports John Paul Newport in the Wall Street Journal (3/24/12). That’s the opinion of Mark Broadie, a Columbia Business School professor, who finds a wealth of insights in golf statistics, as compared to other sports. “It’s harder to tease data out of team sports, because the action is so diffuse,” says Mark. “In golf, it’s one golfer, one ball, one shot. It’s very clean.”

Other researchers love to study golfers because they “stand in one place while they do their thing, and initiate the action on cue rather than react to an object or person coming at them, as in most other sports. Thus they can be wired to the hilt and every little motion and brain wave pondered.” For example, golfers can be outfitted with a helmet equipped “with an external camera and other peripherals” so scientists can track their eye movements as they putt. This has helped Joan Vickers, a Canadian professor, study the “quiet eye” technique.

Joan has determined that the best golfers “control their gaze” and her research reveals “how the neural processes associated with the quiet eye help the brain organize itself to make a good stroke while simultaneously overriding competing neural processes responsible for distractions and anxiety.” These and other findings were recently presented at the World Scientific Congress of Golf, in Phoenix. Other research explored how people process golf lessons into motor skills and a statistical study showing that the Official World Golf Rankings “are significantly biased against members of the PGA Tour.” (link)

Nobody knows how our brains "recall the past, perceive the present and imagine the future," but scientists are getting a handle on it, reports Daniel J. Levitin in the Wall Street Journal (2/4/12). What makes each of us unique is rooted in the "different genes that influence brain development, and accordingly, behavior." But that’s not the whole story. "Genes alone cannot explain how your brain got to be the way it is," writes Sebastian Seung in his new book, Connectome. "As you lay nestled in your mother’s womb, you already possessed your genome but not yet the memory of your first kiss."

Said another way: "You might have a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism, but without the right environmental triggers, that gene may never become active … Neuroscientists posit that all of our hopes, desires, beliefs and experiences are encoded in the brain as patterns of neural firings … A new approach to studying brains and individual differences involves making maps of how neurons connect to one another … The next big frontier is mapping those trillions of neural connection patterns to brain states. By observing a particular network of neurons firing, researchers should know (in theory) whether you are thinking about love or money, beer or burgers."

These connections — or connectomes — are "influenced by a lifetime of outcomes and associations," determining what makes you different from anyone else. They shape your hopes and fears, your likes and dislikes. "Information," says Sebastian Seung, "is the new soul." Scientists are a long way from being able to map connectomes (they couldn’t even do it for a mouse’s brain at this point). But Sebastian "lays out two possible benefits of understanding connectomes: the repair of cryogenically frozen brains and subsequent restoration of consciousness and the uploading of consciousness into computer simulations. In the best (but unlikely) case, either could lead to cognitive immortality."

At Davos, data was declared "a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold," reports Steve Lohr in the New York Times (2/12/12). Not just any data though — we’re talking about Big Data, which some define as “advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions.” The result is “a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years,” according to IDC, a technology research firm.

The sources include not only “web traffic and social network comments” but also “software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers.” The result, says Harvard’s Gary King, is “a revolution” that “will sweep through academia, business and government.” Justin Grimmer of Stanford is using Big Data (i.e., blog posts, speeches, press releases and news articles) to look “for insights into how political ideas spread.” Walmart and Kohl’s use Big Data (i.e., sales, pricing, demographic and weather) to “determine the timing of price markdowns.”

Perhaps most famously, Google and Facebook are using Big Data to target ads. M.I.T.’s Erik Brynjolfsson conducted a study of “179 large companies and found that those adopting ‘data-driven decision making’ achieved productivity gains that were 5 to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.” The downside, some say, is that “Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions.” But Andrew Gelman of Columbia sees only upside: “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun,” he says. “It’s cool now.”

The Obama campaign is turning to "computing experts, mathematicians, programmers and statisticians" — boffins — to try to help attract voters, reports the Economist (2/11/12). The campaign actually has a “chief scientist,” Rayid Ghani, “a leading light in an area of applied science called knowledge discovery and data-mining — techniques that are frequently used by corporations to crunch vast quantities of data in the search for interesting patterns about customers.”

Rayid’s job is to analyze a “torrent of data and predict voting patterns, allowing the Obama campaign to target its spending more accurately and cost-effectively.” Such data links “names and addresses of voters … with everything from magazine subscriptions and home ownership to hunting licenses and credit scores.” As in 2008, the campaign will also “use online experiments to work out which messages are most effective.”

Last time around, for example, the Obama campaign found that a “learn more” button was more effective than “sign up now” in terms of getting voters to submit their email addresses. This time, however, social-media is more crowded, and candidates “can expect less free, word-of-mouth advertising on it.” Then again, Facebook now offers “paid advertisements by zipcode, as well as by political affiliation, age and interests.” The president, meanwhile, perhaps seeking novel, lower-cost channels, recently signed up for Instagram, “a “slightly hip photo-sharing network.”

Science can explain why Adele’s Someone Like You, makes so many people cry, reports Michaeleen Doucleff in the Wall Street Journal (2/11/12). Some of the song’s emotional firepower is in the "heartfelt lyrics" and, of course, Adele’s "powerhouse" voice. But the real trigger is in a musical device known as "appoggiatura," the emotional effects of which were observed by British psychologist John Sloboda some 20 years ago in experiments where he asked subjects "to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps." Eighteen of 20 identified passages included an appoggiatura.

The appoggiatura "is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound," which creates tension for the listener, according to Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves and it feels good." In Someone Like You, Adele "modulates her pitch at the end of long notes right before the accompaniment goes to a new harmony, creating mini-roller coasters of tension and resolution."

Adele also sets the mood with “sentimental and melancholy” lyrics, starting “with a soft, repetitive pattern … When the chorus enters, her voice jumps up an octave, and she belts out notes with increasing volume,” as the lyrics turn “more dramatic … When the music suddenly breaks from its expected pattern, our sympathetic nervous system goes on high alert; our hearts race and we start to sweat.” We enjoy this because it releases dopamine “in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain,” even when the song is sad. In short, the appoggiatura may well be “a formula for commercial success.”

MIT Media Lab scientists have developed a camera that can capture the speed of light, reports John Markoff in the New York Times (12/13/11). This technology "scans and captures light," and enables the scientists to "record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second." The image itself, of light passing through liquids and objects, is captured "in less than two trillionths of a second." That’s super-fast, obviously, but what it does, in effect, is create a slow-motion movie (video).

"It is so much slow motion you can see the light itself move," says Andreas Velten, a member of the MIT Media Lab team. "This is the speed of light: there is nothing in the universe that moves faster." That sounds impossible, but not nearly as nuts as the project’s original objective, which was to create a camera that could see around corners. The idea was that "by capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light" it would be possible to build "images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible."

Ramesh Raskar, who leads the project, suggests some intriguing applications. "Imagine if you have this in your phone 10 years from now," he says. "You will be able to go to your supermarket and tell if your fruit is ripe." The breakthrough is the ability to create pictures of "information that until now had been rendered only as data and charts." Dr. Raskar calls the project "femto photography," using the "term for quadrillionths of a second," and admits that the potential is a mind-bender. "We’re still trying to get our heads around what this means," he says, "because no one has been able to see the world in this way before."