Category: science

science

Salt Water As Fuel?

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When John Kanzius of Erie, PA man announced he’d ignited salt water with the radio-frequency generator he’d invented, some thought it was a hoax. Not only is it not a hoax, scientists know why burns the way it does and he has been able to keep salt water in a test tube burning like a candle, as long as it is exposed to radio frequencies.
This leads me to think that the (to use the pun you know is coming) burning question is how can we use the world’s most abundant substance as clean fuel? Or, more importantly, as my friend and former WGTCTIP2 author Erik puts it, “Does it take more energy to run the necessary storage equipment than the process generates?”
To continue, Erik wants to know why the article does not mention the obvious:

“Hydrogen fuel cells are totally possible, but the one hang-up is the current effort and cost to generate pure hydrogen needed to fuel them. Right now you’d need to capture it from a fossil fuel burning reaction, which obviously isn’t ideal, and then store it at a gas station for people to fill up, making it a huge infrastructure challenge as well. With this machine, instead of burning the released hydrogen, capture it. We could all one day have these in our garages and use them to fuel our cars ourselves.”

Below is a clip from the local news about this cancer fighter who accidentally lit salt water on fire and maybe in the process has saved mankind:

Via Neu

science

Sen. Sam Brownback Believes In The Truth: His Truth

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Senator Sam Brownback from Kansas is running for President and does not believe in evolution. To defend his view, he wrote an Op Ed in today’s NY Times which starts off making some surprisingly good points but he winds up seeming pretty creepy and backwards to me in the end. Here is one snippet:

The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded. I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.

I thought what brought me into existence was that my parents had sex. Hmmm. His piece gets even loopier and nuttier when he says that any theory that does not state that man is a special being created in God’s mind is not science but atheism posing as science. I’m not kidding, here it is word for word:

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

There is actually a lot of evidence that says man’s development was an accident. I love how he throws this word “truth” around. Please note that his man is one of only one hundred senators in this fair land. And he wants to be President. I wonder what he would do with intelligence and/or information that doesn’t fit his worldview. Maybe disregard it like our current President does?

science

No More "Mind Your Beeswax?"

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Just what the world needs, another mysterious and potentially disastrous problem to deal with. The issue at hand is that tens of billions of bees are lost and can’t find their way home to their hives. Why should you care? Well, honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain as they are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. No bees, no food.
While the volume of theories as to why this is happening is “totally mind-boggling” according to Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologiest at Penn State, the one thing that scientists agree on is that this is serious and that they have a name for it: colony collapse disorder. The three most likely suspects are a virus, a fungus or a pesticide. What else is new?
If you are into science, read more about it from the NY Times after the jump. Even if you aren’t into science, its a pretty interesting read about how all sorts of things we knew about the world are just going haywire.
Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons by Alexei Barrionuevo, April 24, 2007
Beltsville, Md., April 23 — What is happening to the bees?
More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.
As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.
The volume of theories “is totally mind-boggling,” said Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University. With Jeffrey S. Pettis, an entomologist from the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr. Cox-Foster is leading a team of researchers who are trying to find answers to explain “colony collapse disorder,” the name given for the disappearing bee syndrome.
“Clearly there is an urgency to solve this,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “We are trying to move as quickly as we can.”
Dr. Cox-Foster and fellow scientists who are here at a two-day meeting to discuss early findings and future plans with government officials have been focusing on the most likely suspects: a virus, a fungus or a pesticide.
About 60 researchers from North America sifted the possibilities at the meeting today. Some expressed concern about the speed at which adult bees are disappearing from their hives; some colonies have collapsed in as little as two days. Others noted that countries in Europe, as well as Guatemala and parts of Brazil, are also struggling for answers.
“There are losses around the world that may or not be linked,” Dr. Pettis said.
The investigation is now entering a critical phase. The researchers have collected samples in several states and have begun doing bee autopsies and genetic analysis.
So far, known enemies of the bee world, like the varroa mite, on their own at least, do not appear to be responsible for the unusually high losses.
Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.
“That is extremely unusual,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.
Meanwhile, samples were sent to an Agriculture Department laboratory in North Carolina this month to screen for 117 chemicals. Particular suspicion falls on a pesticide that France banned out of concern that it may have been decimating bee colonies. Concern has also mounted among public officials.
“There are so many of our crops that require pollinators,” said Representative Dennis Cardoza, a California Democrat whose district includes that state’s central agricultural valley, and who presided last month at a Congressional hearing on the bee issue. “We need an urgent call to arms to try to ascertain what is really going on here with the bees, and bring as much science as we possibly can to bear on the problem.”
So far, colony collapse disorder has been found in 27 states, according to Bee Alert Technology Inc., a company monitoring the problem. A recent survey of 13 states by the Apiary Inspectors of America showed that 26 percent of beekeepers had lost half of their bee colonies between September and March.
Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown. In October, at about the time that beekeepers were experiencing huge bee losses, a study by the National Academy of Sciences questioned whether American agriculture was relying too heavily on one type of pollinator, the honeybee.
Bee colonies have been under stress in recent years as more beekeepers have resorted to crisscrossing the country with 18-wheel trucks full of bees in search of pollination work. These bees may suffer from a diet that includes artificial supplements, concoctions akin to energy drinks and power bars. In several states, suburban sprawl has limited the bees’ natural forage areas.
So far, the researchers have discounted the possibility that poor diet alone could be responsible for the widespread losses. They have also set aside for now the possibility that the cause could be bees feeding from a commonly used genetically modified crop, Bt corn, because the symptoms typically associated with toxins, such as blood poisoning, are not showing up in the affected bees. But researchers emphasized today that feeding supplements produced from genetically modified crops, such as high-fructose corn syrup, need to be studied.
The scientists say that definitive answers for the colony collapses could be months away. But recent advances in biology and genetic sequencing are speeding the search.
Computers can decipher information from DNA and match pieces of genetic code with particular organisms. Luckily, a project to sequence some 11,000 genes of the honeybee was completed late last year at Baylor University, giving scientists a huge head start on identifying any unknown pathogens in the bee tissue.
“Otherwise, we would be looking for the needle in the haystack,” Dr. Cox-Foster said.
Large bee losses are not unheard of. They have been reported at several points in the past century. But researchers think they are dealing with something new — or at least with something previously unidentified.
“There could be a number of factors that are weakening the bees or speeding up things that shorten their lives,” said Dr. W. Steve Sheppard, a professor of entomology at Washington State University. “The answer may already be with us.”
Scientists first learned of the bee disappearances in November, when David Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper, told Dr. Cox-Foster that more than 50 percent of his bee colonies had collapsed in Florida, where he had taken them for the winter.
Dr. Cox-Foster, a 20-year veteran of studying bees, soon teamed with Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the Pennsylvania apiary inspector, to look into the losses.
In December, she approached W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University, about doing genetic sequencing of tissue from bees in the colonies that experienced losses. The laboratory uses a recently developed technique for reading and amplifying short sequences of DNA that has revolutionized the science. Dr. Lipkin, who typically works on human diseases, agreed to do the analysis, despite not knowing who would ultimately pay for it. His laboratory is known for its work in finding the West Nile disease in the United States.
Dr. Cox-Foster ultimately sent samples of bee tissue to researchers at Columbia, to the Agriculture Department laboratory in Maryland, and to Gene Robinson, an entomologist at the University of Illinois. Fortuitously, she had frozen bee samples from healthy colonies dating to 2004 to use for comparison.
After receiving the first bee samples from Dr. Cox-Foster on March 6, Dr. Lipkin’s team amplified the genetic material and started sequencing to separate virus, fungus and parasite DNA from bee DNA.
“This is like C.S.I. for agriculture,” Dr. Lipkin said. “It is painstaking, gumshoe detective work.”
Dr. Lipkin sent his first set of results to Dr. Cox-Foster, showing that several unknown micro-organisms were present in the bees from collapsing colonies. Meanwhile, Mr. vanEngelsdorp and researchers at the Agriculture Department lab here began an autopsy of bees from collapsing colonies in California, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania to search for any known bee pathogens.
At the University of Illinois, using knowledge gained from the sequencing of the bee genome, Dr. Robinson’s team will try to find which genes in the collapsing colonies are particularly active, perhaps indicating stress from exposure to a toxin or pathogen.
The national research team also quietly began a parallel study in January, financed in part by the National Honey Board, to further determine if something pathogenic could be causing colonies to collapse.
Mr. Hackenberg, the beekeeper, agreed to take his empty bee boxes and other equipment to Food Technology Service, a company in Mulberry, Fla., that uses gamma rays to kill bacteria on medical equipment and some fruits. In early results, the irradiated bee boxes seem to have shown a return to health for colonies repopulated with Australian bees.
“This supports the idea that there is a pathogen there,” Dr. Cox-Foster said. “It would be hard to explain the irradiation getting rid of a chemical.”
Still, some environmental substances remain suspicious.
Chris Mullin, a Pennsylvania State University professor and insect toxicologist, recently sent a set of samples to a federal laboratory in Raleigh, N.C., that will screen for 117 chemicals. Of greatest interest are the “systemic” chemicals that are able to pass through a plant’s circulatory system and move to the new leaves or the flowers, where they would come in contact with bees.
One such group of compounds is called neonicotinoids, commonly used pesticides that are used to treat corn and other seeds against pests. One of the neonicotinoids, imidacloprid, is commonly used in Europe and the United States to treat seeds, to protect residential foundations against termites and to help keep golf courses and home lawns green.
In the late 1990s, French beekeepers reported large losses of their bees and complained about the use of imidacloprid, sold under the brand name Gaucho. The chemical, while not killing the bees outright, was causing them to be disoriented and stay away from their hives, leading them to die of exposure to the cold, French researchers later found. The beekeepers labeled the syndrome “mad bee disease.”
The French government banned the pesticide in 1999 for use on sunflowers, and later for corn, despite protests by the German chemical giant Bayer, which has said its internal research showed the pesticide was not toxic to bees. Subsequent studies by independent French researchers have disagreed with Bayer. Alison Chalmers, an eco-toxicologist for Bayer CropScience, said at the meeting today that bee colonies had not recovered in France as beekeepers had expected. “These chemicals are not being used anymore,” she said of imidacloprid, “so they certainly were not the only cause.”
Among the pesticides being tested in the American bee investigation, the neonicotinoids group “is the number-one suspect,” Dr. Mullin said. He hoped results of the toxicology screening will be ready within a month.

science

Stick a Fork In Pluto…

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…it’s done. No, this post is not a bad joke about how certain Asian countries eat dog but about Pluto, formerly known as the ninth planet in our solar system. Whether or not Pluto is a true planet has been a subject of much debate over the last decade. Finally, the debate is over. When the definition of planet was solidified today by the International Astronomical Union, Pluto got the boot.

According to the Union, a planet is “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.” As Pluto’s orbit intersect’s Neptune’s orbit, it is automatically disqualified. A new category called “dwarf planets” has been created and that is where Pluto lives. I wonder if Disney will now change it to the 8 Dwarves and make Pluto an honorary member of the troop… plutotoy.jpg

After the jump, read all about it from the AP
Astronomers Decide Pluto Is Not a Planet
Filed at 12:20 p.m. ET, 8/24/06
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.
After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is — and isn’t — a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.
Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell — a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings — urged those who might be ”quite disappointed” to look on the bright side.
”It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called ‘planet’ under which the dwarf planets exist,” she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.
”Many more Plutos wait to be discovered,” added Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The decision by the prestigious international group spells out the basic tests that celestial objects will have to meet before they can be considered for admission to the elite cosmic club.
For now, membership will be restricted to the eight ”classical” planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Much-maligned Pluto doesn’t make the grade under the new rules for a planet: ”a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”
Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s.
Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of ”dwarf planets,” similar to what long have been termed ”minor planets.” The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun — ”small solar system bodies,” a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.
Experts said there could be dozens of dwarf planets catalogued across the solar system in the next few years.
NASA said Thursday that Pluto’s demotion would not affect its US$700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which earlier this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.
“We will continue pursuing exploration of the most scientifically interesting objects in the solar system, regardless of how they are categorized,” Paul Hertz, chief scientist for the science mission directorate, said in a statement.
The decision on Pluto at a conference of 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries was a dramatic shift from just a week ago, when the group’s leaders floated a proposal that would have reaffirmed Pluto’s planetary status and made planets of its largest moon and two other objects.
That plan proved highly unpopular, splitting astronomers into factions and triggering days of sometimes combative debate that led to Pluto’s undoing. In the end, only about 300 astronomers cast ballots.
Now, two of the objects that at one point were cruising toward possible full-fledged planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed Xena.
Charon, the largest of Pluto’s three moons, is no longer under consideration for any special designation.
Brown, who watched the proceedings from Cal Tech, took Thursday’s vote in stride — even though his discovery won’t be christened a planet.
”UB313 is the largest dwarf planet. That’s kind of cool,” he said.
——
AP Science Writer Alicia Chang in Los Angeles contributed to this story

art

Why The Dutch Continue To Rock

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A young Dutch architect named Janjaap Ruijssenaars has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force. Sure it costs over 1.5 million dollars but still, its a friggin floating bed! The Dutch continue to amaze me, and not just because they have legalized soft drugs. Hup Holland!
floating_dutch_bed.jpg
After the jump, read the article
Via Phyl, a woman who loves the Dutch as much as I do…
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – originally published on 8/8/06
A young Dutch architect has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force and comes with a price tag of 1.2 million euros ($1.54 million).
Janjaap Ruijssenaars took inspiration for the bed — a sleek black platform, which took six years to develop and can double as a dining table or a plinth — from the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 cult film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“No matter where you live all architecture is dictated by gravity. I wondered whether you could make an object, a building or a piece of furniture where this is not the case — where another power actually dictates the image,” Ruijssenaars said.
Magnets built into the floor and into the bed itself repel each other, pushing the bed up into the air. Thin steel cables tether the bed in place.
“It is not comfortable at the moment,” admits Ruijssenaars, adding it needs cushions and bedclothes before use.
Although people with piercings should have no problem sleeping on the bed, Ruijssenaars advises them against entering the magnetic field between the bed and the floor. They could find their piercing suddenly tugged toward one of the magnets.

science

More Green Versus Brown News

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For all those potheads out there, WGTCTIP2 has some good news for you. To follow up on a post from a few months back about the long term effects of smoking marijuana, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles “that surprised even the researchers,” marijuana smoking does not increase a person’s risk of developing lung cancer. Smoking cigarettes however definitely does, so if you are currently smoking and you must smoke something, switch from the brown stuff to the green stuff immediately. Not only will your lungs be healthier, but your appetite will improve and marginally funny movies and television will become magically more amusing.
After the jump, feel free to read the Reuters report.
Via Phyl
Study finds no marijuana link to lung cancer
By Deena Beasley Tue May 23, 9:40 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Marijuana smoking does not increase a person’s risk of developing lung cancer, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles that surprised even the researchers.
They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.
Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers. It did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
The study results were presented in San Diego on Tuesday at a meeting of the American Thoracic Society.
The study was confined to people under age 60 since baby boomers were the most likely age group to have long-term exposure to marijuana, said Dr. Donald Tashkin, senior researcher and professor at the UCLA School of Medicine.
The results should not be taken as a blank check to smoke pot, which has been associated with problems like cognitive impairment and chronic bronchitis, said Dr. John Hansen-Flaschen, chief of pulmonary and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia. He was not involved in the study.
Previous studies showed marijuana tar contained about 50 percent more of the chemicals linked to lung cancer, compared with tobacco tar, Tashkin said. In addition, smoking a marijuana joint deposits four times more tar in the lungs than smoking an equivalent amount of tobacco.
“Marijuana is packed more loosely than tobacco, so there’s less filtration through the rod of the cigarette, so more particles will be inhaled,” Tashkin said in a statement. “And marijuana smokers typically smoke differently than tobacco smokers — they hold their breath about four times longer, allowing more time for extra fine particles to deposit in the lung.”
He theorized that tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a chemical in marijuana smoke that produces its psychotropic effect, may encourage aging, damaged cells to die off before they become cancerous.
Hansen-Flaschen also cautioned a cancer-marijuana link could emerge as baby boomers age and there may be smaller population groups, based on genetics or other factors, still at risk for marijuana-related cancers.

science

Little Mermaid Update

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Milagros Cerron, Peru’s very own little mermaid, turned 2 and to that I say “mazel tov!”. She is basically doing fine – all things considered – and literally is a walking miracle (milagros means miracle in spanish and she has taken her first steps).

vert.milagros.ap.jpg

I know a number of readers, especially for some reason teenage girls in the UK, have been interested in tracking her progress and have left well wishes on WGTCTIP2. After the jump, feel free to read the CNN article about her.
Via Phyl
Peru’s ‘Little Mermaid’ making strides at 2: Doctor says girl should be able to walk on her own by year’s end
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Smiling, blowing kisses and taking small assisted steps, Peru’s “miracle baby” celebrated her second birthday Thursday, nearly a year after doctors successfully performed risky surgery to separate her fused legs.
Milagros Cerron, whose name means “miracles” in Spanish, was born with a rare congenital defect known as sirenomelia, or “mermaid syndrome.”
The condition is almost always fatal, but Milagros has not only survived but also grown into an alert, vivacious little girl who can pull herself from a seated to a standing position.
“We have managed to develop the muscles in the inferior extremities,” said Dr. Luis Rubio, head of a team of surgeons who operated on her in June. “The girl can now stand by herself and has started taking her first steps.”
He predicted she would be able to walk on her own by the end of the year.
To demonstrate her progress, Rubio held the child’s hands as she took small, shuffling strides during the party in the public hospital where her surgery took place.
He said that on May 25, Milagros will undergo another operation to separate a remaining 2 inches (5 centimeters) of fused tissue just below the child’s groin.
“That will permit the child to perfectly take a long step,” he said.
She will need 10 more years of reconstructive surgeries and rehabilitation, he said.
Milagros’ hips are narrow and small, and she has a deformed left kidney and a small right one located low in her body. In addition, her digestive and urinary tracts and her genitals share a single tube.
Dressed in a hot-pink shirt and blue jeans, Milagros enthusiastically blew out candles on a birthday cake shaped like the Walt Disney character “Little Mermaid,” the nickname she is known by in Peru.
Born with her legs fused to the ankles and her feet splayed, she resembled one of the mythical sea creatures before her operation.
Rubio said Tiffany Yorks, a 17-year-old American girl, was the only other person known to have undergone a successful surgery to correct the rare congenital defect, which is almost always fatal within days of birth.
Milagros is small for her age, about the size of a 1-year-old, and all of her time spent with physicians has taken a toll.
A team of speech specialists are now working with her to assure her linguistic skills develop normally, Rubio said.
“It is normal that a child says ‘mama’ at the beginning, or ‘papa,’ but the girl instead of saying ‘mama’ was saying ‘doctor.’ Her first word was ‘doctor,’ ” Rubio told The Associated Press.
But Milagros’ mother did not appear concerned with the detail.
“She does everything. She is a normal girl in her activities,” said Sara Arauco, 21, who gave birth to Milagros in a hospital in Peru’s Andes mountains. “The only thing is the small problem with her legs, and that’s nothing because everything else is normal. She knows more than 50 words.”

science

Too Damn Cute

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Lots of things have been really cute lately. There is a baby panda at the National Zoo and the world has gone ga-ga over him. You can watch him all day long on the pandacam if you want – he was just sleeping when I checked. Jessie is in total love and actually has a giant stuffed panda in her office now (courtesey of Animal Planet). It sits in one of her chairs and keeps her company. A few weeks back, Chris posted a link to this incredibly cute website called Cute Overload. Be careful, you’ll start hugging and mushing the screen. Of course my dog Bingham looks like a fluffy Ewok and is way too cute to get angry at, even when he’s unfurled an entire toilet paper roll and is caught in the act of happily muching away. Then there are these pics below of super cute baby penguins and the aforementioned panda cub:

So, it was great timing to see in today’s NY Times Science section article about the science of cute. Here’s a snipit: “Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

The article is actually fantastic, and some parts of it are incredibly funny, like how it says that humans find anything deemed needy and pathetic very cute because we ourselves are pathetic and so reliant on others when born.

Feel free to go to the Times article itself (and see some uber-cute pics) or if that isn’t available, read the entire article after the jump. Its long (over 2000 words) but totally worth it.

January 3, 2006

The Cute Factor

By Natalie Angier

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 – If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, goofily gamboling masked bandit of a panda cub now on view at the National Zoo isn’t enough to make you melt, then maybe the crush of his human onlookers, the furious flashing of their cameras and the heated gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick.

“Omigosh, look at him! He is too cute!”

“How adorable! I wish I could just reach in there and give him a big squeeze!”

“He’s so fuzzy! I’ve never seen anything so cute in my life!”

A guard’s sonorous voice rises above the burble. “OK, folks, five oohs and aahs per person, then it’s time to let someone else step up front.”

The 6-month-old, 25-pound Tai Shan – whose name is pronounced tie-SHON and means, for no obvious reason, “peaceful mountain” – is the first surviving giant panda cub ever born at the Smithsonian’s zoo. And though the zoo’s adult pandas have long been among Washington’s top tourist attractions, the public debut of the baby in December has unleashed an almost bestial frenzy here. Some 13,000 timed tickets to see the cub were snapped up within two hours of being released, and almost immediately began trading on eBay for up to $200 a pair.

Panda mania is not the only reason that 2005 proved an exceptionally cute year. Last summer, a movie about another black-and-white charmer, the emperor penguin, became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. Sales of petite, willfully cute cars like the Toyota Prius and the Mini Cooper soared, while those of noncute sport utility vehicles tanked.

Women’s fashions opted for the cute over the sensible or glamorous, with low-slung slacks and skirts and abbreviated blouses contriving to present a customer’s midriff as an adorable preschool bulge. Even the too big could be too cute. King Kong’s newly reissued face has a squashed baby-doll appeal, and his passion for Naomi Watts ultimately feels like a serious case of puppy love – hopeless, heartbreaking, cute.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can’t lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.
The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked.
Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Observing that many Floridians have an enormous affection for the manatee, which looks like an overfertilized potato with a sock puppet’s face, Roger L. Reep of the University of Florida said it shone by grace of contrast. “People live hectic lives, and they may be feeling overwhelmed, but then they watch this soft and slow-moving animal, this gentle giant, and they see it turn on its back to get its belly scratched,” said Dr. Reep, author with Robert K. Bonde of “The Florida Manatee: Biology and Conservation.”

“That’s very endearing,” said Dr. Reep. “So even though a manatee is 3 times your size and 20 times your weight, you want to get into the water beside it.”

Even as they say a cute tooth has rational roots, scientists admit they are just beginning to map its subtleties and source. New studies suggest that cute images stimulate the same pleasure centers of the brain aroused by sex, a good meal or psychoactive drugs like cocaine, which could explain why everybody in the panda house wore a big grin.

At the same time, said Denis Dutton, a philosopher of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the rapidity and promiscuity of the cute response makes the impulse suspect, readily overridden by the angry sense that one is being exploited or deceived.

“Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, Let’s not worry about complexities, just love me,” said Dr. Dutton, who is writing a book about Darwinian aesthetics. “That’s where the sense of cheapness can come from, and the feeling of being manipulated or taken for a sucker that leads many to reject cuteness as low or shallow.”

Quick and cheap make cute appealing to those who want to catch the eye and please the crowd. Advertisers and product designers are forever toying with cute cues to lend their merchandise instant appeal, mixing and monkeying with the vocabulary of cute to keep the message fresh and fetching.
That market-driven exercise in cultural evolution can yield bizarre if endearing results, like the blatantly ugly Cabbage Patch dolls, Furbies, the figgy face of E.T., the froggy one of Yoda. As though the original Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t considered cute enough, the updated edition was made rounder and shinier still.

“The new Beetle looks like a smiley face,” said Miles Orvell, professor of American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. “By this point its origins in Hitler’s regime, and its intended resemblance to a German helmet, is totally forgotten.”

Whatever needs pitching, cute can help. A recent study at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the University of Michigan showed that high school students were far more likely to believe antismoking messages accompanied by cute cartoon characters like a penguin in a red jacket or a smirking polar bear than when the warnings were delivered unadorned.

“It made a huge difference,” said Sonia A. Duffy, the lead author of the report, which was published in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. “The kids expressed more confidence in the cartoons than in the warnings themselves.”

Primal and widespread though the taste for cute may be, researchers say it varies in strength and significance across cultures and eras. They compare the cute response to the love of sugar: everybody has sweetness receptors on the tongue, but some people, and some countries, eat a lot more candy than others.

Experts point out that the cuteness craze is particularly acute in Japan, where it goes by the name “kawaii” and has infiltrated the most masculine of redoubts. Truck drivers display Hello Kitty-style figurines on their dashboards. The police enliven safety billboards and wanted posters with two perky mouselike mascots, Pipo kun and Pipo chan.

Behind the kawaii phenomenon, according to Brian J. McVeigh, a scholar of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, is the strongly hierarchical nature of Japanese culture. “Cuteness is used to soften up the vertical society,” he said, “to soften power relations and present authority without being threatening.”

In this country, the use of cute imagery is geared less toward blurring the line of command than toward celebrating America’s favorite demographic: the young. Dr. Orvell traces contemporary cute chic to the 1960’s, with its celebration of a perennial childhood, a refusal to dress in adult clothes, an inversion of adult values, a love of bright colors and bloopy, cartoony patterns, the Lava Lamp.
Today, it’s not enough for a company to use cute graphics in its advertisements. It must have a really cute name as well. “Companies like Google and Yahoo leave no question in your mind about the youthfulness of their founders,” said Dr. Orvell.

Madison Avenue may adapt its strategies for maximal tweaking of our inherent baby radar, but babies themselves, evolutionary scientists say, did not really evolve to be cute. Instead, most of their salient qualities stem from the demands of human anatomy and the human brain, and became appealing to a potential caretaker’s eye only because infants wouldn’t survive otherwise.

Human babies have unusually large heads because humans have unusually large brains. Their heads are round because their brains continue to grow throughout the first months of life, and the plates of the skull stay flexible and unfused to accommodate the development. Baby eyes and ears are situated comparatively far down the face and skull, and only later migrate upward in proportion to the development of bones in the cheek and jaw areas.

Baby eyes are also notably forward-facing, the binocular vision a likely legacy of our tree-dwelling ancestry, and all our favorite Disney characters also sport forward-facing eyes, including the ducks and mice, species that in reality have eyes on the sides of their heads.

The cartilage tissue in an infant’s nose is comparatively soft and undeveloped, which is why most babies have button noses. Baby skin sits relatively loose on the body, rather than being taut, the better to stretch for growth spurts to come, said Paul H. Morris, an evolutionary scientist at the University of Portsmouth in England; that lax packaging accentuates the overall roundness of form.

Baby movements are notably clumsy, an amusing combination of jerky and delayed, because learning to coordinate the body’s many bilateral sets of large and fine muscle groups requires years of practice. On starting to walk, toddlers struggle continuously to balance themselves between left foot and right, and so the toddler gait consists as much of lateral movement as of any forward momentum.
Researchers who study animals beloved by the public appreciate the human impulse to nurture anything even remotely babylike, though they are at times taken aback by people’s efforts to identify with their preferred species.

Take penguins as an example. Some people are so wild for the creatures, said Michel Gauthier-Clerc, a penguin researcher in Arles, France, “they think penguins are mammals and not birds.” They love the penguin’s upright posture, its funny little tuxedo, the way it waddles as it walks. How like a child playing dress-up!

Endearing as it is, Dr. Gauthier-Clerc explained that the apparent awkwardness of the penguin’s march had nothing to do with clumsiness or uncertain balance. Instead, he said, penguins waddle to save energy. A side-to-side walk burns fewer calories than a straightforward stride, and for birds that fast for months and live in a frigid climate, every calorie counts.

As for the penguin’s maestro garb, the white front and black jacket suits its aquatic way of life. While submerged in water, the penguin’s dark backside is difficult to see from above, camouflaging the penguin from potential predators of air or land. The white chest, by contrast, obscures it from below, protecting it against carnivores and allowing it to better sneak up on fish prey.

The giant panda offers another case study in accidental cuteness. Although it is a member of the bear family, a highly carnivorous clan, the giant panda specializes in eating bamboo.

As it happens, many of the adaptations that allow it to get by on such a tough diet contribute to the panda’s cute form, even in adulthood. Inside the bear’s large, rounded head, said Lisa Stevens, assistant panda curator at the National Zoo, are the highly developed jaw muscles and the set of broad, grinding molars it needs to crush its way through some 40 pounds of fibrous bamboo plant a day.

When it sits up against a tree and starts picking apart a bamboo stalk with its distinguishing pseudo-thumb, a panda looks like nothing so much like Huckleberry Finn shucking corn. Yet the humanesque posture and paws again are adaptations to its menu. The bear must have its “hands” free and able to shred the bamboo leaves from their stalks.

The panda’s distinctive markings further add to its appeal: the black patches around the eyes make them seem winsomely low on its face, while the black ears pop out cutely against the white fur of its temples.

As with the penguin’s tuxedo, the panda’s two-toned coat very likely serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it helps a feeding bear blend peacefully into the dappled backdrop of bamboo. On the other, the sharp contrast between light and dark may serve as a social signal, helping the solitary bears locate each other when the time has come to find the perfect, too-cute mate.