Since we live in different parts of the planet — dry vs. wet — humans and octopuses rarely cross paths. The general public has only recently begun hearing news that this sometime-sashimi is actually a remarkably intelligent animal. Octopuses are perhaps even more long-lived in their intelligence than us!
 
Science is now looking at the foreign world of the octopus to shed light on human problems that need solving. A team out of Sungkyunkwan University is attempting to find the best format for to a water-resistant adhesive. And through that effort, they are learning about what an engineering marvel our cephalopod friends are!
 
“If you’ve ever seen an octopus tentacle, you’d know it’s covered in little suckers, each a deep suction cup with a ball in the middle. [Assistant professor Changhyun] Pang and his team wanted to figure out how the tentacles stuck to things underwater, so they made their own tentacles. Rather than a long appendage with protrusions, they instead produced a polymer sheet with dimples tens of micrometers across, each with a little sphere in the middle.

They experimented with various sucker radii, finding that the stickiest adhesive had 50 micrometer dimples arranged fairly densely. They tried several different dimple shapes, and the octopus-inspired one was the stickiest by far under moist conditions, underwater, and under oil.”
 
A tape-like product with octopus-derived suckers on it could have many applications, including moving items underwater, preventing barnacles from adhering to surfaces, and, most importantly, creating a medical adhesive that could close wounds in wet or underwater conditions. The team considers itself on track for commercial applications to be rolled out in three years! I look forward to the fruits of this collaboration between invertebrates and their less lucky counterparts — us.
 

We’ve just gotten into summer, so there’s plenty of fresh local fruit — strawberries, peaches — that we get to enjoy before one of my fall favourites, apples! When the brisk October days come, and it’s time to find a pick-your-own orchard, I’ll keep in mind this fascinating New York Times article on apple hunters— who use scientific techniques to find the lost varieties of this essential North American fruit.
 
And there used to be 17,000 of these varieties, before industrial agriculture whittled the gene pool down a century ago. Now, 15 varieties, led by the abominable Red Delicious have cornered 90% of the market. But that’s not to say that gems of the past are entirely gone. Many melted into parkland or overgrown fields, and are now being rediscovered by a community of sleuths, who then help interested propagators breathe life back into heritage apples. How they do so is fascinating: using old donated seed catalogues and records of county fairs long past to determine rough locale. Then science gets involved!

“Most apple varieties, produced by chance intermingling of pollen from neighboring trees on family farms, cannot be definitively identified by DNA, so the history is important. Plant scientists said old varieties might have something to teach as well about evolution or climate, in looking at the qualities that kept a particular tree going despite the odds.

‘That’s my scientific curiosity: How did this plant do it? How did it survive when others died?’ said Amit Dhingra, an associate professor of horticulture at Washington State University who works with [apple hunter David] Benscoter and the Whitman County Historical Society on the Lost and Heritage Apples of the Palouse project.”
 
I don’t often think of the history (and industry) behind my favourite apples, when taking a big bite; I usually stay in the present of their crisp tart taste! If, someday, I have the chance to bite into a Limbertwig or a Dickinson that has made it back to market, it might be easier to think of them as edible time capsules. It will be a privilege to taste the hard-won flavour of centuries ago in a fresh fruit.
 

After a few years of awareness, researchers are now really digging into the mysteries of the bacterial powerhouse inside the human gut — the glorious microbiome. From chronic fatigue to jet lag effects, we are discovering that upsetting the unique microbial balance within each of us can have far-reaching effects.
 
But some of them may be positive: A team out of Arizona State University has uncovered  that patients who undergo one of the most aggressive forms of bariatric surgery end up with one of the most diverse gut microbiome profiles — and that the colony of happy bacteria doing their thing may be the principal cause of the subsequent weight loss, rather than the reduction in stomach size.
 
“Gastric bypass works like this: A surgeon takes the upper portion of the stomach and cordons it off with stitches, creating a small pouch. Then the doctor attaches a Y-shaped section of the small intestine to the pouch, which routes any food you might swallow directly to the second segment of the small intestine, bypassing the portions of your digestive tract that do most of the nutrient- and calorie-absorbing. It’s a pretty dramatic organ-reorganization. One that makes for a less acidic environment with more oxygen, allowing microbes formerly unable to survive in the gut to flourish.”
 
Megan Molteni of Wired relates that one of the new microbes that find themselves in the gut after this surgery is Lactobacillus a probiotic that assists digestion and is normally found only in the mouth! With the amazing results of this small study the researchers are now looking at microbial profile as the magic bullet for obesity control, and ways to affect the gut environment that don’t involve surgery.

As a woman in business, I am often aware of the way I speak, and how it comes across to clients and co-workers. Many damaging labels end up stuck to women who try to get their point across in power situations, and I like to do my bit in recognizing when that’s happening.
 
So I’m cheered to see that one linguistic quirk, uptalk, is being quickly reclaimed! (Uptalk is the“Valley Girl” tendency to end a declarative sentence with an upward inflection, making it sound like a question.) We have all heard about how women need to stop speaking in this manner if they want to be taken seriously, how it makes us sound undecided, or unsure, etc. etc. Of course, most of this criticism comes from people who are used to being in power and defining access to it — and now we’re looking at how uptalk has actually been a subversive demonstration of power all along.
 
Uptalk may share a technique that also occurs in American Sign Language — where a person signing a conversation raises their eyebrows, to signal to their partner the existence of a yes/no question, when there isn’t one in the content.
 
“According to studies:
(study 1: ;  study 2) […], uptalk serves the same purpose: By turning a declaration into a question, it invites the listener to listen actively, to nod or confirm, much like adding ‘you know?’ or ‘right?’ to a sentence. It also serves a more basic function of ‘floor-holding,’ preventing interruption by indicating there’s more to come; it turns a period into a semicolon.

[Journalist S.I.] Rosenbaum draws the connection beyond linguistics into sociology: Like ASL speakers, young women are often ignored or talked over. So it makes sense that they’d develop a similar defense.”
 
Nick Douglas of Lifehacker continues that “everyone” is now adopting uptalk, because of the strain that personal devices and up-to-the-second connectivity put on our attention spans. This is interesting, but I’m not ready to set aside the gendered nature of this particular bias quite yet. I think it’s high time for everyone to start listening to uptalkers, and not get hung up on how they’re saying it. And then, we can tackle the stigma of vocal fry next!

Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google, has answered a call for proposals from the City of Toronto for a high-tech partnership that will reshape a chunk of the city’s waterfront. Alphabet’s “moonshot” initiatives arm, Sidewalk Labs, has been looking for a city in which to embed a new kind of urban district that it wants to build “from the Internet up.” Now, after having considered and cast aside sites in Denver and Detroit, the faintly ominous-sounding project is in private talks to touch down in The Six.
 
Due to the aforementioned private nature of the development right now, details are sparse; but many sources have been extrapolating possible outcomes from Sidewalk’s previous, smaller, urban interventions like the (possibly privacy-invading) public Wi Fi and browsing stations LinkNYC, As well as the philosophies espoused by Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff. From Doctoroff’s talk at the Smart Cities NYC conference in early May:
 
“‘The future of cities lies in the way these urban experiences fit together and improve quality of life for everyone living, working and growing up in cities across the world,’ Doctoroff said. ‘Yet there is not a single city today that can stand as a model — or even close — for our urban future.’

“We’ve found that applying urban innovations at scale could reduce cost of living by 14 percent compared to surrounding metro areas for an average family in America,”
 
In addition to managing cost of living, the concept aims to overhaul five more “urban experiences” to through integration of technology: housing and real estate, transportation (including public), environmental sustainability, a “new public realm” (parks, sidewalk and street experiences), and data-driven city services (e.g. remote monitoring of congestion and pollution).
 
Ultimately, Doctoroff sees the eventual district’s growth as modeled on that of a tech company. I think it’s far too early in the game to know if that model is sustainable for tech companies themselves, let alone an entire city district. I’m reminded of the kind of top-down city restructuring of the Robert Moses era, where heavily urban areas full of life were razed in favour of freeways and housing projects. While there is no real life in the industrial “Quayside” area up for development, plunking a hive-minded, Google-associated, at-home-anywhere-we-just-need-a-city-who-will-have-us concept of a tech district into the real world might need a smidge more consideration, in my opinion. Hopefully, that’s what they’re doing in these private talks right now… Because the concept could be pretty cool – if we can sustain it.

I’m always impressed by the olfactory feats my canine companions Jill and Samson can accomplish. From searching a field for a groundhog to chase, to lasering in on the treat bag as I pull it from the kitchen shelf, I’m envious sometimes of the whole other world of scents they seem to inhabit!
 
Well, science may be showing that envy is not required: humans may actually have senses of smell comparable to that of dogs, and other big smellers like rodents. While we bipeds may have been socialized to not pay keen attention to scent input, we actually have competitive numbers of odour receptor genes, as well as a large olfactory bulb compared to the size of the rest of our brains. John McGann, a neuroscientist out of Rutgers and author of a recent paper in Science attempting to dispel the myth of humans as poor smellers, believes these physical realities translate into a better smelling skill set for us. McGann goes back to other studies and attempts to set the record straight. From the Guardian:
 
“Humans have approximately 1,000 odour receptor genes, for instance, compared to 1,100 in mice, which some had taken as confirmation of mouse superiority. However, other work suggests there is not a tight relationship between the number of olfactory genes and smelling ability. One study found that cows have 2,000 such genes – far more than dogs.

Even the constant sniffing of some animals may also be misleading, McGann said. When a rat is exposed to a new smell, for instance, it performs ‘fast investigative sniffing’ but rats have the same reaction to hearing an unfamiliar new sound or seeing something unexpected. ‘Sniffing, to some extent, means “I’m curious”,’ he said.” [Or, as we saw last week, “I’m anxious.”] 
 
McGann does concede a few points to the dogs though – that the reason they can detect the smell of explosives and we can’t could be due to the higher concentration of olfactory receptors in their noses. And critics of McGann’s work say that dogs have always been better at the kind of scent work (like tracking, sussing out drugs, or detecting kinds of cancers) that humans could not aspire to, even with the attention of a sommelier. But I think we could definitely fall somewhere in that huge middle ground between bloodhound and Pet Rock! If the nose knows, it’s only a matter of letting it do its thing, and the science will follow.

Humans, in a variety of situations and religious practices, have long engaged in deep breathing to calm and centre — for so long, that it can’t be just a philosophical response! Researchers have been attempting for decades to nail down why deep breathing affects us the way it does. A new study led by Stanford University shows that the answer may be buried deep in the structure of our brains.
 
The team, who published their work recently in Science, built on the aforementioned decades of work with mouse neurons. Nearly 30 years back, UCLA researchers identified a knot of interlinked neurons in the brains of animals, including mice and humans, which appeared to handle most of our breathing. They called this knot of neurons the “breathing pacemaker.”
 
Now that genetic science has become more sophisticated, the Stanford-led team is able to tease a few mysteries out of this knot, by selectively disabling the genes behind particular types of cells in this pacemaker. In one experiment, they disabled one breathing related neuron in mice, and then placed the mice in unfamiliar cages. In regular mice, this would cause them to sniff around, trying to get a handle on their new surroundings in anxiety. Instead, the mice sat and calmly groomed themselves, as though everything were completely familiar and normal. This pointed to an intriguing connection between rate of breathing and autonomic anxiety response.
 
“It turned out that the particular neurons in question showed direct biological links to a portion of the brain that is known to be involved in arousal. This area sends signals to multiple other parts of the brain that, together, direct us to wake up, be alert and, sometimes, become anxious or frantic. […]

Or, without that mechanism, it would remain tranquil, a mouse of Zen.”
 
Though this research is preliminary, the team is cheered by the fact that our breathing pacemakers resemble those of mice, even though the rest of our brains do not. This early work could lead to greater knowledge of the calming effects of breathing, and may assist in relaxing future folks who maybe need a little top-down assistance. (Like me, I hope — meditation shmeditiation…) Until then, keep calm and breathe deeply — research is simply proving what our bodies have known forever!

Showing the kind of get-up-and-go that may have, um, helped them in their previous careers, a group of inmates at the Marion Correctional Institution in Columbus, Ohio, constructed two working computers out of spare parts and hid them in a ceiling in their facility. They were discovered in the summer of 2015, when IT at the facility detected an unexplained upswing in internet usage, which led to an employee login that was suspiciously in use when that employee was off work. Now, the state is investigating how in god’s green earth this could possibly have happened.
 
It turns out the inmates were smuggling parts from a computer-building program the prison was running, and security was loose enough not to catch them. The inmates also smuggled enough cables to connect their resulting Franken-puters to the state network. Through this setup, they were able to steal the identity of another inmate and commit tax fraud, and spoof a security clearance to access secure areas in their own facility.
 
“‘It surprised me that the inmates had the ability to not only connect these computers to the state’s network but had the ability to build these computers,’ Ohio Inspector General Randall J. Meyer said. ‘They were able to travel through the institution more than 1,100 feet without being checked by security through several check points, and not a single corrections staff member stopped them from transporting these computers into the administrative portion of the building. It’s almost if it’s an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.’”
 
Thankfully, investigators have determined this to be a failure of security protocols, and not a sign that these sorts of skill building workshops need to be spiked. The rehabilitative value of these workshops will be preserved. Meanwhile, the investigators have issued an interesting recommendation: that the U.S. corrections department run checks on their networks for strangeness, rather than relying on fallible humans to twig to what’s wrong!

From one account of bias to another: This week we look at a new experiment that may redefine animal intelligence on their terms, not ours – opening up a whole new way of looking at the interesting animals with whom we share our planet!

The study (recently published in Scientific Reports) has shown that elephants show body awareness; that is, they recognize when own physical selves get in the way of a task. This form of intelligence is one that human scientists have not previously prioritized testing for. The gold standard of intelligence tests has long been the Mirror Self-Recognition Test, in which a subject is required to look at themselves in a mirror and demonstrate that they know the reflection is actually them. This test is biased in two ways: towards species that are visually oriented in their information processing; and towards humans in particular, for whom mirror recognition is a natural developmental milestone that kicks in at around 18 months old.

Elephants are among the few species other than us that pass the MSR test. Jumping off from that recognized intelligence baseline, the experimenters (out of the University of Cambridge) devised a more animal-friendly alternative test and had the elephants attempt it.

“ […T]he researchers attached a stick to a rubber mat with a rope. Elephants were required to walk on top of the mat, pick up the stick and pass it to a person standing in front of them. But as the elephant quickly discovers, the stick can’t be lifted all the way because it’s standing on top of the mat. In order to be able to hand the stick over, the elephant must step off the mat and try again.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, elephants excelled at this task. In tests involving 12 elephants, the animals successfully completed the task nearly 90 percent of the time. This suggests that elephants are capable of recognizing themselves as being separate from objects or their environment, and they appear to have a level of self-understanding—intertwined with their ability to pass the mirror test—that’s quite rare among animals.”

While the sample size is pretty small, the researchers are enthused at these early results. They also consider them a call to arms for other scientists: to continue to develop tests to identify different kinds of intelligence in animals, and not just intelligence that humans recognize as being like our own.

Good news for gamers! Swedish and British researchers working out of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute are looking at something a little unusual right now — the health benefits of sitting on your duff and playing a video game — specifically, the perennial classic, Tetris.
 
The benefits seem to be to mental health, and involve counteracting the intrusive, painful memories that can occur as a result of trauma. The small study the researchers set up (recently published in Nature) involved patients admitted to a UK hospital in the immediate aftermath of a car accident. While in the emergency room waiting to be checked out, participants were invited to either play twenty minutes of Tetris, or complete an activity log of everything that happened to them since they entered the hospital (this was the control group).
 
The researchers found that, in the first week after their accidents, the patients who played Tetris had 62% fewer bad memories than the patients who did the log — and, the memories faded more quickly for them than for their unlucky, paper-pushing counterparts.
 
The researchers are keen to set up a more comprehensive study, because this one points to an interesting function of the disruption of memory. Literally playing Tetris could theoretically be an early therapy for post-traumatic and acute stress disorders because its action can get in the way of a patient’s brain consolidating memories immediately after a terrible event.
 
“Traumatic memories are often highly sensory: Sights and sounds of a trauma can flash back in horrifying detail. [Psychology professor and study lead author Emily] Holmes believes that any highly visual activity that stimulates the brain’s sensory centers might prevent graphic recollections from forming in the first place. The colors, shapes and constant movement of Tetris may do just that, but based on Holmes’ past research, activities like digital pub quizzes and counting exercises do not. She plans to study other visually engaging interventions like drawing and the video game Candy Crush in the near future.”
 
Even though I have one, and I witness the world through its frame every day, I’m often taken aback by how startlingly complex in all its aspects the human brain really is. And I find it quite fitting that something as simple as an addictive little video game can interrupt a spiraling process, and jump start this important organ back to health! I’m looking forward to the continuing research into this therapy — who knows, really, when any of us might need it.