A round up of the month's science news
Look! no hands
Santa will be busy this year trying to get his hands on Kinect, the latest in video game technology. Just as the world has been getting used to the Wii, Microsoft has gone one step better and developed a game that needs no controller at all. The good news: there is less chance of you flinging the remote across the room while playing virtual tennis. The bad news: you will look even more ridiculous than usual. Working with an Xbox 360, it uses a camera that picks up the infrared light reflected from 48 points on a player’s body and an infrared emitter to read the player’s movements and create an image of the person. There are only a few games for it so far, but they concentrate on the sport end of things, so throwing yourself around the room is a must. Clear any tables with sharp edges from the area. And make sure no one is filming you for YouTube.
Win a Nano now
Send us your pictures if you want to win fame, glory and an iPod Nano. BANG would love to see your photographs, so we want you to send them to us each month. This month’s theme is “Bang”.
Let your imagination run wild and take whatever picture you think best depicts the theme “Bang” and send them to us. We have got an iPod Nano for first prize and great runner-up prizes of HMV vouchers for second and third places.
We will print the best pictures in next month’s issue.
To enter: please email your BANG snaps to bang@irishtimes.com with the theme in the subject line. For full terms and conditions, please email marketing@irishtimes.com
Paul the octopus: rest in peace
Having achieved fame during the football World Cup for match “predictions” broadcast from his aquarium tank in Germany, Paul the Octopus who died recently was a scientific marvel. This invertebrate correctly forecast the outcomes of all the matches involving his country, as well as the final. His choice was signalled by opting for food from one of two containers, each labelled with the flags of the competing countries.
Cephalopods, particularly octopuses, are noted for their intelligence. His 100% accuracy is, in the strictest sense of the word, incredible. Assuming there was no cheating, the accuracy of his predictions was as far as possible from the expected 50% success rate of random guessing. So what plausible explanation can there be?
Inspired by a great post on HeresyCorner.blogspot, I put this question to my first year tutorial group at Trinity College Dublin. Could we use scientific methods to understand Paul’s performance?
Octopuses can be “conditioned” into certain activities. Such learnt behaviour might be to always look for food in the box with the German flag on it. Germany won all of their matches until the semi-final, when they were beaten by Spain. For that match, as well as for the final, Paul chose Spain.
One can imagine how these two flags, both with high-contrast horizontal stripes, looked the same to this colour-blind invertebrate.
So was Paul simply viewing the horizontal stripes as a reliable indicator of a food reward?
I would love to have tested this hypothesis by setting up an experiment with Paul, but instead I will just have to appreciate his legacy as a wonderful example of how people find sense in nonsense. – Aoife McLysaght, Lecturer in genetics, TCD
We’re getting space brains
Ever wondered what it costs to buy a zero-gravity toilet for the International Space Station? Find the answer in Space Brains, a new app offering a multiple choice challenge that tests your knowledge of astronomy.
It has 1,000 questions on such topics as the solar system, stars and galaxies as well as the one about zero-gravity toilets. The app runs on the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad and you can play solo or remotely in twos or fours. It was released as part of Science Week Ireland by the Discover Science and Engineering programme with the Armagh and Blackrock observatories. Space Brains is available free from iTunes or through scienceweek.ie
The month’s top telly
David Attenborough's new television series First Lifeis cracking stuff. As he traipses around the world examining fossils, he brings their stories to life and builds a picture for us of how life developed.
Last week, he considered such questions as why we have a nose over our mouth and eyes over our nose. And how did all animals come to share that?
It makes you realise that humans are closer to seabed-hugging creepy crawlies than you might think. (By the way, your face is that way so you can smell and see what you are putting into your mouth. It could get nasty otherwise.)
Catch First Lifeon BBC 2 at 9pm next Friday as Attenborough looks at how fossils in Canada's Rocky Mountains document animal diversity.
Banging blog
The Frog Blog has become one of our favourite sites of late. It has loads of great stuff from the fun end of science, including the best YouTube videos.
Promising to be especially enjoyable is its strange animals slot: did you know the Angora rabbit’s fur gets so fluffy it begins to eat itself? Which is not good. But it is a ridiculously cute bunny.
The blog has been nominated for an Eircom Spider, the awards for Ireland’s best websites. Also listed is Communicate Science, another place for fascinating twists and turns, with a great focus on what’s going on in Ireland.
The Frog Blog was created in St Columba’s College, Dublin, by teachers Humphrey Jones and Jeremy Stone.
Before you check it out, read Jones on the science of time travel on our back page. Then turn to blog.sccscience.com.
Check out Communicate Science too at communicatescience.eu.
Building a backyard spaceship
You might think it would be impossible to stick a camera into a take-away container attached to the end of a balloon, send it in to space, film the process and then recover it once it had crashed and put it on YouTube. Think again. A father and son did just that – with spectacular results. Check it out on brooklynspaceprogram.org
Is that comet salted or roasted?
After travelling 4.6 billion kilometres, the unmanned spaceship Epoxi last week flew within 1,126 km of the 1.2km-wide comet Hartley 2.
Some great snaps show a peanut-shaped object with jets spraying from its surface. It meant success for the mission after a rocky start. The first comet it was supposed to photograph couldn’t be found.
NEXT ISSUEDecember 15th THE SCIENCE OF CHRISTMAS