Turns out it has something to do with earworms, or more precisely the Germanic Ohrwurm. 

One theory is that earworms are a form of mild musical hallucination (normally a rare experience), the distinction being that with an earworm you (a) usually aren’t on drugs or suffering from schizophrenia and thus (b) are fully aware there’s no actual music being played outside of your skull. Another theory is that earworms are a side effect of your brain trying to consolidate memories, akin to what happens in REM sleep. Yet another possibility is pondered by neurologist Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia: earworms might simply be a consequence of our being surrounded by music in our lives whether we want to be or not.

PBS will be airing a two-hour-long documentary based on Michael Pollan’s excellent book, The Botany of Desire. The program airs October 28 at 8 p.m.

You know, the one that was heralded a few weeks ago?  The research may be bunk. Disappointed but not shocked.

Did anyone wake up super-duper early, grab their telescope to check out NASA’s moon bomb this morning?  No, I didn’t either.  4:30 a.m. is just too early even for me.  I was hoping to wake up to a destroyed moon and out-of-whack tides, but alas NASA even managed to screw up a simple moon bomb.

I can’t help wonder if the supposed findings that female oral contraception has changed the definition of male sexiness will develop from “Hum, this is mildly interesting” to something the conservative anti-contraception movement could latch onto as another way to demonize healthy family planning.

Future headlines will surely read “Is Oral Contraception killing our beefy hunks?” (read the comment thread in this post if you have any doubts) I can just see the sensationalized evening news promo asking if we can guess which common household pill is choosing our men for us. Advil? Tylenol? Clariton? Aghast, no, it is the dreaded birth control pill.  The shame!  MORE »

Incredible! Seven new species of bioluminescent fungi have been discovered. “Dennis Desjardin, a mycologist at San Francisco State University who has discovered more than 200 species of fungi to date, and his co-authors found the mushrooms in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico.”

Desjardin believes these fungi developed their glow-in-the-dark capability to spread their spores.  Animals are attracted to them, etc.

It doesn’t matter how much evidence piles up on the side of evolution or science as there will always be a loud and vocal minority of fundies that use evolutionary evidence to strengthen their own convictions.    It’s odd because they act as if they are being marginalized by society and yet they are probably given a larger soapbox than they deserve.

Hence, there’s something deliciously satisfying about the discovery of a skeleton older than Lucy and far more significant, as it seems to link humans and chimps in a manner no skeleton before has done.  I know it won’t change anything is the science vs. religion debate, but still. 

“A multinational team discovered the first parts of the Ar. ramidus skeleton in 1994 in Aramis, Ethiopia. At 4.4 million years old, Ardi is not the oldest fossil proposed as an early hominin, or member of the human family, but it is by far the most complete–including most of the skull and jaw bones, as well as the extremely rare pelvis, hands, and feet. These parts reveal that Ardi had an intermediate form of upright walking, a hallmark of hominins, according to the authors of 11 papers that describe Ardi and at least 35 other individuals of her species. But Ardi still must have spent a lot of time in the trees, the team reports, because she had an opposable big toe. That means she was probably grasping branches and climbing carefully to reach food, to sleep in nests, and to escape predators.” 

And even if this isn’t the cold-stone missing link, the holy grail of evolution, it’s another chink in the armor.

Voyager 1 and 2 have passed through the “termination shock” boundary — a magnetic bubble that partially protects the solar system from cosmic rays.  Currently, they two probes are traveling through the heliosheath before moving into the heliopause. The heliopause is the assumed boundary of the solar system.  Read More. [Space via Reddit]

Jonah Lehrer explains the science behind Girl Talk:

Let’s say you’re listening to that catchy Wu-Tang song, with the chorus “And let’s start it like this, son, rollin’ with this one / And that one, pullin’ out gats for fun”. Once the acoustic snippet enters working memory, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex will fire in response to the stimulus – they are the neural representation of the song. Here’s where things get interesting: even when the stimulus disappears – you’ve now started listening to a different song, perhaps that Boston song “Foreplay/Long Time” – those working memory cells continue to fire. They’re still holding on to the Wu-Tang clip, which is why working memory is a type of memory. This echo of activity only lasts for a few seconds, but it’s long enough so that our thoughts get blended together, as seemingly unrelated sensations overlap.

Got it?  Gregg Gillis, the genius behind Girl Talk, is profiled by GQ and interviewed by Whitney Matheson.

This is some haul for biologists:

Scientists have found 850 previously unknown species living in subterranean water, caves and micro-caverns.These insects, crustaceans, spiders and worms are likely only about one-fifth of the number of undiscovered species the researchers think exist underground amid the harsh conditions of the Australian outback. Two species of blind fish and two of blind eels were also uncovered.

“What we’ve found is that you don’t have to go searching in the depths of the ocean to discover new species of invertebrate animals — you just have to look in your own backyard,” said researcher Andy Austin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Not that I’m blind, but I so want a cyborg eye: “Using wireless technology, eyeglasses equipped with a camera and the chip, scientists say they should someday be able to restore at least some vision to people who suffer from retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration , two of the leading causes of blindness.” 

The technology is still in the testing phase, but MIT researchers hope it will be ready within three years.

Ken Morrish of Colaton Raleigh, East Devon, insists he picked this mutated Golden Delicious apple from a tree in his garden.

“The red and green split through the stem is totally perfect – as if I’ve painted it,” Mr. Morrish told the Daily Mail. “It’s a genuine one-off and none of us have ever seen an apple like it before.”

According to horticulturists, who’ve examined the fruit, it’s the product of a random genetic mutation.

For the first time, an experimental AIDS vaccine was effective at blocking the virus.  It’s a small but significant step in the fight.  Still, even though the results are promising it’s certainly nowhere near ready for market.  “The benefits of the vaccine were modest, only a 31% reduction in the number of new infections. But coming on the heels of previous vaccine studies that either showed no benefit at all or actually increased the risk of contracting the disease, the study buoys the hopes of researchers who had nearly given on ever finding an effective way to block the spread of the virus.” 

“We now have evidence that it is possible to reduce the risk of HIV infection with a vaccine,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in his own statement. “There is little doubt that this finding will energize and redirect the AIDS vaccine field as all of us begin the hard work to translate this landmark result into true public health benefit.”

The trial, which began in 2003, had been disparaged by many critics as a waste of time and money because each of the two vaccines used in it had been shown in individual trials to produce no benefit. But researchers speculated that using them together, with one vaccine priming the immune system and the second boosting that response, would be more effective, and their optimism about this “prime-boost” combination has been validated.

Experts said that it will be many more years before a vaccine is available for wider use, but the results indicate at last that such a vaccine may, indeed, be possible. “It gives me cautious optimism,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped fund the study.

And for those interested in the science behind the trials:

The primer in this combo is Alvac, made by Sanofi Pasteur, which uses a defanged canarypox virus to carry three synthetic HIV genes into the body. The boost comes from Aidsvax, originally made by VaxGen and now owned by the nonprofit group Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases. It contains a genetically engineered version of a protein from the HIV surface.

The study involved more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand who had no unusual exposure to the virus, just the normal everyday risk. Half received four priming doses of Alvac and two boost doses of Aidsvax over a six-month period, and half received placebo shots.

After three years of follow-up, new HIV infections were observed in 74 of the 8,198 people who received the placebo, but in only 51 of the 8,197 given the vaccine, a statistically significant 31% reduction.

To the researchers’ disappointment, however, the vaccine did not reduce levels of HIV activity in those who became infected after being vaccinated.