From the start of the Abbreviated Science Round-up, most articles have come from three peer-reviewed journals: Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (which is inelegantly, but understandably, abbreviated as PNAS). Occasionally, items have been sourced from other journals, but in the main there has been an attempt to avoid those items that have already been blatted across every news site and linked to death on social media.
The reasoning behind this was twofold: To give Daily Kos readers more original reporting of science stories that were not yet making the rounds of the popular press, and to avoid looking at these items through secondary sources which often distort and misreport stories, particularly when it comes to articles on health and medicine.
But going forward, there’s going to be a bit more flexibility. There will still be a weekly scan of Science, Nature, PNAS and other journals for articles that seem relatable. But there will also be more material from National Geographic, Smithsonian, and from news sites like the BBC and the Guardian.
I’m making that change because sticking with the journals means sometimes skipping over a story that is of obvious high interest, but which isn’t connected to fresh research results. It also means bypassing some terrific science journalism and failing to relay articles some of which are the results of months or years of work. And, frankly, some of these journalists have been doing just what I’ve been doing: Digging through articles with sometimes obscure titles and dense information, in an attempt to find interesting stories that impact people in their homes and daily lives. They’ve often done such a good job at it, that my taking a Friday-night, Saturday-morning swing at repeating their work seems not just pointless, but a disservice to readers.
That doesn’t mean you’re still not going to get such nifty little dips into the science pool as a paper on the best way to remove adhesive tape from artwork, a discussion on the difficulty of determining the effectiveness of Facebook ads, or evidence for large-scale looting following a battle between Romans and ‘barbarians’ in the FIrst Century. They’re in there, just after the fold.
It’s just that you’re also going to get a Smithsonian article on 3-D printed houses, National Geographic’s take on a paper showing how climate change slows hurricanes, and the Guardian talking about some very, very old footprints.
Come on … let’s science.
PSYCHOLOGY
How effective are targeted Facebook ads?
The answer to that question turns out to be that it’s very hard to determine. Because they’re targeted.
Last November, a quartet from Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Cambridge put out a paper that looked at the effectiveness of Facebook ads, specifically those ads that like those used by the now infamous Cambridge Analytica, used psychological markers to target and influence specific consumers. The results of the study suggested that these ads were not just effective, they were extremely effective.
Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences. We discuss both the potential benefits of this method for helping individuals make better decisions and the potential pitfalls related to manipulation and privacy.
Paired with the on-line actives in the last election, the paper makes a good case that everyone dismissing ad purchases by Trump’s campaign, or by Russians posing as various US-based organizations, had best think again. Because these ads were effective in not just moving people, but influencing what they said to others.
However, the authors of the paper acknowledged that determining the real effectiveness of the ads was difficult. The instruments of psychological research—from phone interviews and mailed-out questionnaires—seemed inadequate to the task, and downright clumsy in comparison to the sophistication of the manipulative items they were investigating. This week, a letter from a different Cambridge researcher, along with a pair from Northwestern, pointed up additional difficulties: Mostly that in trying to evaluate ads going to a targeted audience … it’s a targeted audience. That’s being targeted a second time in the attempt to create a study.
This wasn’t one of those letters that starts with the academic equivalent of “Jane, you ignorant slut ...’ The letter writers actually showed both interest and respect for the research that had been done in the original paper. But taken together both the original paper and the follow-up letter point out that researchers are in a tough position when they try to quantify the effects of ads that are being pushed out by multiple, overlapping teams using various theories of what peg fits best with what hole.
The tools for making ads are so far ahead of those for studying them, much less regulating them, that it’s as if cars had been invented that could go five hundred miles an hour, and people were still trying to work out the rules behind stop signs and speed limits.
Materials Science
How do you get Scotch tape off ancient parchment?
Adhesive tape may rate up there in terms of mankind’s great inventions, at least when it comes to convenience. Unfortunately, it’s proven so convenient, that it has been used in some places that might make you wince.
From Dead Sea Scrolls to Federico Fellini and Lucio Fontana drawings, pressure-sensitive tapes (PSTs) have been used as adhesive fasteners or as part of temporary conservation treatments that frequently became permanent.
Determining how to get adhesive tape off the Dead Sea Scrolls (yikes) and other treasured artifacts represents quite a challenge. The glue on the tape doesn’t just rip your precious original 2000: A Space Odyssey poster (darn tape) it does the same to even more valuable works. And over time that glue dries into a hardened yellow-brown mess that distorts and discolors the underlying art.
But researchers from the University of Florence, where art restoration is most definitely a thing, have worked out a process that a “hydrogel” — a network of polymers swollen by water drops. Inside the chambers of the hydrogel, they’ve added nanoparticles of a solvent. The combination allows them to attack and remove the glue, while doing minimum damage to the underlying artwork.
That tape doesn’t just put an ugly, modern smear across important artifacts. It can cover up some pretty important information.
… PST totally concealed the inscription, “di mano di Michelangelo” (“from Michelangelo’s hand”) …
Physics
The evolution of Italian violin sounds.
This one doesn’t come from the University of Florence. In fact, it’s from a research team at National Taiwan University, who looked at instruments from the modern violin’s creator, Andrea Amati, and his well-known follower Antonio Stradivari.
Taking apart Stradivari violins to see just what magic of wood, glue, and varnish makes a Stradivarius a Stradivarius, has been an obsession for decades, and there have been multiple papers recently about various aspects—including how climate change going back to the Little Ice Age may have affected the density of the wood from trees at the time the instruments were being made. But the Taiwan team wasn’t focused on how to make a Stradivarius. They were focused on the why. As in why, after almost four hundred years, do we still find the sound of a Stradivarius so special?
In particular, they tested one long-standing theory.
According to Geminiani, a Baroque violinist, the ideal violin tone should “rival the most perfect human voice.” To investigate whether Amati and Stradivari violins produce voice-like features, we recorded the scales of 15 antique Italian violins as well as male and female singers.
What they found was that violins by many different Italian makers had a vocal range similar to those of male singers, particularly basses and baritones. That’s not saying they were pitched lower, but when they were producing a particular note, the quality of that note was similar to that of a bass singer hitting the same frequency. But Stradivari’s instruments had voices more like tenors, or like female singers in the alto range.
Hey Siri, do people prefer listening to female voices? In any case Geminiani appeared to be right in comparing the tonal quality of these old violins to those of singers.
Evolution
Where do morning glories come from?
Morning glories are definitely one of those plants that is either a lovely flower, or a strongly-cursed weed. It depends on whether it’s draped decoratively over miles of old fence rail, or engaged in actively strangling your garden beans.
It’s also a bit of a evolutionary mystery. When people think about fossils, they’re often picturing dinosaur bones or maybe the shells of some ancient brachiopod (you know what a brachiopod is, you just don’t know that you know). But plants also leave behind fossil evidence, and not just in coal beds. Pollen, leaves, stems, even flowers, can be preserved under good circumstances, and evolutionary botanists have chased down the origins of many modern groups.
As it turns out Convolvulaceae, the family that includes Morning Glory, has a pretty robust pedigree for a flowing plant. Previous studies of fossils found in North America had argued that the family came from somewhere in Laurasia — the ancient mish-mash of North America, Europe, and Asia that existed before the Atlantic Ocean opened up in the Cretaceous. But family relationships indicated that morning glories were more similar to plants from Gondwanaland, that other former supercontinent that today is spread around the Southern Hemisphere.
And now the fossils have caught up to the family connections.
We report Ipomoea leaves from the late Paleocene (Thanetian; 58.7–55.8 million years ago) of India, which was a part of East Gondwana during this time. This is the earliest fossil record for both the family Convolvulaceae and the order Solanales.
Which … doesn’t make the flowers any less lovely along the steps, or those clinging vines any kinder to the blackberries.
Not just the first known footprints — the first known feet.
Trace fossils, those things that show that plants and animals were present, but don’t actually preserve any part of the structure of those organisms, are actually more common than you might think. Some of the first evidence of dinosaurs was footprints of “large birds” found in the eastern United States. Some creatures are known only from their fossilized prints, or burrows, or the trails they left in mud.
The tiny footprints and marks left by burrowing worms and scampering trilobites are often critical in interpreting not just the age of ancient stones, but the nature of the communities in which those organisms lived. And now, as the Guardian records, researchers in China have found footprints from a time when just having feet was a novelty.
The tracks were left by a primitive ancestor of modern-day insects or worms, according to scientists. Precisely what the creature looked like is a mystery, though: nothing this old with legs has been discovered to date.
The date placed on the footprints is 540—550 million years ago. That actually makes them older that Canada’s famous Burgess Shale by at least thirty million years. The Burgess is one of the world’s best lagerstätte—a place of extraordinary preservation. And it’s fine shale layers have recorded many of the creatures we associate with the “Cambrian Explosion,” that period in time when life seems to have gone from a few, mostly either tiny or soft-bodied organisms, to a wide variety that encompasses every phylum still around today. And possibly a few that are not.
But just as China has been turning up critical dinosaur finds over the last few decades, a pair of sites in that country are now rivaling the Burgess for fantastic, early looks at what was going on back at the beginning of animal-kind.
550 million years is … back there. In fact, this is in the period considered Pre-Cambrian, where most known fossils are decidedly odd.
Climate and environment
Hurricanes are moving slower, and that’s a very bad thing.
I’m actually hitting this from both directions, because it’s an important article. The link above is to a letter in this week’s issue of Nature. In it, James Kossin, from NOAA’s Center for Weather and Climate, shows that either NOAA hasn’t gotten the memo from Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt, or that he, at least, is intimidated.
As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the atmospheric circulation changes. These changes vary by region and time of year, but there is evidence that anthropogenic warming causes a general weakening of summertime tropical circulation. Because tropical cyclones are carried along within their ambient environmental wind, there is a plausible a priori expectation that the translation speed of tropical cyclones has slowed with warming. In addition to circulation changes, anthropogenic warming causes increases in atmospheric water-vapour capacity, which are generally expected to increase precipitation rates.
Hurricanes are moving more slowly, and packing more water. And as Craig Welch reports in National Geographic, that’s leading to an enormous increase in damage.
While having a cyclone travel with less speed may seem like a good thing, it's actually just the opposite. Wind speeds within the storm remain high, but the whole system itself moves slower across the landscape, allowing punishing rains to linger longer over communities.
Welch also notes that there have actually been two studies in as many months showing that hurricanes were making a slower passage—something definitely seen last season in the murderous passages of Harvey and Maria. More heat drives more vapor into storms, a slower passage means they hover over warm waters longer, picking up still more moisture and also building to a greater force.
And as Welch also notes, “related research … suggests that warming temperatures from climate change will slow storms more in the future.” So the worst is yet to come.
Plastic never goes away. At least, not for long periods. Geologically long. Much of the plastic that humans introduce into the environment instead just breaks down, and down, and down into smaller pieces. Pieces that for years scientists have been finding in marine organisms.
And now, marine organisms are returning the favor.
According to the study by the University of Hull and Brunel University London, 70 particles of microplastic were found in every 100 grams of mussels.
There’s a vital disconnection here – highlighted by the bottled water you drink to wash down your moules-frites, and the fact that 89% of ocean trash comes from single-use plastic. No sea is immune from this plague, nor any ocean creature, from the modest mussel or zooplankton to the great whales.
Materials Science
Netherlands gets a new neighborhood — from a printer.
Visitors to Austin earlier this year got the opportunity to see a home that was created by a massive 3-D printer that worked with concrete rather than plastic, and which could turn out a new, if modest, home in about a day. Now the Netherlands is planning to host and entire community of freshly printed homes.
The Netherlands’ first functional 3D-printed home will be ready to welcome occupants as early as next year.
According to The Guardian’s Daniel Boffey, the one-story, two-bedroom house is the first and smallest of five 3D-printed concrete homes set for construction in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. The five-year initiative, known as Project Milestone, aims to combat the country’s shortage of skilled bricklayers and revitalize the architectural industry.
At least five homes are currently planned. The construction method seems to be similar to the one used in Austin, with a robotic arm directing a nozzle to put down layers of a fast-drying cement. The resulting homes look … pretty okay, actually. In the Austin demo, a lot of the emphasis was on building solid, basic homes that might help to address the needs of people who were either homeless or living in substandard housing. But the Netherlands is treating the 3D printed homes as more of an art installation at the moment.
Hopefully, they can be both.
ARCHAEOLOGY
Battlefield looters after a Roman massacre
In 9 AD, Roman efforts to push their empire efforts ended with a defeat and massacre of Roman forces among the dark trees of the Teutoburg Forest. Over the next century, the Romans made multiple attempts to push Germanic tribes back to the Elbe. And the result was a lot of Roman corpses scattered across a lot of battlefields.
Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark uncovered one of those battlefields, and what they found was not just evidence a battle where three hundred legionaries, but what came after.
The relative absence of traces of healed sharp force trauma suggests that they had relatively little previous battle experience. Evidence of the systematic treatment of the human corpses, including stripping of bodies, disarticulation of bones, crushing of crania, and arrangement of body parts, points to a new form of postbattle activities, with implications for the interpretation of contemporary battlefields and later ritual traditions with regard to depositions of the spoils of war.
In short, someone—probably a good number of someones—went through the field of the fallen, crushing the skulls of the injured, stripping everything of value, and generally doing ugly things to people who had come there to do ugly things.
Image
This week’s image, as usual comes from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Visit his site for a larger, easier to read version along with dozens of other interesting infographics.