My house is a filthy mess. It has nothing to do with my housekeeping skills, (which I’ve never put on the list of things that help make me a whole person) I’ve been sweeping up at least twice a day and even the husband has been going around with the broom!

The culprits are none other the dogs and my new landscaping out front. The grading was changed and there is topsoil seeded with grass that is trying to grow….Jill loves sitting in the soil, she loves burying her bones in it, she & Samson both like digging and of course rough housing. And try as I might they don’t clean themselves off before they come in the house. Did I tell you Jill can open the door herself, both to go out and come in; so she comes and goes as she pleases.

Enough for now, I have to go clean the floors…again!

THE FIVE SECOND RULE RULED OBSOLETE
It’s happened to all of us: you’re sitting at your desk, happily working away and munching on a mid-afternoon energy-building snack. Suddenly, you lose your grip on your Ritz cracker smeared with almond butter, your corn chip, your seedless grape, and it falls to the floor in a desperate bid to escape your hungry mouth. You briefly hesitate, until a voice in your head shouts “Five Second Rule!”  So you snatch the fugitive morsel up quickly, wipe off the dust, and pop it into your mouth — day saved.

Or is it? C. Claiborne Ray of the New York Times’ Science Q&A column cites a 2007 study from the Journal of Applied Microbiology which exposes the Five Second Rule as a health-compromising misconception. Researchers took turns dropping slices of bologna and bread onto different types of surfaces contaminated with salmonella, then tested to see how much bacteria had transferred to the food. Their results were shocking (and gross): From tile, wood, and carpet, more than 99% of the salmonella present transferred to the food almost immediately, with no difference between the exposure times of five, 30 and 60 seconds.

(Digression: I recall a couple years ago that Adam and Jamie debunked this particular belief in their own unique style on Mythbusters. (watch this video ) It’s great to see their methodologies confirmed! Isn’t Science grand?

The fascinating full study can be found here. (You may not want to read it while eating lunch!) The short version: next time you lose a snack to gravity, grant it its freedom and put it in the trash — participating in this particular science experiment may not be worth the stomachache.

We at DFC have already reported on the many talents of the smartphone – from testing your stress, to becoming a high-powered microscope. Now there’s yet another service they can do to add to that list: helping to mitigate cravings for food, drugs, and other activities.

It has everything to do with what the subjects did (and most of do) on their smartphones: play games! Specifically Tetris, the finest Soviet-era puzzle game ever committed to pixels. Researchers from Plymouth University and Queensland University of Technology, Australia, have just reported on their experiment in the journal Addictive Behaviors. They rounded up 31 undergrads between the ages of 18 and 27, and had them self-report cravings they were experiencing (for things like food, sleep, cigarettes, coffee…) both when prompted by text messages and on their own. Half of the group then played Tetris on iPods for three minutes before reporting their levels of craving again.

The undergrads who played Tetris reported significantly decreased levels of craving than their co-subjects, to the tune of 50% to 76%. This marks the first time that “cognitive interference” has been proven an effective non-food craving management tool outside of a laboratory setting. How lead researcher Prof. Jackie Andrade postulates this works is very interesting:

“‘We think the Tetris effect happens because craving involves imagining the experience of consuming a particular substance or indulging in a particular activity. Playing a visually interesting game like Tetris occupies the mental processes that support that imagery; it is hard to imagine something vividly and play Tetris at the same time.’”

I’m sorry if you have a video-game obsessive in your life, because now they have science backing them up on the “At least I’m not doing [insert intoxicant here]!”  front. Otherwise: how cool is it that we can manage our own pesky cravings by distracting ourselves for three measly minutes! In fact, I bet it doesn’t even have to be with Tetris – just something as visually imaginative, as Prof. Andrade says. Maybe a game of tennis… There. There’s your totally unscientific rejoinder to your hypothetical video game nut. You’re welcome!

This August brings with it much memorializing, as it marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Pacific War, the last conflict of World War II. This end began of course with the cataclysmic use of the most extraordinary weapon humanity had seen to date: the atom bomb. The city of Hiroshima saw widespread destruction when the United States unleashed the bomb “Little Boy” at 8:15am on August 6, 1945; “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki on the morning of August 9. Japan formally surrendered on September 2.

While scholars are now, with the benefit of hindsight, divided on the necessity of using the A-bomb, at the time decision was regarded as inevitable, and taken very seriously (Harry S. Truman called it “an awful responsibility.”) In fact, during the long march into the Atomic Age, many other ideas were floated by Americans intent on breaking Japan. One of the nuttiest involved everyone’s favourite rabies vector, bats.

In January 1942, Dr. Lytle S. Adams of Pennsylvania penned a missive to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, outlining his plan to arm bats with incendiary bombs, and take advantage of their natural tendency to fly in a wide spread and roost in eaves to destroy the wood and paper homes of the Japanese people over whom these special bats would be dropped.

This plan, dubbed “Project X-Ray,” was perhaps crazy, but so well-elucidated (and Adams so well-connected: he was a friend of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt), that FDR kicked it up to the head of wartime intelligence, Col. William J. Donovan. Dr. Adams and his off-the-wall scheme got funded.

Adams footed a team of bat experts who sourced agreeable chiropterans from a Texas colony of Mexican Free-Tailed bats. Then thought turned to the nature of the bombs, both the ones the bats would be carrying, and the one in which they would be dropped from a plane. From i09:

“Two major tasks remained: designing the mini-bombs that each bat would carry, and the larger bomb that would house the whole shebang. The first problem was given to Dr. Louis Fieser, best known as the inventor of military napalm. It was a tricky project—the bombs had to be light enough for the bats to carry, and they couldn’t contain reagents, like phosphorus, that reacted with oxygen, because their bat carriers had to be able to breathe. Fieser settled on a light pill-shaped case made out of nitrocellulose, or guncotton, and filled with kerosene. A capsule on the side of the bomb held a firing pin, which was separated from the cartridge by a thin steel wire. The whole thing weighed seventeen grams (or about as much as three American quarters), and dangled from a string.”

“The larger, housing bomb was entrusted to the Crosby Research Foundation, a joint venture of famous crooner Bing Crosby and his brothers Bob and Larry [Ed. note: What?!]. Based on a design by Adams, it looked, from the outside, like a normal bomb, a cigar of sheet metal with a tapered nose and fins. But on the inside, it was outfitted with a parachute and heating and cooling controls, and stacked with enough cardboard trays to hold one thousand and forty bats.”

The bats would be prompted to hibernate by the cool interior temperature of the bomb. They would then slumber through the long flight to their target city, bearing mini bombs strapped to them, into which copper chloride, a corrosive, had been injected. Once released, they would awaken and scatter, hiding in the roofs of the structures that they found. And when night fell, they would instinctively chew through the strings holding the bombs to their bodies, and fly off in search of insect breakfast. (I was very happy to learn they were not intended to blow up too!) The copper chloride would then finally reach the steel firing pin, causing it to release, and the mini incendiary bombs to leap into flame. And the city – and any city they chose to rain bats on – would burn to the ground.

It wasn’t hubris or impracticality that ended up killing Project X-Ray, which saw continuous development for two years: it was the military’s need to push all available resources to the Manhattan Project. So we have no way of knowing how effective Dr. Adams’ batty plan would have been, though he maintained to the end that it would have been just as destructive as Fat Man and Little Boy’s combined efforts, with far less loss of life.

Moving to a new area after 40 some odd years requires getting to know the members of one’s new community. Of course there is plugging oneself into the local scene to find new hairdressers, butchers, dentists, etc. One member that I’ve taken the time and effort to get to know is someone I’ll call Charlotte…she’s my “friendly” backdoor spider. The reason that I call her “friendly” is that she stays out of the way during the day, tucked away, covered up in a corner of the back door, and at night she is out, spinning and repairing her web and catching all sorts of bugs. She is very busy at night, every night. Charlotte doesn’t call in sick or take a vacation, and she’s always busy preparing her meals.
At one time I would have taken a shoe to a spider that was sojourning in my environment, now I visit Charlotte every night and marvel at how industrious she is with the big bonus of being a very efficient bug zapper. I must ask my friend at the University of Guelph who is a world expert on spiders, how long she has to continue her work….I feel Charlotte is a member of my new community and I am interested in her.

Little Free Libraries: Forging Ties between Police and Communities
Just over two years ago, we wrote about Little Free Libraries — the “take a book, leave a book” phenomenon that has seen small book collections sheltered in purpose-built houses crop up in a variety of places.

The aim of Little Free Libraries is to help create a sense of community by fostering book sharing and conversation. The LFL organization is now seeking donations to extend that aim to where it is sorely needed: American police stations. From BoingBoing:

“Using the simple idea that books begets community begets new understanding, LFL has developed “Libraries of Understanding,” a new program that aims to establish and rebuild the relationship between police and the community. Todd and Co. have designs on providing Little Free Libraries available to each of the 18,000 police departments across the country, so that people in any neighborhood, anywhere in the country can gather, exchange books, exchange ideas and hopefully, extend the idea of what it means to be a community.”

The initiative has raised over $58,000 USD to finance the building and furnishing of the Little Free Libraries, and has already opened some for business in police stations in major American cities. (Go to their Kickstarter site for more info.)

Education and a common point of departure are key for communication between different groups — and libraries are places where that important work can happen. And, though the Little Free Libraries are indeed physically modest, the LFL movement was founded on the belief that something small can be the catalyst for something big. I have a feeling they will meet with success!

As I’m sure you are aware, dear readers, I share my life with two hulking yet adorable dogs. I love seeing how smart they are in their dog-specific skills. To change things up, we have a new game: I stand on the porch and throw dog treats for them to find. Jill, in particular, has proven quite adept with her nose: She was very fond of scent training back in Toronto, and now both she and Samson spend a lot of energy finding and rolling in all kinds of gross things in the hiking trails around our new home in rural southeastern Ontario. (Yay…?)

So, as a human with dogs in my life, I have a bit of an inferiority complex about my scent detection abilities. Thankfully, as I was sitting on my back porch working my way through back issues of The New Yorker and watching Jill and Samson snuffle through the grass for amphibious prey, I came across an article that explains why we have such a hard time identifying scents. And I feel a bit better about it!

In short, it involves socialization. Generally, human noses (unless injured or affected by congenital smell disorders) are able to detect differences between up to a trillion (!) scents. But the ability to describe and name what we smell depends on our culture. A team led by Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, pitted a group of Dutch speakers and a group of Jahai speakers against each other in a study verbally identifying scents. (Jahai is a language of hunter-gatherers in Malaysia and southern Thailand.):

“In Jahai, [in contrast to Dutch,] there are about a dozen abstract words in common use for distinct scents, such as the one that emanates from stale rice, mushrooms, cooked cabbage, and certain species of hornbill (yes, the bird). Majid couldn’t tell me for sure whether the Jahai facility with odor was the result of culture, physiology, or environment, but she suggested that their surroundings may play a significant role. When visiting the Jahai, Majid noticed a rich smellscape—heady wafts from flowers and pungent elephant dung. The thick jungle, she said, seemed to render vision less important.”

In European/North American culture, scientists theorize, sight is king due to a holdover from the Enlightenment (which emphasized visual evidence), childhood training (when was the last time you saw a Sesame Street sketch that taught scents like they do colours?), or even physiology (scents being processed by the limbic system, which, as the brain area associated with memory and emotion, is less able to turn around a complex description). As a result, the Dutch subjects of the study took an average of thirteen seconds to spit out a vague approximation of a smell’s description. The Jahai nailed them in an average of two seconds.

All this spells hope for me as I sit on my porch sniffing the country air, filled with scents of, um… pine? I plan to ask Samson and Jill for tips. Updates to come!

Thankfully Samson has found something more interesting than digging up our yard…he likes to chase critters that hop and slither around our yard. In fact he was fixated and barking like mad the other day – this is what he was barking at!

The Computer that Detects Forged Art
One of the things that continue to separate human intelligence from that of machines is the ability to recognize art. (Well, sometimes it’s hard for us humans to tell too…!)

A step towards remedying that has been taken by Milan Rajkovic at the University of Belgrade and Milos Milovanovic at the Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. They have developed a “machine-vision analysis technique” that detects in the pattern of brushstrokes in a painting the underlying cognitive processes of the artist, which indicates which of a pair of identical paintings is the original, and which the copy — even if painted by the same person.

This was undertaken to solve a legendary conundrum in the art world, involving two versions of the painting La saveur des larmes (The Flavour of Tears) by the Belgian surrealist Magritte. It has long been known that Magritte himself painted both versions, likely to make two sales to two different collectors, in the painter’s financially challenged, immediately-post-WWII period. Since Magritte took especial care to make each appear to be the same painting, it has proven impossible for art experts to determine which was painted first: even the inscriptions of the back match!

Enter Rajkovic and Milovanovic. The pair hypothesize that creating an original painting is a task more cognitively complex than copying one, resulting in more layered colours and differently organized brushstrokes, which can be detected by computer. The pair tested this hypothesis by engaging Dutch painter Charlotte Caspers to execute seven artworks using different media, and then create copies of them as closely as she could. Then Rajkovic and Milovanovic unleashed their analysis.

“[It] transforms a two-dimensional image into a time-frequency representation which captures information about the painting at various scales. These scales can be thought of as looking at progressively more blurred images of the paintings.

Rajkovic and Milovanovic perform this analysis using the red, green, and blue channels of a conventional RGB image of each painting, and they repeat the analysis for patches of each painting.

Sure enough, they say a difference in complexity is clearly visible between Caspers’s originals and copies. ‘For all patches and all the paintings, the mean global complexity of an original painting is larger than the corresponding value of a copy,’ they say.”

With the success of their trial run under their belts, Rajkovic and Milovanovic turned to La saveur des larmes 1.0 and 2.0. Using their techniques, they have definitively identified the original and the copy in relation to each other, but, in a move Gizmodo is calling “either a fantastic display of academic trolling or paranoid ass-covering,” they have omitted any other real-world details (home gallery, for example) that would indicate which is actually which.

Rajkovic and Milovanovic are currently being challenged to fully identify the paintings. While that means that someday this tantalizing mystery will sadly be solved, it means the next step for machine intelligence (and the forgery-detecting business!) may be in the horizon.

Alchemy has been an interest of mine for quite awhile…to me it represented the more glamorous and legacy aspect of chemistry. So it was with interest as I was preparing this week’s article that aqua regia, “royal water” played a part. Back in my chemistry days, I worked in a precious metals refinery which meant that gold was one of the products we worked with, including the refining of it. Aqua regia was a staple in my daily work life and often because it was so corrosive minute amounts of the gold solution (made up of aqua regia & gold) or chloroauric acid would leak through my gloves and get on my hands. As this was in the 70’s I would just wash my hands and go on with my day. However after a few months at this job my husband and I went to Aruba — as soon as the tropical sun hit my hands they turned black and purple from the silver nitrate and gold chloride respectively. Don’t be horrified, it was the 70’s and it made me think that my hands were more valuable!

Dissolving the Nobel Prize: How Science Defeated the Nazis
The history books are full of tales of great capers and feats of derring-do, but some of the most breathtaking are quite compact in scale. Such is the story of the physicist Niels Bohr and chemist Gyorgy de Hevesy saving the (literally) prized possessions of two Bohr’s colleagues from plunder — with science!

In 1940, Bohr was running his Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, where de Hevesy worked in the lab. The Nazi forces that were sweeping Europe had finally taken Denmark, and Bohr had a unique problem: he was hiding contraband gold that fellow physicists Max von Laue and James Franck had smuggled out to him from Germany for safekeeping — in the form of their respective medals for the 1914 and 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Harbouring this secret gold was a capital offense under the new regime. Bohr had to hide the medals, fast; and in an ingenious way, as the dogged Nazis, who now had much practice in pillaging, would be sure to find the medals if they were buried in the garden, as de Hevesy first suggested.

As a chemist extraordinaire, de Hevesy turned to his trade for his next try. He found the solution in (wait for it…) a solution:

“He took the first [medal], he says, and ‘I decided to dissolve it. While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue’s and also James Franck’s medals.’

[… G]old is a very stable element, doesn’t tarnish, doesn’t mix, and doesn’t dissolve in anything — except for one particular chemical emulsifier, called ‘aqua regia,’ a mixture of three parts hydrochloric acid and one part nitric acid.”

De Hevesy spent a nail-biting afternoon slowly dissolving both medals into the aqua regia. What resulted was an unremarkable beaker full of a reddish brown liquid, which escaped the Nazis’ notice when they finally arrived and ransacked the lab.

The beaker was so non-descript that, once Bohr and de Hevesy returned from exile after the war ended, it still sat on the shelf on which they had left it. And then de Hevesy worked a wonderful bit of science magic: he reversed the original reaction and extracted the gold back out of the solution, then sent it off to the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences. Von Laue’s and Franck’s medals were recast, and presented back to them in a ceremony in 1952! (De Hevesy racked up his own Nobel in 1943, for “ his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes.”)

It’s just after dark and it’s really noisy here – so much so, it’s hard to concentrate….It’s not traffic outside or the tv program that’s blasting which my husband is trying to convince me that he needs to watch – no it is the birds! There are so many new birdsongs around that it drives me to distraction. In the morning I hear the loon, crows and a bird that makes a “reebee reebee” type of sound and in the evening, always after dark, there is another more complicated song. My new favourite website is Cornell Lab of Orinthology’s All About Birds. The challenge though, is that is so many birds and you almost need to know the bird you’re looking for in order to find it’s song. Anyone out there amongst you who knows something about birds? Please contact me!

This Is Your Brain on Injectable Implants
I admit: I’m guilty of making frequent jokes about how much easier things will be when we all have chips in our brains. But even I was taken aback by the news coming out of Harvard University: Researchers have discovered a method by which a tiny polymer mesh can be injected into mouse brain tissue, where it unfurls and observes neuron activity — and it could become a platform for all kinds of therapeutic interventions.

The mouse trial is basically a stone’s throw away from human implantation, where the mesh could eventually ameliorate the effects of conditions like Parkinson’s, or events like a stroke. (In addition to turning you into a really cool cyborg!) The study outlining this development was published last month in Nature Nanotechnology.

The mesh is a game changer in the field of neuroscience: most current brain-observing technologies are too narrowly focused to get a good idea of how thousands of neurons work together. They are also too rigid to stay on a target cell when the subject breathes, or its heart beats. The mesh is wide-ranging and flexible enough that these problems can be eliminated, and a whole new way of looking at the brain becomes possible. It is made of:

“conductive polymer threads with either nanoscale electrodes or transistors attached at their intersections. Each strand is as soft as silk and as flexible as brain tissue itself. Free space makes up 95% of the mesh, allowing cells to arrange themselves around it. […]The team [rolls] up a 2D mesh a few centimetres wide and then use[s] a needle just 100 micrometres in diameter to inject it directly into a target region through a hole in the top of the skull. The mesh unrolls to fill any small cavities and mingles with the tissue. Nanowires that poke out can be connected to a computer to take recordings and stimulate cells.”

The rodent subjects’ brains see the mesh as a friendly material, and cells soon grow on it, integrating it fully into the environment it observes. But, of course, further stringent testing must occur before we see human use of this technology. (The researchers are thinking of next implanting the mesh in the brains of newborn mice, to see if it will expand as they grow.) The possibilities for cognitive improvement and support are fascinating, and I can’t wait to see how it unfolds (pun intended)!

Here’s a quick quiz for you dear readers: The picture below shows a few things that is in our new backyard – soil covering Samson’s hole digging, clothes on a line, hidden fence flags and a fire bowl for burning things….So the question is, what would have been considered a violation in our old neighborhood?

If you guessed the hanging clothes you would have been right!

When we moved into our old house close to 30 years ago, we had to agree in the purchase papers not to have a clothesline in our yard with which to hang clothes on! In these days of energy awareness, it just seems wrong that we opt to use an appliance instead of Mother Nature’s own energy in the form of sun and wind. Times have changed and I sleep all the better for it…(there’s nothing like sleeping in sheets that have hung outside and feeling that one has done their part for the environment).

“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye”: an appreciation of brutalist playgrounds
The architecture style Brutalism (think, Fort Book at UofT ) — whose literal definition is “raw concrete” — certainly does not inspire visions of fun, child-friendly, safe environments. But, the post-WWII movement that brought us buildings like Le Corbusier’s famous Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh, India, also brought us many less-known government complexes and apartment blocks in Europe and the Americas. Any place you expect kids, you need a playground — and if you expect kids at a Brutalist site, that playground’s gonna be Brutalist.

Web Urbanist reports on an installation by artist Simon Terrell and the collective Assemble at the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. The installation recreates (in high-density foam, thank goodness) the Brutalist playgrounds from those mid-century halcyon days before they invented safety. Just looking at them makes my healed-over childhood skinned elbows ring with phantom pain. My personal favourite is the evil-looking tilt-a-whirl construction at the Churchill Gardens playground, with stepping stones leading to it that resemble the Devil’s Postpile in California.

Joking aside, the rationale behind Brutalism and its playgrounds is fascinating; coming immediately after — and making a serious comment on — the destruction of the “frivolous” architecture of the previous decades in the crucible of World War II. And as someone who believes that today’s kids are being coddled a bit more than they should be, I appreciate that these playgrounds taught kids to assess risk and harden themselves. (Just maybe not with scar tissue…!)

This business that we have been in since the late 1980’s has seen substantial change. I remember when I had to explain what the web was to potential customers, let alone what a web page was…the “Information Highway” was going to be the next big thing! Fast forward a “few” years and the Internet is not given a second thought anymore, except when we cannot connect to it in a manner that we expect. Along with the ubiquity of the being online, has come viruses, hackers, bad creepy people that try to steal sensitive information, etc. Of course bad, creepy people have always existed and now the internet just gives them another venue for their mischief (and more); thus security, which has always been part of DFC’s business has seen more interest recently. One aspect of increased security which is necessary to protect your information, is password management. No longer is it a good idea to use simple words for passwords, or use the same password for all your accounts! So in order to stay safe, life has gotten more complicated — passwords have to be changed regularly, they must be complex and each account should not share the same password with a different account! (Just for fun you can test your password here) My poor brain…but wait maybe my poor brain may be used in the future instead of passwords….
The Future of Passwords May Be Found Inside Your Mind
We all know about fingerprints and security — how our unique prints are calling cards that can, say, unlock a laptop, or incriminate us if we forget to wear gloves during that bank heist (*ahem*).

But researchers are thinking that there may be something even more secure than a fingerprint: a brainprint. And in the near future, we may be able to use brainprints in lieu of remembering all the complicated passwords that litter our lives.

Researchers from Binghamton University have published a study in the journal Neurocomputing, which shows that subjects’ brains react to acronyms differently. This means that the detectable reaction can be scanned and used by security software to confirm a person’s identity before giving them access. Co-author Sarah Laszlo describes another feature of a brainprint-based security system:

“‘If someone’s fingerprint is stolen, that person can’t just grow a new finger to replace the compromised fingerprint — the fingerprint for that person is compromised forever.  Fingerprints are “non-cancellable.” Brainprints, on the other hand, are potentially cancellable.  So, in the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorized user, the authorized user could then “reset” their brainprint.’”

The computer system in the study identified volunteers’ brainprints with a whopping 94% accuracy. Soon, we’ll be able to use our brains’ natural processes as passwords, instead of shoehorning awkward at-least-one-numeral-and-one-capital-letter constructions into them. And I say it’s about time!