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3 Ways Drones Are Revolutionizing Science

by MiquelCuriel Posted on June 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Civilian drones are becoming an inescapable part of the skyscape. They are taking us inside protests, providing stunning footage from the Nepal earthquake, and even crashing down on the White House lawn. But they may be making the biggest difference within the world of research science.

While no one can agree on what to call them, the industry at large is expanding exceedingly fast. And the fastest growing sector? The civilian use market, which is projected to grow at an annual rate of 19 percent through 2020, according to Business Insider. There’s also been a rapid decline in price, with many quadcopters—simple, small, four-rotor helicopter drones—available for $1000 or less.

On the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast, we spoke with Eric Cheng, the director of aerial imaging at DJI, a leading manufacturer of consumer drones based in China. “These drones are sweeping across the world allowing people to capture low-altitude imagery, relatively affordably, for the first time,” says Cheng. “They are starting to feel much more like cameras that happen to not be in your hands, than they are drones that carry cameras.” Cheng let us take the DJI Phantom 3 Professional quadcopter out for a spin around Mt. Davidson in San Francisco as we discussed the impact that drones are having on scientific research. You can watch a short video we put together (above) or listen to our full interview with Cheng (below):

Cheng frequently tests the limits of his technology by going to the ends of the Earth, often with teams of scientists in tow. “Scientists are absolutely fascinated by what’s possible,” says Cheng. So how are drones changing research?

1. Going where no one has gone before. Even with the most advanced equipment, there are places on Earth that humans can’t go. Drones have been able to penetrate some of these areas, offering glimpses into dynamic environments. Cheng himself has taken a drone directly into the middle of a volcanic eruption. (You can watch an incredible video of that below.) Ocean drones are charting the depths of the seas, 95 percent of which are still unexplored. Drones are even being used to monitor and predict where oil spills will flow in complicated ocean currents.

2. Tracking endangered species with new precision. Drones are booming in conservation science. These tools are able to image, track, and monitor species that live in jungle canopies, while introducing minimal human impact. Communities of researchers, such as ConservationDrones.org, have emerged to share strategies and open source drone designs. In one example, ConservationDrones has mapped hundreds of areas across Africa, identifying never-before-seen orangutan nests high up in forest canopies. This information could be critical in the fight against poachers and in efforts to monitor how land use change is impacting wildlife.

A collage of images of orangutan nests photographed by conservation drones. DrLianPinKoh/Flickr

3. Dramatically lowering the cost of automated monitoring. Private investments in drone technology reached a record $65 million in the third quarter of 2014. At the same time, the cost of key drone components (inertial measurement units, brushless motors, accelerometers) are rapidly falling. That means drones have become affordable for researchers and amateurs alike. The DJI Phantom 3 flown during this interview retails for $1,259.

In the context of scientific research, many of these drones can be deployed as autonomous sensors, outfitted with specialized monitoring equipment. In agriculture, scientists have used drones to monitor water usage in drought-stricken areas in an effort to improve efficiency. The low altitude, high-resolution imagery offers more precision than satellites, at a fraction of the price.

A low altitude image of depicting chlorophyll levels in crops ModernFarmer.com

To listen to our entire interview with Eric Cheng, click below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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3 Ways Drones Are Revolutionizing Science

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How to Trick a Child Into Eating a Vegetable

by AshleyAragon Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michelle Obama has gotten a lot of flak for her efforts to improve the nutritional value of school lunches and reduce the rate of childhood obesity. On Twitter, for instance, kids have been using the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama to complain that new lunch standards she spearheaded have resulted in less appetizing meals.

By some accounts, the First Lady’s school lunch program seems to be working. A 2014 study from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that compared to 2011, kids eating school lunches were selecting 23 percent more fruit overall after the guidelines were imposed in 2012. What’s more, vegetable consumption per student rose 16 percent. The problem is that the amount of food left uneaten and thrown away seems to have increased considerably, as well. According to a study from the School Nutrition Association, schools reported an 81 percent increase in the amount of food left on plates, with vegetables making up the majority of the waste.

The fact that kids (and many adults) generally don’t like vegetables isn’t exactly an earth-shattering discovery. Parents and policy makers have long struggled over the question of how to get children to eat their broccoli. But Traci Mann, a health psychologist who has spent much of her career studying our eating habits, has come up with a simple solution. “Just put the vegetable in a competition it can actually win,” said Mann on a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

Of course, in a contest between vegetables and, say, mac and cheese, the veggies don’t stand much of a chance. But Mann has an elegant strategy for improving the odds. “As far as I can tell,” she says, “the only competition a vegetable can routinely win is the competition between a vegetable and nothing.” Mann first discovered this kernel of wisdom by observing the behavior of her own children. In a Los Angeles deli, when her kids were 3 and 6, she watched them happily consume sauerkraut while waiting for their meals to arrive. “After much scholarly effort,” writes Mann in her newly released book Secrets from the Eating Lab, “I developed a highly technical theory about why they ate the sauerkraut: They ate it because it was there.”

And, being a scientist, Mann decided to put this theory to the test. Using schoolchildren as subjects, Mann and her colleagues conducted two field studies in an elementary school where most of the students were eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches. In one study, the scientists first figured out what the baseline consumption rate was for a reasonably well tolerated vegetable—in this case, carrots. Then, the scientists waited three months for the exact same menu to be served again. This time, as the children waited at their class tables before receiving their full meals, they had access to small paper cups filled with baby carrots. Once the meal was over, the scientists painstakingly weighed all the leftover carrots in cups, on the floor, on trays, and anywhere else they could be found. Sure enough, kids ate more carrots when they were left alone with them at their tables than they did on a normal day. The result, wrote the researchers, was an “increase in carrot consumption of over 430% that was almost entirely driven by many students eating carrots from the cups before entering the line.”

Encouraged by these findings, the scientists then conducted a follow-up field study in which broccoli was the prized vegetable. On a regular day, broccoli was among the foods that the children could select as they went through the cafeteria line. But on the study days, the students were handed cups of broccoli while they waited for the rest of their meal. Once again, the experiment worked. The students as a whole consumed far more broccoli when that was the first food they had access to.

Mann and her colleagues even tested the “veggies first” theory on college students, comparing their consumption of baby carrots and M&Ms while manipulating which snack was offered first. Undergraduates not only ate more carrots when that was the first option, but they also then ate fewer M&Ms.

“For most of us, the main obstacle to eating a vegetable is that we don’t like them as much as the other stuff,” says Mann. And most of us are also pretty lazy. Since vegetables in general require more preparation than many other foods, and are not as tasty, we tend to eat less of them than is good for us.

But there’s an upside to our laziness: If the goal is to limit consumption of an unhealthy food, even a minor obstacle can make a difference. On Inquiring Minds, Mann describes a Dutch study of M&M consumption. “They showed that if you have a bowl of M&Ms on the table right by you, you’ll eat a lot,” says Mann. That’s not surprising. But if you place that bowl farther away, requiring you to get up from your desk to grab a handful, consumption decreases significantly. “Here’s the even more amazing thing,” adds Mann. “Take that same bowl of M&Ms, put it on the same table that you’re sitting at—except instead of right by your hand, put it two feet across the table.” Within-reach, but requiring a bit of stretching. It turns out that you’ll consume just as few M&Ms as if they were across the room.

Adding obstacles, even tiny ones, is so effective at reducing unhealthy food intake that even a simple manipulation in Google’s New York offices made headlines recently. When M&Ms were put in opaque rather than glass containers, and healthier alternatives such as figs and nuts were made more visible, Google employees consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms over seven weeks, according to the Washington Post.

One of Mann’s experiments shows just how much of an impact the visibility of food can have. In another effort to get school kids to eat more veggies, her team placed photographs of green beans and carrots into two of the compartments on the children’s lunch trays. With this simple manipulation, they found that twice as many kids served themselves green beans and nearly three times as many took carrots, compared with what happened on a typical day.

Mann attributes the success of the photos to the social forces that impact our eating habits. It’s not effective to simply tell a kid to eat his vegetables. But putting photos on the trays, according to Mann, sends the message that other kids are choosing those veggies and placing them in those two compartments. And, as any parent knows, fitting in can be a powerful motivator.

To listen to our full interview with Mann, click below.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How to Trick a Child Into Eating a Vegetable

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5 Ways You Can Live Forever

by PNTImogengbpfbf Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last summer, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, I sat in a room full of scientists, innovators, and thought leaders. Someone asked how long everyone would like to live. To my great surprise, most people agreed that somewhere in one’s 90s was a good time to kick the bucket. Given that this was a collection of curious and optimistic people whose religion is science, I was shocked that—unlike me—more of them didn’t want to live forever.

I later found out that this reaction is actually representative of the general population: Among the attendees was fellow science writer David Ewing Duncan, who has asked this question online and at the beginning of numerous talks, collecting more than 30,000 responses. The consensus? About 85 percent of people wouldn’t want to live past 120, and more than half agreed that 80 years was about how long they’d like to live. The number of people who would like to live forever? Less than 5 percent.

Bill Gifford is in that mortal majority, despite the title of his most recent book, Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying). Aging, explained Gifford on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, “kind of sucks.”

In his book, Gifford points out that the quest to find a cure for aging has permeated our thoughts for as long as there’s been a written record. “The oldest existing great work of literature,” writes Gifford, “the nearly four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, in part chronicles a man’s quest for the elixir of eternal life.”

And, given the fact that—according to Gifford—we spend some “eleventy bajillion dollars” on anti-aging creams alone, surely we must be close to discovering the formula for age-reversal. Well not quite yet. But here are some promising lines of research that might eventually lead to a hack that works forever. Or at least for a few extra decades.

1. Follow Michael Pollan’s advice to eat real food, not too much, and mostly plants: In the 1930s, a nutritionist at Cornell named Clive McCay discovered the writings of a 16th-century diabetic who, at a time when diabetes was poorly understood, voluntarily put himself on a strict diet and within a week began to feel much better. Nearly dead in his 40s, the man experienced a complete turnaround. “Even in his eighties, he was still bounding up and down the stairs of his estate,” writes Gifford. McCay read his treatise with fascination, noting that the Italian’s secret to a long life—he ultimately lived to 98—seemed to be contained in a simple message: Don’t eat so much.

For a nutritionist like McCay, this message was intriguing to say the least. So he decided to test it—by underfeeding a group of baby rats. And sure enough, his scrawny, half-starved experimental group lived almost twice as long as the portly but satisfied control group—in some cases, up to four years. Caloric restriction, as it came to be called, has been shown to increase the life spans of mice, rats, and monkeys, and to decrease the incidence of age-related diseases.

There’s still some controversy, however, as to whether the beneficial effects of caloric restriction result from fewer calories total or just fewer “bad” calories coming from junk food. A 2012 study from the National Institutes of Aging compared groups of rhesus monkeys who were fed healthy diets—similar to what Pollan might recommend—and in this case, a 30 percent reduction in calories did not seem to have much of an effect. So some scientists have suggested that in earlier studies, the experimenters were comparing animals fed what we humans would consider junk food with those whose diets included less sugar and fat. But the NIA study is still ongoing, and there’s some new evidence that even if the monkeys ate healthy food, there still might be a benefit in showing some restraint.

So what’s going on? Are the hungry animals simply less likely to get diabetes? “When you’re not eating, your cells actually do go into a different state,” explains Gifford. “It’s like they have a different engine.” Eating less puts your body into a “conservation” mode, in which you’re not growing and metabolizing food in the same way. And—if scientists like McCay are correct—animals in this mode can live longer.

An important note of caution, though. Eating too little can of course lead to malnutrition, which has its own negative side effects and is quite common in the elderly. And restricting calories in children is particularly dangerous, as development stalls in the conservation mode.

2. Metformin: There’s actually a treatment for diabetes that also shows promise in terms of increasing our longevity. Metformin, a drug commonly prescribed to treat patients with type 2 diabetes, has been shown to extend the health span—that is, how long someone remains healthy—and the life span of male mice. “Diabetics who are on metformin actually seem to be living longer than nondiabetics who are not on it,” says Gifford, “when in fact the reverse should be true. The diabetics should be dying sooner.” It turns out that taking metformin provides some of the benefits of caloric restriction, such as improved physical performance and better cholesterol levels. In your cells, metformin increases antioxidant protection and reduces chronic inflammation, one of the mechanisms by which aging ravages our bodies.

3. Exchange your old blood for young blood: The vampires were on to something: The fountain of “youthiness,” as Gifford calls it, might be found in our circulatory system. One of the things that sucks about aging is the way in which our ability to recover from injury and fend off illness declines. Blood has long been a candidate for élan vital—or the essence of life—and even back in the 16th century, Sir Francis Bacon transfused blood from a young dog to an old one, which seemed to rejuvenate him. In the 1970s, a scientist at the University of California-Irvine cut open young rats and sewed them to old rats, a method called parabiosis, essentially combining their circulatory systems. These rats lived much longer than those who were paired with rats of the same age—four to five months longer, which, given that the average life span for a lab rat is about two years, is an enormous difference.

Even more exciting is research coming from the lab of Tony Wyss-Coray and his colleagues at Stanford University, who infused older mice with the blood of younger animals and found that the older mice were indeed rejuvenated. Their brains became more plastic and malleable—a hallmark of youth. The procedure enabled them to learn and remember information like their younger donors and helped them perform much better on tests of mouse cognition. Below, you can watch an older mouse show improvement on a maze test after being infused with young blood.

4. Train for the Senior Olympics: If someone told you that there was an absolutely free treatment that hundreds of studies had shown to be effective in combating many different age-related diseases, you probably wouldn’t believe them. But this miracle drug really does exist—in the form of exercise. “Between 50 and 70, we say goodbye to about 15 percent of our lean muscle,” says Simon Melov, a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, who is quoted in Gifford’s book. “After that, it jumps to 30 percent per decade. You could make the case that aging starts in muscle.” As we age, this muscle turns to fat. And because muscles burn more calories than fat, your metabolism—the process by which your cells turn food into fuel—slows down, leaving more sugar in your blood and making you more vulnerable to diabetes. Staving off the metabolic changes that accompany this shift from muscle to fat will help keep your body young. Many pharmaceutical companies are developing drugs to promote muscle growth, but thus far, staying active seems to be just as effective.

Part of the effect that exercise has on our metabolism has to do with how our genes are expressed. Throughout your lifetime, different genes are turned on and off depending on things like your age, your behavior, and your environment. So although you might have a genetic predisposition for smoking-related cancers, for example, you might be able to stave off the disease by not smoking. (Even if you’ve never smoked, however, it’s still possible to get lung cancer.)

Similarly, exercising seems to turn off some genes while turning on others. In a remarkable study from 2007, a bunch of Canadians were placed on a strict exercise regimen for six months. Half of them were old, and half were young. Scientists then compared biopsies of their muscles taken before and after the regimen. And they found that the older Canadians had activated many of the genes that were active in their younger counterparts but that had been inactive before they began to exercise. Exercise seemed to have switched on young genes, and switched off older ones—particularly genes that were involved in metabolism.

Think you’re already too old to start exercising? Many medal winners in the Senior Olympics start training after retiring from their jobs, like 89-year-old Dr. Granville Coggs, who ran his first race when he was 77. For some more inspiration, watch the women’s 400-meter sprint from the 76-80 age group at the 2013 Senior Olympics, complete with commentary by the friends of the competitors in this video.

5. Be small: While height might give you many advantages during your working years, it may also contribute to your early demise. The taller you are, the more likely you are to develop cancer, among other problems. Why height is a risk factor for cancer remains unclear, but it might have to do with the fact that the taller you are, the more cells you have and the higher your likelihood of developing a cancer-causing mutation in them. In fact, people who live past 100 aren’t just small because they’ve shrunk with age—they actually tend to have started out on the smaller side. Just like for dogs, whose life span negatively correlates with size—that is, the smaller the dog, the longer its life expectancy—being short has its advantages.

To listen to my full interview with Bill Gifford, stream below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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5 Ways You Can Live Forever

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Scientists Want to Make a Malaria-Resistant Mosquito

by AnneKappel Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Malaria has long bedeviled those who have sought to eradicate it, particularly in Africa. According to the World Health Organization, in 2012, the disease caused an estimated 627,000 deaths—the majority of those were African children. But now scientists are focusing on a promising new line of research: genetically manipulating the mosquitoes that carry the deadly illness.

On this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast, George Church—a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves—described the cutting-edge mosquito research that’s taking place at his university in Massachusetts and around the world.

In the past, scientists have attempted to control certain insect populations in part by irradiating the males, rendering them sterile. But that hasn’t worked as well with mosquitoes as it did with other species, such as the Mediterranean fruit fly. Genetic engineering, Church says, offers a new, faster tool to more precisely target and create specific mutations. In June, a team of researchers published a paper in the journal Nature Communications that detailed a method by which mosquitoes were made to produce primarily male offspring. Male mosquitoes feed on plant nectar, not human blood, and thus don’t transmit malaria. These mosquitos were shown to be able to interbreed with wild mosquitos (in cages), passing on their genetically engineered traits. Because they produce so few female offspring, whole mosquito populations could simply die off within a few generations.

And in August, Church and his colleagues published papers in the journals Science and eLife describing how a new genetic engineering procedure called Crispr—a tool borrowed from bacteria that enables much speedier and more precise genetic manipulation—could be used to develop mutations in mosquitoes that could be spread throughout wild populations. One approach, for instance, is to create malaria-resistant mosquitoes, which would then pass the mutation down to subsequent generations. “You don’t have to affect that many species or sub-species,” said Church, “because not that many different types of mosquitoes carry the most dangerous types of malaria.” This technique could also be useful for other insect-borne diseases, such as sleeping sickness, dengue fever, and Lyme disease.

Church acknowledges that these ideas are controversial, to say the least. In-depth ecological research and detailed mosquito studies will be necessary to understand any potential unforeseen consequences before releasing genetically engineered mosquitoes into the wild. Such studies will evaluate what plants the mosquitoes (or other vectors) pollinate and whether other animals also pollinate the same plants. And they’ll look at which fish, amphibians, and birds feed on the mosquitoes, and whether these animals have other food sources. Church hopes that the promise of a new weapon against malaria will motivate funders to support these kinds of studies. “We need to fund these basic ecological studies at a higher level,” he says. In addition, the initial attempts to implement this type of malaria-eradication system could take place in a bounded location, such as on an island.

The technology poses other potential dangers, as well. As Church explains, genetic engineering tools are becoming so easy to use that they’re accessible to practically any researcher who wants to utilize them. That’s why Church and his colleagues have produced a series of journal articles that focus on precautionary policy components and specific regulations for the technology. “Almost everybody has some species that they don’t like,” he says. “Maybe it killed someone in their family. It doesn’t mean you know immediately what to do with this powerful technology. Even if your goal is to rectify the situation, there are many ways to do it. We just need to be sure that people are thoughtful.”

To hear more from Church on everything from HIV/AIDS research to efforts to engineer an animal that will closely resemble the long-extinct woolly mammoth, listen to Inquiring Minds below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. This week’s episode was guest-hosted by Cynthia Graber, an award-winning journalist who co-hosts the Gastropod podcast. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Scientists Want to Make a Malaria-Resistant Mosquito

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Science Says Your Baby Is a Socialist

by GMPStanton Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Your kid probably isn’t a Leninist, but research suggests she’d like to divvy up other people’s stuff equally. Solodov Alexey/Shutterstock

At the playground, I watch my 10-month-old son beeline to the center of the sandbox where there is a bright pink shovel. But before he gets there, a rambunctious 2-year-old snatches up the coveted toy first. As my son watches the shovel slip away, a wobbly 14-month-old comes over and offers him a half-chewed cookie. I tear up a bit at this random act of kindness. It’s probably just “hormones,” but I am touched by the empathy that this little person is showing my child.

What caused this toddler to “do the right thing” and show kindness to a stranger? Was it good parenting or an innate personality trait? That’s the mystery that cognitive scientist Paul Bloom, author of the recent book Just Babies, is working hard to figure out: Can the youngest of our species distinguish good from evil practically from birth—or does morality need to be taught?

Philosophers like John Locke and psychologists like Sigmund Freud took for granted that we are born with a blank moral slate. But Bloom rejects that. He argues that babies actually have a natural sense of morality and fairness—one that simply emerges, like many other developmental milestones. “I think all babies are created equal in that all normal babies—all babies without brain damage—possess some basic foundational understanding of morality and some foundational moral impulses,” says Bloom on the Inquiring Minds podcast. “They’re equal in the same way that all babies come with a visual system, and the ability to move around, and a propensity to learn language.”

Bloom thinks this sense of morality emerged via Darwinian evolution, just like every other adaptive trait that marks our species. But how can he tell? How does one study morality in babies who can’t wax poetic? Scientists have come up with several clever solutions to break the language barrier.

“The way we do it here at Yale,” says Bloom, “is we show babies one-act plays.” These one-acts, playing at the Yale lab run by Karen Wynn, who is Bloom’s colleague and wife, star puppets who model behaviors that we would label as naughty or nice. Similar experiments are being conducted at the Center for Infant Cognition at the University of British Columbia, where Wynn’s former graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, now runs her own lab.

We asked Hamlin to share some short videos of the one-acts that Bloom describes in his book and on the podcast. In one play, for example, a dog is enjoying playing with a ball. She loses control of the ball or, depending on your interpretation of events, tosses it to one of two nearby cats. Then one of two things happens. In the first video below—from Hamlin’s lab at UBC—the orange cat refuses to return the ball and instead runs away with it. In the second video, by contrast, a gray cat returns the ball to the dog.

After watching the play, the babies are given a choice: Which kitty would they like to play with—the helpful gray one or the naughty orange one? The scientists carefully monitor the children’s reactions. “With the younger babies, like 3-month-olds, we can see which one they orient to, which one they look at,” says Bloom. Older babies can actually reach for and grab the preferred character. And with babies and toddlers alike, time and time again, “we find they look to the good guys.” Like in this video, again from Hamlin’s Lab:

But these labels of “good guy” and “bad guy” are adult constructs. Are we simply projecting our own judgments onto the behavior of the babies? “There’s no consensus even for adults what makes something moral or not moral,” acknowledges Bloom. “But one cue for adults, at least, is intuitions about reward and punishment.” So the scientists investigated how babies respond when the bad character is punished and the good one is rewarded.

For example, another play tells the story of a cow who is trying to open a plastic box full of toys. Flanked by two little piggies, the cow struggles with the box for a few moments. Then the play has one of two possible endings. Either one of the pigs helps the cow open the box and get the toys, as in this video…

…or the other pig hinders her efforts by jumping on the box and slamming it shut, as shown here:

Babies under the age of 1 then watch another character either reward or punish the naughty and nice pigs by handing out treats; the babies show a preference for characters who reward good and punish evil. Toddlers are given the opportunity to administer the reward or punishment themselves, and they tend to punish the hinderer and reward the helper.

Interestingly, as the toddlers get a little older, this sense of fairness seems to morph into pure egalitarianism—at least when it comes to distributing other people’s stuff. “There’s a lot of research suggesting that when it comes to divvying up resources that strangers possess, they are socialists—they like to share things equally,” says Bloom.

When asked to hand out treats to other people or to stuffed animals, 3- and 4-year-old children will divide resources equally, if at all possible. Even if they know that one person deserves more of a resource than another because she worked harder for it, they will still opt for equal distribution. In a study of 5-to-8-year-olds, when it was impossible to divide resources equally—for example, if the children were given five erasers to distribute to two people—they would even throw the extra eraser in the trash instead of giving more to one person than the other.

But what happens when the children being studied are themselves the lucky recipient of the extra resources? Well, that changes everything. “So, they’re very egalitarian when it comes to other people,” says Bloom. “When it comes to themselves, they’re not the slightest bit egalitarian. Particularly when dealing with strangers, they want everything.” So while babies do seem to have an innate capacity to separate good from evil, their moral lives are still fairly limited. “Babies are kind of jerks,” Bloom says.

It turns out that humans aren’t the only primates that have evolved a sense of fairness. In one study, Capuchin monkeys performed a task and were rewarded with slices of cucumbers. But when they observed another monkey getting a grape—which tastes much better—for doing the same amount of work, they went on strike. The previously rewarding cucumber slices were no longer worth the effort.

Does this mean that babies (human or otherwise) are making actual moral judgments? Or are they simply learning what types of behaviors get rewarded in the society in which they are born? In other words, are the scientists really just observing a tool that helps infants navigate complex social interactions? As Bloom points out, babies don’t have a lot of control over their own lives—they can’t choose the people with whom they interact. So what’s the point of having a preference for those who are fair or moral? “It could be when choosing a social partner, and particularly who to learn from, they pay attention to how these individuals react towards other individuals,” notes Bloom.

But it also could be that this capacity is useless in the beginning. “A second possibility is that this capacity does no good for babies, but it’s just wired to pop in early on,” he says. “It’s like sexual organs, which emerge early in development even though they aren’t used as sexual organs until much later.”

So what separates a morally mature adult from a well behaved toddler? “As we get older, we become more like moral philosophers,” says Bloom. “We become more able to use reason and deliberation to figure out what’s right and wrong.” And we tend to grow out of our selfish phase. “Most adults are far nicer than babies and 2-year-olds,” says Bloom.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Science Says Your Baby Is a Socialist

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How One Man Poured Chemicals Into New Jersey’s Drinking Water and Changed Women’s Fashion Forever

by StephanBurrough Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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These days, drinking more water seems to be the solution for everything from weight loss to youthful skin. In fact, we’ve taken our obsession with water so far that the medical community is actually warning people that drinking too much water can be poisonous. What most of us take for granted, however, is that water (in reasonable quantities) is safe to drink—a notion that was absolutely not true a hundred years ago.

The innovations that gave us clean drinking water don’t seem as sexy as self-driving cars or a rover on Mars. But author Steven Johnson argues that these types of technological advances have changed our world in profound ways—impacting everything from life expectancy to women’s fashion (more on that below).

Seemingly mundane scientific breakthroughs can create what Johnson calls a “hummingbird effect,” a reference to the great evolutionary leap that species made when it began to mimic the flight patterns of insects in order to extract nectar more efficiently from flowers. Johnson coined the phrase while writing his latest book—How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World—in Marin County, Calif., where hummingbirds were frequent visitors in his garden. What started out as a distraction provided him with an apt metaphor for the often unpredictable and far-reaching effects that a simple innovation can have on society. “You think you’re inventing something that just involves flowers and insects, but it ends up changing the anatomy of birds,” says Johnson on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “We see that again and again and again in the history of technology.”

So how does Johnson link clean drinking water with female fashion? The story begins with a nineteenth century problem. As American cities grew larger, contamination of drinking water by sewage was becoming a serious health hazard. For John Leal, a doctor based in New Jersey, the problem was personal: his father had died a slow and agonizing death after drinking contaminated water during the Civil War. He wasn’t alone. “Nineteen men in the 144th Regiment died in combat,” writes Johnson, “while 178 died of disease during the war.”

Steven Johnson Nutopia

In addition to his work as a physician, Leal was a health officer and inspector for the city of Paterson, N.J. His duties included understanding and curtailing communicable diseases and disinfecting the homes of people who died from them. He was also in charge of the city’s public water supply and the safe disposal of sewage. This combination of interests and responsibilities ensured that he spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve water safety. Whereas other doctors rejected the notion of using chemicals to kill noxious bacteria in water, Leal began to consider chlorine—in the form of calcium hypochlorite—which was commonly used to disinfect houses and neighborhoods affected by typhoid and cholera outbreaks.

Chloride of lime, as it was called back then, smelled terrible and was known to be toxic, so the idea of putting it in drinking water seemed ludicrous. But Leal realized that in small doses, it was essentially harmless to humans and yet still effective at destroying deadly bacteria. “Leal understood this in part because he had access to very good microscopes,” explains Johnson. “In the old days, if you had a hypothesis about how to clean the water, you would kind of do it, and then you’d wait for a month and see if anybody died.”

But putting what is essentially poison into the city’s water supply was still an unpopular suggestion, to say the least.

And so, a few years later, when Leal was put in charge of Jersey City’s water supply, he added chlorine to the city’s reservoirs “in almost complete secrecy, without any permission from government authorities (and no notice to the general public),” writes Johnson. And not surprisingly, once people realized what he had done, Leal was called a madman and even a terrorist. He had to appear in court to defend his actions, where he testified that he believed his chlorinated water was, in fact, the safest in the world.

The case was settled in his favor and, unlike many of his contemporaries, Leal gave away the recipe for chlorination for free to whomever wanted it. “Unencumbered by patent restrictions and licensing fees,” writes Johnson, “municipalities quickly adopted chlorination as a standard practice, across the United States and eventually the world.”

Mass chlorination had some predictable effects, reducing the mortality rate in the average American city by 43 percent. According to Johnson, parents of infants benefited even more significantly, as the death rate for babies dropped by 74 percent. And while reducing mortality is perhaps the most important consequence of Leal’s innovation, there is also a lighter side to the story.

As the First World War came to an end and chlorination spread across the country, some 10,000 public baths and pools were opened in the United States, giving women a new forum to show off their figures. As pools became safe and swimming became the norm, swimsuit fashions exploded. Or compressed, more accurately. “At the turn of the century,” Johnson writes, “the average woman’s bathing suit required 10 yards of fabric; by the end of the 1930s, one yard was sufficient.”

“Hanging out at a pool and seeing people in swimsuits” became a major driver of fashion, says Johnson. And while Hollywood glamor, fashion magazines, and other cultural changes had an effect, “without the mass adoption of swimming as a leisure activity,” he writes, “those fashions would have been deprived of one of their key showcases.”

How We Got to Now’s publication also coincides with a six-part PBS and BBC television series airing Wednesdays at 10 pm ET, from October 15 to November 12. You can watch a preview below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How One Man Poured Chemicals Into New Jersey’s Drinking Water and Changed Women’s Fashion Forever

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Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

by StarLujannsuakf Posted on October 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing.

In his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Steven Pinker basically outdoes Strunk and White. The celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist and psycholinguist explains how to write in clear, “classic” prose that shares valuable information with clarity but never condescension. And he tells us why so many of the tut-tutting grammar “rules” that we all think we’re supposed to follow—don’t split infinitives, don’t use the passive voice, don’t end a sentence with a preposition—are just nonsense.

“There are so many bogus rules in circulation that kind of serve as a tactic for one-upmanship,” explains Pinker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “They’re a way in which one person can prove that they’re more sophisticated or literate than someone else, and so they brandish these pseudo-rules.”

Unlike past sages of style, Pinker approaches grammar from a scientific perspective, as a linguist. And that’s what leads him to the unavoidable conclusion that language is never set in stone; rather, it is a tool that is constantly evolving and changing, continually adding new words and undoing old rules and assumptions. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum,” writes Pinker in The Sense of Style.

Steven Pinker. Rebecca Goldstein.

Indeed, Pinker notes with amusement in the book that in every era, there is always somebody complaining about how all the uncouth speakers of the day are wrecking the Queen’s English. It’s basically the linguistic equivalent of telling the kids to get off your lawn. Why does this happen? “As a language changes from beneath our feet, we feel the sands shifting and always think that it’s a deterioration,” explains Pinker on the podcast. “Whereas, everything that’s in the language was an innovation at some point in the history of English. If you’re living through the transition, it feels like a deterioration even though it’s just a change.”

Thus, Pinker notes that in their classic book, The Elements of Style, published in the mid-20th century, Strunk and White instructed writers not to use the verb “to contact.” Look how that turned out for them.

The same framework allows Pinker to explain why so many grammatical “rules” that we all think we have to follow are, in fact, bogus. His outlook is refreshingly anti-authoritarian: You don’t have to follow supposed grammar rules, he says, unless there is actually a good reason for following them.

Here, then, is a brief but highly liberating list of glorious rule-breaking activities that Pinker says you should feel free to engage in:

Do split infinitives. For Pinker, the idea that you cannot split infinitives—for example, the classic complaint that Star Trek was wrong to describe the Starship Enterprise’s mission as “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly” or “boldly to go”—is “the quintessential bogus rule.”

“No good writer in English has ever followed it consistently, if you do follow it it makes your prose much worse,” Pinker explained on Inquiring Minds.

Indeed, according to Pinker, this is a rather striking case in which the alleged prohibition seems to be mostly perpetuated by urban legend or word of mouth. It doesn’t even seem to be seriously asserted as a rule by any supposed style experts. “This rule kind of levitates in mid-air, there’s actually no support even from the style manuals,” adds Pinker.

Do use the passive voice (at the right times). We are constantly told that we need to make our verbs active, rather than relying on passive constructions. The passive, Pinker emphasizes, is a voice and not a tense: “It’s the difference between ‘the man bit the dog’ and ‘the dog was bitten by the man,'” he explains. (The latter example is passive.) In this particular example, you really don’t want to use the passive voice; but according to Pinker, there are other contexts in which you very well might. “Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory,” he writes.

One of the uses defended by Pinker involves employing the passive voice to “direct the reader’s gaze.” For instance, sometimes you don’t need to know the name of the person who committed an action, because what really matters—what you, the writer, want to emphasize—is the action. Do we really need to know that “the cook cooked a perfect steak,” or can we leave out the actor here since all we really hope to communicate is that “the steak was perfectly cooked”? Pinker has no problem with the latter construction, assuming that you’re trying to focus attention on the steak rather than who cooked it.

Do begin sentences with conjunctions. Pinker also says there’s absolutely nothing wrong with starting a sentence with “and,” “but,” “or,” “also,” “so,” or even “because.” The idea that this is an offense gets taught early on to kids, Pinker observes, as a way of preventing them from using sentence fragments.

But “whatever the pedagogical merits may be of feeding children misinformation, it is inappropriate for adults,” writes Pinker. These conjunctions (Pinker calls them “coordinators”) “are among the commonest coherence markers, and they may be used to begin a sentence whenever the clauses being connected are too long or complicated to fit comfortably into a single megasentence.” Fragments can be an art. Run-ons a headache. And once again, you don’t have to follow grammar “rules” when those rules have no actual justification.

Do end a sentence with a preposition. And there’s another activity that writers are often told not to engage in. And that is ending a sentence with a preposition (see last sentence). Pinker couldn’t be more scornful: “The prohibition against clause-final prepositions is considered a superstition even by the language mavens, and it persists only among know-it-alls who have never opened a dictionary or style manual to check.”

Seriously: If rigidly followed, Pinker notes, this rule would have you doing silly things like turning “What are you looking at?” into “At what are you looking?” Obviously, the former is highly preferable. There are certainly times when you don’t want a preposition at the end of a sentence—usually when you are discussing something serious, and ending with a preposition would make your tone seem too light—but you’ve got to figure this out on a case-by-case basis.

And yes, you can even use the singular “they/their/them.” Pinker even argues that you can use the following construction: “No American should be discriminated against because of the color of their skin.” Language Nazis would argue here that since “American” is singular, using the plural “their” is a big faux pas. But Pinker counters that Shakespeare used these “singular they” type constructions on multiple occasions, as did Jane Austen. (Merriam Webster cites the following example from Austen: “I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly.”) “It’s been in the language for a long time, and one can even argue that it isn’t really a clash of number agreement,” says Pinker. He continues:

The ‘they’ in those constructions—”everyone return to their seats”—is actually not really a pronoun. It’s more like what a logician would call a variable. What does “everyone return to their seats” mean? It means, “for all X, X return to X’s seat.” And the “they” is just basically “X.” And so it’s not surprising that that construction is so tempting.

And there are many, many other pseudo-rules exploded in Pinker’s new book. So many that we decided to ask our own Mother Jones copy editor, Ian Gordon, to comment on this article. Pinker remarks on the podcast that an overactive copy editor is what finally pushed him into writing this book, but we’re proud to say Gordon was more enlightened, commenting:

I think Pinker is totally right. Many rules are stupid, especially the ones he highlights. We should understand the language deeply, not follow dumb rules blindly. That said, there’s something to be said about linguistic continuity across a publication, which is part of the reason why crotchety copy editors (hi!) have jobs.

The basic outlook on language and writing from all this? You don’t have to follow grammar “rules” if they don’t make any sense. Some of them just don’t stand up at all; others, meanwhile, are better understood as general guidelines, admitting of many important exceptions.

“It’s very easy to overstate rules,” says Pinker. “And if you don’t explain what the basis is behind the rule, you’re going to botch the statement of the rule—and give bad advice.”

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Steven Pinker, you can stream below:

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Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

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Live Event: Inquiring Minds Interviews Adam Savage in San Francisco

by SonyaBrock Posted on October 1, 2014

Mother Jones

In San Francisco? Join neuroscientist and opera singer Indre Viskontas on October 28 for a conversation with Mythbusters’ Adam Savage in a special live production of the Inquiring Minds podcast! We’ll discuss the joy of using science and critical thinking to explore and understand our world. With each show, we endeavor to find out what’s true, what’s left to discover, and why it all matters with weekly coverage of the latest headlines and probing discussions with leading scientists and thinkers.

The event also includes a live production of The Story Collider. Check out the details below, and get your tickets here.

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Live Event: Inquiring Minds Interviews Adam Savage in San Francisco

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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

by WinnieBachman Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s self-evident that embryos, fetuses, and babies are vulnerable. We have strict laws protecting children because they cannot fend for themselves. And yet, too often, we ignore the impact that environmental disasters have on the very earliest stages of life. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein examines the effect that our reliance on fossil fuels has on the most helpless members of the animal kingdom—as well as on our own children.

“In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines,” Klein writes. “Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.”

Take the case of the leatherback sea turtles. These ancient creatures have been around for 150 million years, making them the longest-surviving marine animals on earth. As Klein points out, they’ve survived the “asteroid attacks” that likely wiped out the dinosaurs. But now they are threatened by a combination of poaching, fishing and climate change. One recent study found that as temperatures rise over the next century, “egg and hatchling survival will rapidly decline” for sea turtle populations in the Eastern Pacific.

The leatherback turtles have “survived so much,” says Klein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But it’s not clear that they’re going to be able to survive even incremental climate change, because what’s happening already is that when the eggs are buried in the sand, even if the sand is just marginally hotter than it used to be, that the eggs are not hatching; they’re cooking in the sand.” What’s more, turtles don’t have sex chromosomes—they turn into males or females based on the ambient temperature of the sand in which they are born. Hotter sand means more female turtles hatch. And the danger is that warming could eventually result in a significant imbalance between males and females, ultimately decimating the species.

While writing the book, Klein was going through her own fertility crisis, so she says she was particularly attuned to the fragility of new life and the impacts that stressors can have on reproduction. And she began to notice a common theme in the after-effects of environmental catastrophes. In the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, she toured the Louisiana marshes. With Jonathan Henderson, an organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network, guiding the way, Klein and a few others set out to investigate whether the oil from the Deepwater Horizon had permeated the bayous. It was the fish jumping in dirty water and the coating of reddish brown oil that impressed Klein and her companions.

But what most concerned Henderson, recalls Klein, was the nearly invisible cost of the disaster: the tiny zooplankton and juveniles that grow into the shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fish that are the bedrock of the Gulf fisheries. “What he was preoccupied with was the fact that this was spawning seasoning,” says Klein. “And that even though we couldn’t see it, there was just a huge amount of proto-life surrounding us, and this was spring in the Gulf and everything was spawning.”

Drifting in the marshlands, Klein writes that she “had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage.”

These effects, she argues, may be felt years later, when those juveniles should be reaching maturity. “Looking into it in the context of the Gulf, we’ve heard a lot of really concerning stories directly from fishermen saying that they’re not seeing baby fish out there,” says Klein. “Or they’re seeing female crabs without eggs.” In her book, she recounts a 2012 interview with a Florida fisherman named Donny Waters who had noticed the absence of small fish in his catches. This hadn’t yet cut into his income, since small fish are thrown back. But Waters was worried that the impact would be felt in the years to come—specifically, in 2016 or 2017 when those fish that were in the larval stage during the spill would have grown up.

This wouldn’t be the first time that an oil spill had a delayed effect on the fishing industry. “The greatest and most lasting impacts on the fish in Alaska had to do with this delayed disaster,” says Klein, referring to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. “It wasn’t until three or four years after the spill that the herring fishery collapsed.” Twenty-five years later, it still hasn’t recovered.

What’s more, scientists say the spill might also help explain the deaths of an unusual number of young bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In a paper published in PlosONE in 2012, Ruth Carmichael and her colleagues examined whether the spill contributed to a “perfect storm” of events that killed 186 dolphins—46 percent of whom were perinatal calves (that is, babies)—in the first four months of 2011.

An unusually high number of young bottlenose dolphins died in the Gulf of Mexico between January and April 2011. Graham Worthy/University of Central Florida

“When we put the pieces together,” explained Carmichael in a 2012 press release, “it appears that the dolphins were likely weakened by depleted food resources, bacteria, or other factors as a result of the 2010 cold winter or oil spill, which made them susceptible to assault by the high volumes of cold freshwater from heavy snowmelt coming from land in 2011 and resulted in distinct patterns in when and where they washed ashore.”

By April 2014, 235 stranded baby bottlenose dolphins had been found, “a staggering figure, since scientists estimate that the number of cetacean corpses found on or near shore represents only 2 percent of the ‘true death toll,'” Klein writes.

Of course, this research isn’t conclusive. A BP spokesperson notes that dolphins in the Gulf began dying off before the oil spill and that unusual mortality events “occur with some regularity.” For its part, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that the “direct or indirect effects” of the spill are being “investigated as potential causes or contributing factors for some of the strandings” but that “no definitive cause has yet been identified.”

Dolphin strandings by age group for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Florida. Reprinted with permission from Carmichael et al., PlosONE, 2012.

Further up the food chain, Klein is also concerned about the potential impact of environmental pollution on human fertility. During the same trip that took her through the marshlands of Louisiana, she also visited Mossville, the historic African-American town notorious as a case study in environmental racism.

“This was a town formed by freed slaves, and after being established, it was surrounded by 14 massive petrochemical factories, and the land and water was just poisoned, and most of the people have already left,” says Klein.

While worries about cancers and other illnesses in Mossville have been covered fairly extensively in the media, the issue of fertility problems is less well known. “When I spoke to women who had lived in Mossville, what I heard about was just an epidemic of infertility and that just so many women had hysterectomies,” Klein says. These stories are anecdotal, but Klein hopes more research will be done. “This is often just an understudied part of science,” she says.

Klein also points to emerging research that links the fracking boom with various reproductive problems. In a Bloomberg View column earlier this year, Mark Whitehouse reported on data presented at the annual American Economic Association meeting from a yet-to-be published study of Pennsylvania birth records that apparently found a correlation between proximity to shale gas sites and low birth weight in babies. Babies born within a 2.5-kilometer radius of gas drilling sites were almost twice as likely to have a low birth weight (increasing from 5.6 percent to 9 percent of births) or a low APGAR score, the first evaluation of a baby’s health after birth. And a study published this year examining birth outcomes and proximity to natural gas development reported that mothers who lived within 10 miles of the highest number of fracking sites (125 wells within a 10-mile radius) were 30 percent more likely to have babies with congenital heart defects and twice as likely to have babies with neurological problems compared to mothers whose homes were at least 10 miles away from any fracking site.

Then there’s the threat that climate change itself poses to children. Last year, UNICEF warned that “more severe and more frequent natural disasters, food crises and changing rainfall patterns are all threatening children’s lives” and that by 2050, climate change could result in an additional 25 million children suffering from malnourishment.

“For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn,” writes Klein, “our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

by aleidasharrington Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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American artist Deborah Aschheim makes the “invisible visible”: In one series of works, she created room-size installations that allowed art lovers to walk through a nervous system, with each subsequent installation becoming “smarter” than the previous one. The sixth and final piece in the series was the most like a real brain—using motion sensors, closed circuit TVs and baby monitors, the network responded to the movement of its audience, capturing their actions and encoding “experiences” into “memories.” (For images of the fourth installation in the series, see below.)

Ascheim’s work calls into question an idea that was once widely accepted: That no two disciplines differ more greatly than science and art. The scientifically trained British novelist C.P. Snow crystallized this notion in his famed 1959 lecture about the “two cultures.” Scientists and those in the humanities, Snow said, just couldn’t communicate.

But to hear Arthur I. Miller tell it, that’s an antiquated point of view. Miller is a physics Ph.D., a science historian, and a philosopher—and an art aficionado to boot. And in his new book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, he makes the case for the existence of a “third culture” that, today, is mashing together art, science, and technology into one big domain. “There are still people who think science is science, and art is art,” says Miller on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But that is very far from the situation because it is very, very common and meaningful today for artists to indulge in science and technology in doing their work.”

Miller’s argument is supported not only by the myriad examples of artists who, like Aschheim, are highly reliant on science, but also by the surprising symmetries between how artists and scientists go about their work. One of his most important points: Scientists not only appreciate, but are in some cases driven by, aesthetic considerations. And artists don’t just pull ideas out of their imaginations: They engage in detailed work that often resembles scientific research.

“There’s aesthetics in biology: form is beautiful in biology, but it’s form as adapted to nature,” says Miller. “And when one gets into the physical sciences, one can even quantify aesthetics even more, in that, for example, we’ve heard the phrase, ‘This is a beautiful equation.'” Einstein, famously, put it like this: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

At the frontier of this new culture, there is a blossoming of workshops and events in which artists and scientists are thrown together into a room and forced to interact. The thinking is that cross-pollination will occur and new creative ideas will emerge. The CERN laboratory, home to the Large Hadron Collider, even has an artist in residency program.

Here are five artists who are using cutting edge science and technology to change the landscape of contemporary art:

Deborah Aschheim—Neural Architecture. Aschheim‘s installations are inspired by her personal connection to neurological disorders; her focus has been on investigating memory, both autobiographical and collective—in part because memory disorders like Alzheimer’s disease run in her family. She’s worked as an artist-in-residence at several academic institutions, and she immerses herself into the science behind her pieces. (At the University of California, San Francisco, she and I worked together on a piece that explored the subjectivity of neuroimaging.)

Panopticon (neural architecture no. 4). Deborah Aschheim

In the work pictured here, entitled Panopticon, Ascheim used 260 light cells on motion sensors, 23 pocket televisions, 3 DVDs, 3 closed circuit TV cameras, 14 nanny cams, and 4,000 feet of clear PVC tubing to create a series of “cells” in a type of neural network. This work was the fourth installment in her Neural Architecture series, in which each subsequent piece was “smarter” than the previous one—in essence, the architecture was “learning.” As people walked through the Panopticon installation, they triggered motion sensors that altered which cells were “on,” as lights in the nodes would turn on and off depending on the signal from the sensors. (See a video here.) Then, monitors inside the piece screened video footage from external galleries at the college, as well as a live feed of viewers from embedded spy cameras. This installation was not only responsive, it could also “remember”: monitors played short animated “memories” from the previous installation.

Here’s a close-up of the Panopticon:

Marta de Menezes—Modified Butterflies. Menezes creates “designer” butterflies: Not through genetic engineering, but by “interfering with the normal development of the wing, inducing the development of a new pattern never seen before in nature.” Her work of “art,” then, is actually the live animal that was altered by her vision. For examples of these butterflies see the lead image above, or below:

Modified butterfly. Marta de Menezes.

“They’re not genetically modified at all,” explains Miller of Menezes’ butterflies. “That’s the big thing about them. Menezes takes a hot needle and probes into the caterpillar. And out comes butterflies with asymmetrical wings.” Here’s Menezes’s description of her work:

These wings are an example of something simultaneously natural, but resulting from human intervention. The artistic intervention leaves the butterfly genes unchanged. Thus, the new patterns are not transmitted to the offspring of the modified butterflies. The new patterns are something that never existed before in nature, and that rapidly disappear from nature not to be seen again. These artworks literally live and die. They are an example of art with a lifespan—the lifespan of a butterfly. They are an example of something that is simultaneously art and life.

Brandon Ballengée—Ecological Art. Ballengée is an artist, activist and ecological researcher. He participates in biology field studies, works in a lab and uses his art to document the changes that are happening in various ecosystems. His artistic products put his biological specimens on display, and his most common subjects are frogs, toads and salamanders. In his book, Miller quotes Ballengée as saying that “amphibians are a ‘sentinel’ species, the environmental ‘canaries in the coal mine.'”

In some pieces, like the one pictured here, Ballengée uses biological technology to “clear and stain” a specimen, making it transparent and highlighting certain parts. DFA186:Hades, below, was created using more than 10 different chemicals and dyes.

Hades. Brandon Ballengee

According to Ballengée’s website, his work is designed to “re-examine the context of the art object from a static form (implying rationality and control) into a more organic structure reflecting the inherent chaos found within evolutionary processes, biological systems and nature herself.”

Mark Ackerley—DNA Melody. Ackerley is a composer and former employee of 23andMe, a biotech company that pulls genetic information out of a sample of your spit and helps you research your ancestry. While working at 23andMe, Ackerley developed an algorithm that translated snippets of DNA into music. Using four different musical parameters—rhythm, pitch, timbre and key signature—he turned genes into melodies. To hear an excerpt of a DNA melody played by a string quartet, click here.

Ken Perlin—Perlin Noise. At NYU’s Media Research Lab, Perlin invented a new way of making animation more life-like. His technique, called Perlin Noise, is used by animators world-wide, including in Pixar movies. He’s even won an Academy Award for his work. “Which is something pretty good for somebody who has an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in computer science,” comments Miller.

Watch this video to see how Pixar used mathematics and Perlin Noise to create life-like moss in the film Brave:

“When I asked Perlin what he considers himself to be—either an artist or a scientist—he said neither,” recalls Miller. Rather, Perlin identifies himself simply as “a researcher.”

“In other words,” argues Miller, “the labels ‘artist’ and ‘scientist’ are becoming increasingly irrelevant.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short discussion with Joe Hanson, writer and host of the “It’s Okay to Be Smart” video series, about the science of Game of Thrones, what blowing on Nintendo cartridges has to do with your cognitive biases, new evidence disproving Bigfoot, the relationship between seeing UFOs and alcohol consumption, why men born in winter are more likely to be left-handed…and more.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

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