madame scientist's not-so-mad musings

Are men funnier than women? Yes, according to gender stereotype, arguing an evolutionary selective advantage akin to a peacock’s gaudy feathers in attracting mates. Not so, says a recent study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Using a gender blind New Yorker cartoon captioning contest, researchers from UCSD concluded that men were only a “skosh” funnier than women (by 0.11 points out of a possible 5). Even that advantage came largely from men, who rated other men funnier than women did. Plenty of lolz from the article itself!

“Sad for the guys,” Christenfeld said, “who think that by being funny they will impress the ladies, but really just impress other men who want to impress the ladies.” snark

The difference in self-assessment was greater than the actual difference detected by the contest. “Male confidence, in this domain at least,” the researchers write, “does seem to outstrip male competence.” ouch

Lead author (Laura) Mickes declined to make any funny comments because they’d be attributed to her male coauthors anyway. hahaha

Just beautiful!

Originally shared by Daniel Harrington

Heat map of the Earth. Watch 11 years of >10 million fires recorded by two NASA satellites, Terra and Aqua, condensed into a minute. Over 70% of the world’s fires were recorded over Africa, most caused by agricultural practices or lightning. USA, in contrast, had less than 2%. Data were recorded using MODIS (MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and shown as a heat map.

Info from: http://www.zmescience.com/ecology/climate/burning-fire-outer-space-22102011/

The ultimate armchair travelogue! Zoom out of our planet, marvel in the constellations, ponder the distant reaches of our universe and return home in 6:31 minutes.

via Koen De Paus

Tip: watch on full screen (double click) since the embed is too small to appreciate 🙂

Originally shared by Jeremy Dahl

The scale of our existence always astounds and amazes me. To imagine what our understanding of reality will be in only a few short years is exciting. #bravenewscience

Evolutionary Timeline The Big Bang happened 14 billion years ago. Life arose nearly 4 billion years back . “Our brains have never before needed to be able to comprehend such vastness of time. A decade is probably the longest duration of time that our brains can correctly imagine.” Now try a million, or a billion years. It is not surprising then, that some people reject this incomprehensible vastness for “a shorter, emotionally more pleasing yet incorrect number of about 6,000 years for the age of the Universe.” Check out this very cool evolutionary timeline, drawn to scale. Drag the time slider through eight telescoping sections. There’s a lot happening.

http://www.johnkyrk.com/evolution.html

Thanks to +Suhail Manzoor , for finding the blog that led me to this: (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2011/10/22/bio101-evolution-of-biological-diversity/)

via Walter Jessen . Alfred Nobel was born on this day, in 1833

President Clinton declared Oct 21 to be National Biomedical Research Day -as is every day, for me 🙂 He said, “There is an intriguing quality to biomedical research: A discovery does not always predict its future uses. As a consequence, it is essential that the Nation continue to champion broad-based studies of both the normal and the disease processes. These studies will yield a fundamental understanding of biological systems and will provide us with the foundation of knowledge needed to ensure successful responses to current and future health problems.”

Cheers! to that sentiment!

Globalization of Science! Inspired by the friendship map of Facebook, this visually gorgeous map documents collaborations between scientists from bibliographic information in databases. Each paper published with authors from different cities is one line with geographical coordinates mapped onto a Mercator projection. Definitely check out zoomable link below!

(Reflecting on our own work, we’ve published with colleagues in Australia, Israel, Czech Republic and Japan in the past five years).

Originally shared by ****

A beautiful map visualizing scientific collaborations between researchers.

A zoomable very high resolution map can be consulted here: http://collabo.olihb.com/

by Olivier H. Beauchesne via http://goo.gl/dRIX0

Norwegian Terje Isungest is an ice musician. He’s held concerts at a frozen waterfall, glaciers and ice caves. Some of his challenges: Every time he plays on ice, it sounds different. An ice horn may last 50 performances, or only one. The colder the temperature, the more high and low frequencies he can generate. And of course, “You have to move all the time, because if you stop, you will just freeze”.

Talked like Yoda, cavemen did While modern languages typically use a subject-verb-object order (SVO), linguists believe that proto-human languages used subject-object-verb order (SOV), as in Yoda Speak. 2,200 languages, dead or alive, were clustered into family trees to show Yoda Speak without exception. So what will we sound like in the future? “Impossible to see the future is.”

The paper was just published in PNAS. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/10/04/1113716108.abstract