Josie Ford
Fossil or beehive?
A new celebrity lookalike currently resides on a rock near Bhopal, India, drawing gossip as to whether it is (a) a fossil of a long-extinct creature known as Dickinsonia tenuis, or (b) the decayed remnants of a not very-old beehive.
The journal Gondwana Research published an almost-licking-its-chops-in-delight rundown by scientists at the University of Rajasthan and the University of Florida. “[W]e note the structural similarities between ‘Dickinsonia‘ and honey and pollen stores of recently decayed bee nests,” they write. Onwards they snipe, adding: “Moreover, we note the presence of myriad giant honeybee hives within the rock crevices that show remarkable similarities to the purported fossil of Dickinsonia“.
The opposing case – that it is a glamorous fossil – was presented with equal but opposite happiness two years ago in the same journal. The it’s-a-fossil team comprises researchers from the Geological Survey of India, the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and institutions in the US. “Dickinsonia remains the most iconic and controversial of the dazzling array of Ediacaran fossils now known worldwide,” they proclaimed. “Here we report three newly discovered fossils as the first record of the genus from India.”
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This kind of is-it-or-isn’t-it confusion isn’t unusual. It glares from the titles of two other reports: “The saga of the false fossil foram Eozoon” (published this year) and “Fossil lice (Insecta: Phthiraptera) reconsidered” (out in 2006).
And the snideness? That isn’t unusual, either. Nor is it new. In 1934, the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences printed a report called “The supposed fossil ear of maize from Cuzco, Peru”.
Quantum black holes
Construct a list of every possible phrase that can be made by combining 17 words chosen at random from an English-language dictionary. One of those 17-word phrases will be: “It is thereby expected that all sufficiently advanced civilizations ultimately employ black holes in their quantum computers.”
That exact phrase appears in a new study, “Black holes as tools for quantum computing by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations”. Our own civilisation is already seeking advancement, as shown by several patent applications on file internationally. These are stuffed with ideas such as “Method for utilizing dimensional manipulation” – and quanta of confidence.
Music for unrelaxing
A project at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, is looking into the “effects of disliked music on psychophysiology”. The research, as described by Julia Merrill, Taren-Ida Ackermann and Anna Czepiel, is both painstaking and painsgiving. They say that “participants listened to three self-selected disliked musical pieces which evoked highly unpleasant feelings”.
They assess the changes evident in listeners’ bodies: heart rate, skin conductance response and body temperature that each reflect “higher arousal” and reactions in three facial muscles. These are the levator labii associated with disgust, the corrugator supercilii that typically indicates anger and the zygomaticus major, which is linked to distress and grimacing. The reactions are most prominent, they say, when people listen to music of the “very unpleasant” variety.
Merrill, Ackermann and Czepiel do make it clear that this unpleasantness isn’t the entirety of music’s effects on all humans. They assure us that “previous research has shown the positive effects of music listening in response to one’s favorite music”.
Slime mould watch
A new variety of smartwatch is like Tamagotchi, but with real life to it – it is partly slime mould.
Tamagotchi, the electronic artificial pet that isn’t much bigger than a wristwatch, entranced millions when it arrived on the market a quarter of a century ago. Its Japanese inventors, Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company and Aki Maita of Bandai Company, won the 1997 Ig Nobel prize for economics for “diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets”.
Now, Jasmine Lu and Pedro Lopes at the University of Chicago have created a smartwatch that is partly made of a slime mould (Physarum), a living entity that must be fed adequately and often enough or else the watch will stop running. As Lu and Lopes explain: “The slime mold grows to form an electrical wire… If the user does not care for the slime mold, it enters a dormant stage and is not conductive. The users can resuscitate it by resuming care.” The care is fairly simple: give the slime mould a regular diet of water and oats.
Lu and Lopes say they tested their smartwatch by having humans wear it for nine to 14 days. “We found that participants felt a sense of responsibility, developed a reciprocal relationship, and experienced the organism’s growth as a source of affect.”
Tamagotchi itself now comes in the form of a smartwatch. The newest version of the old toy still “lives” via traditional electronics though. Its guts and nervous system depend not at all on slime mould, but on the combined power of an electrical battery and, like the Chicago smartwatch, the diligent attention (or not) of its human owner.
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