"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the best. He's an Astrophysicist with a wife and two kids and what is probably the best twitter feed on the whole internet, and an out-of this world of knowledge about space and the universe.

Yes, he is a real person who exists, all you naysayers. And he's actually quite famous. And really, really cool.

I've mentioned him before on this blog, because he used to host NOVA Science Now,  but I feel like I should dedicate an entire post to him because he's actually on my list of my favorite people.

So here we are.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson was born in Manhattan, the second of three children. He graduated from Harvard and earned a doctorate from Columbia, then went to work at the Hayden Planetarium. He eventually became the director, renovating and greatly improving the planetarium. He hosted NOVA Scince Now for five years, served as a presidential adviser, and also makes frequent appearances in the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report. He's written a lot of books, like Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandarie and The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was the one to declare Pluto a dwarf planet instead of a regular planet (perhaps his only fault), but what he's most famous for is his ability to explain complicated science concepts in a way that's easy to understand.

He also has a lot of opinions about religion, spirituality, and God. He  was an eyewitness to the 9-11 attack. He has the awesomest ties that have space and planets on them.

The thing I admire the most about him is how passionate he is about Astrophysics, and how much he knows about it. I mean, he actually knows everything about space. If I don't become a Rabbi or Shakespearean actress or author or journalist or archaeologist or teacher, I definitely want to be him when I grow up.


Here's him, talking, being awesome, like he always is.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is my favorite.

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

one might say. Although, one would be wrong.

Haha, get it? The sky is falling? Chicken Little? The asteroid landing in Russia? Eh? Eh?

I'm sick. It's not my best, I'll admit. 

Anyways, I though I'd discuss the event that occurred in Russia last Friday. Because it's space, and current, and all sorts of fun things.

So.

In brief, here's what happened:

On last Friday morning, a relatively "small" meteor crashed on the earth (55 feet in diameter, weighing about 10,000 tons), near Chelyabinsk, Russia. The crash released the energy of more than 30 atomic bombs. The shock waves caused by it shattered glass windows and injured over 1,000 people.

Small fragments of the meteor have been found scattered around the site, ranging from very, very small, to just sort-of-small. This particular meteor came from the asteroid belt, and not from the moon or Mars, like many do. For those of you who don't know, the asteroid belt is pretty much a ring of floating space rocks in between Mars and Jupiter. They can be dislodged by comets, gravity, any number of things.

When these asteroids do approach Earth, they fly into our atmosphere. Most of them, if they're small enough, burn up there, and don't really cause a big splash, so to speak. You may have seen this during a meteor shower; however, sometimes they don't burn up entirely, and then bits land on the Earth. That's what happened on Friday.

Fun fact: according to the Wall Street Journal, "A meteor is what is seen burning up flying through the atmosphere. A meteorite is what survives the plunge and lands on the earth's surface."

 The event was filmed completely by accident by several drivers from little cameras mounted on their dashboards. Apparently, that's a thing in Russia, so that if someone assaults their car, they have proof for corrupt police or people trying to make faulty insurance claims. There's a segment on the Daily Show. You should watch it.

The terrifying thing, for me, at least, is not that this asteroid crashed as it did, but that NASA had no idea. Apparently, they're stepping up asteroid detection, but why haven't they yet? In my humble (cough not really cough) opinion, I feel like defending the Earth should be one of their top priorities.(Although, when you think of the Earth, you should remember that IT. IS. DEFENDED. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry (I'm not.)). Besides, you know, discovering new things out there, in space...

I think that everything in the universe is important. Not just because I watch too much doctor who, but mostly because I knowing what's out there, be it helpful aliens or mortally destructive space rocks, is so, so interesting and important. There could be, and I think there is, an entire universe full of wonderfully diverse life and planets and everything. The universe is infinity.

Your whole life is a lie.

Well. Most of it. Well, some of it. Well, a very, very, small, somewhat unimportant part of it. But nevermind that.

Let's talk about Apatosaureses. Apatosauri? Apatosaurs? Whatever the plural form may be, today I'm going to tell you about the species of dinosaur known as Apatosaurus. Okay.

Apatosaurus was discovered in 1877 by paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh.  In a nutshell, Apatosaurs are a type of plant-eating sauropod, those dinosaurs with the really long necks, from 154 million to 150 million years ago, or during the the Jurassic period. They lived hereish, in the woodlands of North America. They're really, really big, some of the biggest dinosaurs, about 75-85 feet long and 18 tons. It had to keep its head parallel to the ground most of the time because it's neck is too long and heavy and it would be hard to maintain its blood pressure.

I've always felt bad for apatosaurs. They're the saddest dinosaur, in my opinion. Not because they're wimpy or they died out quickly or anything like that, but because there's been so much confusion as to their identity.

Their name, Apatosaur, comes from greek words (like most dinosaur names) "apate/apatelos," which means "deceptive," and "sauro," meaning "lizard." Even from the beginning, apatosaurs (I guess that's what I'm calling them now. Bear with me) were mistaken for a different type of dinosaur-- Mosasaurus, which is an aquatic reptile.

Shortly after Marsh discovered an incomplete set of fossil remains and named them Apatosaurus, he discovered another set of remains, this one more complete, and named it Brontosaurus. Have you heard of them? Good. Now erase them from your mind. You've been lied too. We've all been lied to.

As it turns out, Marsh did not, in fact, discover a new dinosaur. What he discovered were a mostly complete set of apatosaurus bones and one camarasaurus skull. It took until the 1970s to figure this out, which is uncomfortably close to a whole century before the apatosaur was recognized for what it was. They are sad. See?

The reason that this mistake was made is because of something called the Bone Wars (also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush). Much like when everyone was rushing to discover new elements for the periodic table during the mid-late twentieth century (Hi, Ms. O'Donovan!), two of the world's greatest fossil finders, Marsh and another paleontologist named Edward Drinker Cope, were rushing to discover more dinosaurs, first. And also like the periodic table of the elements discovery war, the competitive nature of the scientist often led to rushed decisions, mistaking already found dinosaurs (and/or elements) for new dinosaurs (and/or elements), and, in one case, putting the skull of one dinosaur on the tail instead of on the neck. Yup. That happened to Cope, which sort of makes Marsh's little accident a bit ironic.

So it's sort of understandable why Marsh made the mistake that he did, but not that excusable. Can you imagine if, millions of years in the future, scientist shoved the skull of shark on a human skeleton and called it a completely new sort of being that lived on the earth, terrorixing the humans and keeping them as slaves?

Actually, that would be really cool. But the point still stands.

I feel like we sort of owe apatosaurs an apology, even if they are a species of lizard that has been extinct for millions of years. So, on behalf of the human race, apatosaurs, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.

The reason that I know any of this (besides extensive Wikipedia research) is because of a band/group of storytellers called DinoRock. We had an actual tape thing of a bunch of songs about dinosaurs, one of them being about Alan Apatosaurus and his woeful history. I was going to find a video of this and share it with you, since it is vital to understanding this whole debacle (it's not, really), but unfortunately it can be found nowhere. I did find another one about a particular dinosaur named Harry, a parasaurolophus, though, so all is not lost. Here it is, and remember that this is my childhood.

I hope you enjoyed this small rant about dinosaurs. In the words of dinorock, "dinosaurs, dinosaurs forevermore!"

Some sources I looked at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus

http://www.livescience.com/25093-apatosaurus.html

http://www.wisegeek.com/was-the-brontosaurus-a-real-dinosaur.htm

http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurdiscovery/a/bonewars.htm

They're gonna be the last ones standing

If you had to guess one thing that could outlive any other being in pretty much any environmental condition ever, what would you say?

Not cockroaches. Not those cool, super poisonous cone snails, either. Not humans, certaintly.

Then what? Well, I'm glad you asked. If you didn't ask, I'm very sorry, but I quite frankly couldn't care less. Sorry.

The answer to your question, whether you asked it or not, is a tardigrade! You know, large blue box, bigger-on-the-inside, can travel through all of time and space....

I'm just kidding, of course. A tardigrade is actually a very, very small water animal, only 1.5 millimeters long at the most, that has eight legs, a plump, segmented body, and tiny little claw-type things. They're more amoebic than actually animal-like because they're so small and misshappen. They look like this:

 

They have a very slow, lumbering walk, like a polar bear, which is why they're sometimes called water bears. They eat plant and animal material. They're found throughout the world, mostly in moist places, and were first discovered in 1773. But the thing that makes them the most absolutely fantastic is that they can survive in all sorts of extremely treacherous conditions. 

Tardigrades are able to survive temperatures of around 300 degrees Fahrenheit to about one degree above absolute zero. They can live in very, very low pressure, like in a vaccum, or in very, very high pressures, 1200 times the atmospheric pressure. They can live for up to ten years, usually, in dry moss without water. Tardigrades can also withstand huge amounts of radiation that would be fatal to humans. 

They do this by going into a sort of hibernating state in which they slow and almost stop their metabolism and appear almost dead--sort of like when Juliet takes that sleeping draught in Romeo and Juliet. When they're in this state, they can survive almost anything. 

As you can probably imagine, scientists are fascinated by tardigrades. If they can survive end-of-the-world catastrophic conditions, then perhaps we can figure out a away to adapt their power into something we can use. 

For this reason, scientists launched some tardigrades into space in what is called the TARDIS, or TARDigrades In Space project. If the tardigrades can survive in space, that could tell scientists so much about survival and DNA and reproduction and cool science stuff. It's so exciting! Are you excited? I'm excited! 

Tardigrades are one of those little, awesome things about the world that sort of makes you want to know more about it. I mean, if virtually indestructible, teeny tiny little things can exist here, on Earth, in the world where we are every single day, what totally awesome cool things exist in other places, on other planets, even? It gives one furiously to think, does it not?

If you want to learn more about tardigrades, you can look at this video, which says some of the things I just said, but also some more things. I hope you're as interested in these little things as I am.

Cracking the Maya Code

Because December 21, 2012 is drawing closer, I decided to watch the 2008 NOVA documentary about ancient Mayan heiroglyphs, Cracking the Maya Code.

The film follows the discovery of ancient Mayan writing and how scientists have gradually managed to decipher the hieroplyphs more and more. Mayans used to be spread out all over South and Central America with their own unique and complex culture, mythology, and writing system, but the Spanish invaded their cities and destroyed all except 5 of their book, converted them to Catholicism, made them speak Spanish, etc. The Maya abandoned their cities and all but died out. Then in 1774, Jose Calderon found their temples and the writing that was in them. Soon, scientists and archaeologists began coming to the lost cities to learn about Mayan Culture and decipher the heiroglyphs. In 1810, a man named Constantine Rafinesque found copies of an ancient Mayan text and was able to figure out their number system. Scientists made a little progress in dating some Mayan monuments, but not much. An archaeologist named J. Eric Thompson then was able to chart all the Mayan Glyphs and tried to figure out what kind of language system it was. He deciphered a few signs, but eventually determined that most Mayan symbols were just pictures and had little meaning. Several scientists since then have been able to disprove that, discovering that the pictures could tell stories, could represent whole words, names, or just syllables. Being able to read the glyphs had a huge impact on modern Mayan culture, and Mayans are now able to learn firsthand the ways of their people that have been lost for centuries. It included several interviews with prominent scientists including David Stuart, Michael Coe, and Linda Schele.

This documentary did a very good job of clearly getting its message across with good use of point of view and characters, as well as sticking to the well-defined goal.

There were a few reenactments, all of which had realistic props, costumes, and actors.

The cinematography was very good. The different shots were well put together and relatively simple and easy to understand. There were several real pictures from the time period, all of which were helpful. When complex or somewhat illegible glyphs were shown, they would be outlined or highlighted in a way that made them clearer using special effects. This made it even easier to understand what was being said.

I really enjoyed this documentary. Although it isn't as well-known or life-changing as some documentaries,  it was very informative and really fascinating. It was really cool to follow the development of scientists's understanding of an entirely new language and culture. It's so interesting to think that this complex culture would be lost forever had scientists been unable to crack their code.  It was also cool to see how happy it made the Mayans of today to know that they could read, speak, and follow many of the same customs as their ancestors. 

If you'd like to watch it, which I highly recommend, it is available on the NOVA website, on Netflix, and, of course, here:

Cracking the Maya Code (52 mins) is not rated.

Synesthesia--part two

Okay, here is the probabbly-not-very-anticipated-but-still-here-so-you'll-have-to-deal-with-it part two of my explanation of synesthesia!

To see the first part, click here.

I just wanted to talk briefly about a few notable synesthetes.There are a lot, especially in the art and music world, because synesthesia usually has to do with color and/or sound. Some synesthetes will go their whole lives without knowing that they're different, believing that everyone can experience their unique perspectives.

• One of the most well known synesthetes is the famous composer, conductor, author, pianist, and lecturer Leonard Bernstein . He had timbre-color synesthesia, which means that the timbre of different notes triggered different colors for him. He was conductor of the New York Philharmonic orchestra as well as composing several pieces of music, including the songs for West Side Story. He wrote about his synesthesia and how it had influenced him as a musician in Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Bernstein also recieved the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Yeah, he was pretty cool. 
• Another fairly well-known synesthete is composer, big-band leader, and pianist Duke Ellington. Perhaps you've heard of him. He was an extremely influential figure in the history of jazz, but didn't limit himself to one genre of music. Because of his work, he was (posthumously) awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1999. He had sound-color and -texture synesthesia, so different notes (sometimes even the same note played by different people) had a unique color and texture for him. This exceptional perspective helped him to create the distinctive sounds he was so well-known for. 
• You may not have heard of this person, but you've probably heard of his work: the cartoonist Michel Gagné . He was the animator who created such films as Ratatouille, Osmosis Jones, The Land Before Time, and a lot more. He has music-color and movement synesthesia, which could explain his animation prowess. That synesthesia reminds me of this scene from Ratatouille where Remy has a synesthetic eating experience:  
• Abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky . Kandinsky was an art theorist as well as a painter, exploring the possibilities of the connections between the color scale, shapes, and sounds. He also is credited with being a pioneer in the field of pure abstract art. He was influenced by french impressionists, as well as his own sound-color ynesthesia. He wanted to combine his perception of sounds with the colors in order to create a fantastic visual experience. You can look at some of his works here. 

If you look around, you'll be surprised by how many famous artists are synesthetic. Synesthesia is not horribly uncommon, and synesthetes are very likely to go into some field of art. There are several famous artists who are confirmed synesthetes, including a few who are still being processed and some false alarms. Overall, synesthesia is an absolutely fascinating condition and one which we probably will never fully understand.

Synesthesia--part one

I've talked about synesthesia a little bit before, when I was discussing Daniel Tammet, but synesthesia is such a broad and delightful topic that I thought I would talk about it more. This post will explain more about the basics of synesthesia and its connection to language, and the next post will have a bunch of interesting synesthetic cases.

To recap: synesthesia is a condition in which neurological parts of the brain are connected in such a way that experiencing one sensation triggers the response of another. Scientists aren't entirely sure what causes synesthesia, but somehow, senses are linked. For example, a person with synesthesia might see purple whenever they eat chocolate, or hear a violin sound whenever they touch something fluffy. There are more than 60 reported different types of synesthesia, but scientists have only studied a few.

One of the most common types is color-grapheme synesthesia, which is when a person percieves a color when they read a certain letter or number, like the number three might be purple or the letter s might be red. Another moderately common type is number form, which is when numbers and times have different specific spacial locations.

Synesthesia is thought to run in families, and often is something children are born with; however, strokes, seizures, brain damage, drug use, and other potentially brain-effecting things can sometimes cause synesthesia. For Daniel Tammet, he had a bunch of epileptic seizures when he was four that probably caused his own synesthesia.

Synesthesia also is thought to be a part of the root of lauguage. There was a study in which participants were shown two shapes:

and asked which one was the "bobo" and which was the "kiki". Almost every single time, they said that the shape on the left was the kiki and the shape on the right was the bobo. The study was done before with the words "maluma" and "takete", with the same results. The sharper sounding word goes with the sharper sounding shape, and the rounder word goes with the rounder shape. This association, although not technically synesthetic, is based on the combination of sound and shape, which is a type of synesthesia. In the beginning of language, synesthesia and synesthetic connections could have caused things to be named the way they are because of how they sound. Words that have the short "i" sound tend to be words like "little" or "quick", because the short "i" sound sounds small. Words like "great", "grand", or "God" all have a hard "g" sound, which sounds big and important. If you think about it, of course that makes sense because that's just the way it sounds. "G" sounds large and grand. "I" sounds small. This is evidence of synesthetic roots at the basis of our understanding of words.

In addition, expressions like "loud shirt", "bitter wind",  and "cutting words" could be synesthetic as well-- they combine more than one sense. 

If you're still interested, there's a lot of stuff about it on the internet that's really cool. This is a good summary of it, if you like videos better:

There's an official organization group thing for people with synesthesia, called The Synesthesia Battery.
It's really cool.

Synesthesia is just so fascinating to me for a lot of reasons, but mostly because there's such a huge variety. Some people see sounds when they hear music, or associate different personalities with numbers and letters. There are just so many different types, and scientists haven't even found them all. Synesthesia could also be really important to scientists' current understanding of our perception of the senses and how the brain works. Or maybe this power could be harnessed and used for some purpose. I highly recommend looking it up if you have time.

Prepare for Trouble, and Make it Double

To protect the world from devastation! To unite all peoples within our nation! To denounce the evils of truth and love! To extend our reach to the stars above!

I have a little brother. He was six once. Therefore, yes, I did just quote Pokemon. Almost from memory.

This week, I want to talk about twins. While I'm not entirely sure whether or not Jesse and James are twins, I do know that they are two people who are roughly the same height and look similar, and seem to do a lot of things together, so I think of them as sort of twins.

I think twins are really cool. I really want one. People with twins probably don't agree with me on this, but it would be awesome to have a person who is your sibling but also the same age as you and probably one of your really good friends.

But scientifically, what are twins? And, more importantly, do twins have super magical twin telepathy?

According to wikipedia, twins are defined as "one of two offspring produced in the same pregnancy". There are two different types of twins: monozygotic, or identical, and dizyotic, or fraternal. Zygosity is just a measure of how identical twins are.

You can have boy-boy identical twins or girl-girl  identical twins. Statistically, female-female twins are more common than male-male twins. Boy-girl identical twins are extremely rare, as less than ten cases have been confirmed. In addition, the girl would probably have turner syndrome, which is when a female is missing part of one of her X chromosomes. (Just a very brief biology lesson-- women have two X chromosomes, men have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome).

Identical twinnings occur when a fertilized egg splits into two separate embryos. Because the egg has already been fertilized, both twins have pretty much the same DNA, so they look identical. They have different fingerprints, though, because their fingers were pressing different parts of their mother's womb, and, apparently, that's how fingerprints are created. The chance of having identical twins is about 3 in 1000.

There are also semi-identical twins, where they get the same amount of genes from one parent and unequal amounts of jeans from another parent. 

Fraternal twinnings are more common, about  6 per 1000 births to 14 per 1000 births.It happens when two eggs are fertilized by two separate sperm. They have the same similiraity in DNA and looks as normal siblings.

There are other twin-eque conditions of pregnancy, including

• vanishing twin, which is when one twin dies early into the pregnancy
• conjoined twins, which happens when an egg doesn't split all the way. They're also known as siamese twins. They're pretty self-explanatory. 
• parasitic twins, which is when one twin fetus causes problems for the other twin fetus because it's not fully developed. Sometimes this has to be surgically remidied. 
• chimerism, which I don't understand exactly, but basically means that chromosomes from multiple organisms are mixed.
• twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, which is when one twin is pretty much stealing blood from the other
• a lot of other ones, too. You can Wikipedia them if you want. 

The higher number of multiple births you get, the rarer and more potentially dangerous they become. Twins are fairly common,  triplets are less common, and anything more than that is very rare. No nonotuplets (9 birhts) have survived infancy, and one one set of octuplets, the Suleman octuplets, have survived.

Here's a short video from CBS about a group of septuplets. They're one set of the very few surviving septuplets in the world.

Twins are also very useful for scientific experiments. Since identical twins have the same DNA, they can be used to test the difference of genetic and environmental factors. This can help scientists determine the cause for many diseases, personality trait, and personal tastes to better understand both genetics and the human brain. 

 But do these multiple sets of babies have a special bond?

There are so many stories about a twin who gets a random, agonizing pain when the other has just gotten into a car crash, or twins finishing eachother's sentences, or knowing what the other one is thinking; however, that might be from living together and being so similar more than actual telepathy. Their similarities and familiarities with one another might subconsiously allow them to predict how the other one might react in a certain situation or empathize so much with their pain that they feel pain as well. There is no scientific evidence to support the idea of twin telepathy at all.

Perhaps as science expands, scientists will be able to determine the bond between twins. Until then, there are a lot of questions that they still have not just about how twins' minds work, but how their genetics work. And how they can harness their superpowers to fight crime and save the planet. Or not. You never know...
 


 

Do Your Research

I was reading the newspaper (as I do every day, of course) and I happened across an article about sociopaths-- I think it was in the Kids Post (because I'm just that sophisticated), and it sparked my interest.

Pretty much the only thing I know about sociopaths is that Sherlock Holmes is not a psychopath, he's a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research. And that psychopaths get bored.

Hahahahaa, oh, me. I'm hilarious.

I've only heard psychopaths mentioned in a criminal context, like the guys that go and shoot schools full of children. I'm mostly sure that psychopathy is a psychological condition instead of an insulting label hurled at criminals, but other than that, nothing. So, I thought I'd learn more, and thus this blog post was born.

So what are sociopaths? And psychopaths? And what's the difference?

Interestingly enough, when I searched "sociopaths" on Wikipedia, it redirected me to psychopaths, suggesting that they're the same or similar. Psychopathy is a personality disorder marked by several factors, including lack of empathy, lack of emotions like fear or guilt, egocentricity, manipulativeness, impulsivity, other antisocial behaviors such as substance abuse and rowdy and inconsiderate behavior, and a parasitic lifestyle.  Basically, psychopaths can't recognize other people's emotions very well or feel many emotions themselves without specifically learning to.

There is a psychopath checklist called the PCL-R, which was developed by psychologist Robert D. Hare. It assesses subjects based on two factors: Factor 1, Aggressive Narcissism, which includes things like superficial charm and the inability to accept responsibility for one's actions, and factor 2, a socially deviant lifestyle, like a need for stimulation and proneness to boredom. There a few others that don't fit into either category, like promiscuous sexual behavior and relying on sociological strategies to pervcieve and feign emotions, usually to manipulate people. Factor 1 is more useful in identifying psychopathy in women, while factor 2 is more useful for men. Experts recognize that this test is not perfect, but it can be useful in determining psychopathy.

There's also a test called the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, or PPI. This is different because it tests personality traits, instead of referring outright to antisocial behaviors themselves. There are 154 factors organized into 8 groups, which are then grouped into two groups, fearless dominance (social skills)  and impulsive anisociality not adapting to one's environment), plus one leftover factor which is important in itself, coldheartedness.

Psycopathy is not listed as a condition in itself according to the DSM, a system for testing mental disorders, but it is very similare to ASPD, which is anti-social personality disorder. Many experts argue whether or not psychopathy should even be classified as a separate condition.

Now onto sociopathy. I tried Wikipediaing it again, and this time, Wikipedia said that it is loosely defined and usually refers to psychopathy or ASPD.  When I went to the ASPD page, it explained that ASPD was different from sociopathy and psychopathy- and then explained the difference between the two.

The difference between psychopathy and sociopathy, according to Wikipedia, then, is based on what one believes to be the origin of such behavior- sociopathy is usually used by sociologists who believe that the cause is based on social factors, while psychopathy is used with people who believe it to be social or environmental.

Which is interesting when taken back into the context of BBC's Sherlock. If Sherlock considers himself to be a sociopath, then that implies that he thinks his family (namely, Mycroft) and perhaps his school life are what made him who he is. Cool.

But enough over-analyzing British television. My thought train isn't done yet.

It struck me that psychopathy sounded really similar to extreme autism. Autism is a wide spectrum of developmental disorders that usually include impaired social skills, which is a part of psychopathy.  In A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, the main character has severe autism, and he has to learn how to discern emotions with facial cue flash cards. This is also a psychopathic behavior. Also, Autism is thought to be somewhat genetic, similarly to psychopathy.

There are a lot of differences, though, as well. Autism is not limited to social efficacy, and neither is psychopathy. Autism also has to do with different parts of social efficacy, like looking people in the eye and symbolic play.

 I think it's important to understand personality disorders and why we do things because we have to deal with people all day, every day. Humans are social animals, and by understanding them we can make our lives more fulfilling.



Sources I used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_spectrum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder#Psychopathy_and_sociopathy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist

PBS, Evolution, and people

I don't think Mitt Romney truly appreciates the wonderful genius that is PBS. I watch a lot of it. And last night, there was this really cool NOVA special about things that make us human, specifically DNA, laughter, language, and tool-making.

It was so cool.

First of all, it was hosted by David Pogue, who is both really smart and pretty funny, which is rarer than you might think.  Not that scientists aren't funny, but a lot of documentaries have elder, condescending narrators who tend to make me feel stupid for not knowing what they're talking about. They're also really hard to understand. But this was fun to watch because Pogue is very engaging. He's a columnist for the New York Times and he's hosted a few other science series.
 NOVA ScienceNow is usually hosted by Neil degrasse Tyson. You may not know who he is, but you should definitely Google him, because he is awesome, too. He's an astrophycisist, which means he studies planets and aliens, along with knowing pretty much everything. He also writes books.
Scientists are so cool.

The actual program was nice, too. It wasn't just about the hosts.

If you think about it, humans have come so far. Not only have we built vast cities and created a profusion of life-helping technologies, but we've also improved genetics-wise. We have opposable thumbs, no tails, voice boxes, enough mental processing skills to modify our environments and use our surrounding, and cooperation skills that are essential to our survival.

Like laughter. One scientist took recordings of the sounds that different human-related monkey species make when they are being tickled, and they found that as their DNA became more and more similar to humans', their laughter became higher pitched and more vocalized. Our super-vocalized laughter has developed, it seems, primarily to manipulate each other. It helps us form emotional bonds with each other so we can work together to hunt and stuff. It's really interesting, because so many things we do and think are hardwired into our brains for an evolutionary advantage. Standards of beauty, for example. Most societies throughout history have prized healthy or younger looking women above others. Younger and healthier woman can live to have more babies. You know. Evolution.

Another really cool thing we do is language. Well, we don't do language so much as have the ability to form and understand complex sentences. Language, or at least more complex language, is remarkably rare in the animal kingdom, so scientists are trying to figure out where it comes from. They just found another australopithecus africanus (Lucy is a famous example) skull, along with a stone tool. Stone tools are also unique to the human species; so, since the astrolopithecus africanus is one of our ancestors, scientists tried to figure out how long we've been able to do these complex things. But that's not the best part. They used the stone tool to figure out whether or not astrolopithecus africanuses could talk by seeing if both skills use the same part of the brain.

It would never have occurred to me to do that.  The two ideas are so unrelated, but scientists connected them and tested them. And it turned out to be true! Tool making and language use the same part of the brain! It makes sense, if you think about it. Grammar is kind of like building things. Sort of.

Wow. Science is so cool. And scientists are really smart. that sounds sort of air headed, but I admire their perseverance and  passion for their work. If you watch them talk, they're really enthusiastic about everything they say. Not everyone is lucky enough to really love what they do. I just think it's great that not only do we have these really smart, incredibly talented people, but we also have jobs for them where they can learn more things. I want to be able to study what I love, and these people inspired me to try to do that.

Plus, evolution is really interesting. It explains how people have acted been for millions of years and how they came to where they are today. Just like George Orwell discussed in 1984, it is essential that we know our past to evaluate our present. For me, it's very important to know how people work because people are everywhere and they influence everything, If we understand each other, maybe we can finally manage to understand ourselves.