We don't know what causes autism, but we know it's not vaccines

Every time I read about another possible cause of autism, I'm fascinated.  Clearly, something in our environment is different, given the surge in cases over the last few years.  There's some increase in diagnosis and awareness, but that's not enough.

And since the alleged ingredient in vaccines has been removed, but autism rates continue to climb, we know that's not the cause.  Plus, the only study to show any relationship between autism and vaccines was faked.  And only included 20 participants.  Whose data was faked.

Anyway, I read an article suggesting the possibility that sonograms cause autism.  I find it a fascinating theory.  I hope we can figure out the cause soon.

Linus Pauling FTW

Scientists have just imaged atomic bonds in a molecule as it changed shapes. It's particularly amazing how the shapes from molecular diagrams pretty exactly match the images of the actual molecule.

Atomic animation

IBM made their logo out of atoms when they first invented the scanning probe microscope. Now they've made a movie with atoms as pixels. That's some cool progress.

Tau, an improvement on Pi

I have loved Pi for a long time.  But Vi Hart has convinced me that Tau (2 Pi) is a better way to do circle math and trigonometry.  It has all the things that make Pi wonderful, but is even simpler and easier to understand.

Happy Tau Day!

Last in a series of funny videos

This is the last of my nano videos.  As this is posted, I'm shooting Spanish versions of them.

Pants

I made this video about pants.  Pants.

Another game for science

There's a game called Phylo you can play where you try to match colored blocks.  These blocks are actually DNA proteins, and you're sorting DNA sequences.

"Why should I do that?" you think to yourself.  Because humans are way better at doing this job than computers.

Another funny video!

Getting ice cream to fall off a cone is not as easy as I make it look.  Prop masters beware trying to do this shot.  (Getting ice cream to levitate is surprisingly easy, on the other hand.)

More funny videos

This one has special effects!

Video 2

This is the least funny video of the series I made.  So I show it second to get it out of the way.

I'm funny!

I made several videos last year.  I'm doing these again in Spanish next month.

Spoilers make stories better!

A researcher asked people (aka college undergraduate psychology students) to read some short stories, but some of the students had a spoiler paragraph at the beginning that revealed the twist in the story.

Surprisingly, people rated the spoiled stories as more enjoyable. When you know there's a secret, you can read the story and see the hints coming. I think we still enjoy being surprised sometimes, but we are more able to see the quality of writing when we know more of the details. Having a story "spoiled" makes the first time reading it like reading it a second time.

Video games ARE making us smarter

Good news for Stephen Johnson: video games are in fact making us smarter.

Studies show that IQ scores have been steadily increasing over the last few decades. Part of this increase can be attributed to better schools and nutrition, but even well-educated and well-fed people do better solving puzzles than they did 50 years ago.

One likely reason? Video games. Lots and lots of people spend leisure time solving 3D mazes, intricate puzzles and logic problems, and doing other things that IQ tests challenge you to do.

Not that increases in IQ scores are necessarily good. But video games are changing our brains.

We may be biologically programmed to like what we buy

You surely know that people who buy a product become fans of that product. (Usually, unless that product really stinks.) We end up with the Mac vs. PC argument, Coke vs. Pepsi, even our political polarization.

It turns out that not only do normal people do this, but even people with amnesia who can't remember choosing. Psychologists had students and amnesia patients choose between two different posters, and both groups had stronger preferences later after making a choice. Even if they couldn't remember the first choice at all.

Not only that, but they see the same behaviour in monkeys. After choosing between different colored M&Ms, monkeys start to prefer the color they chose and dislike the color they previously rejected.

I'm not sure what this all means, but clearly my increased excitement about science will persist even after I don't remember this particular study.

Missing universe mass found!

A student has discovered where some of the mass missing from the universe is! There are thin filaments of matter sticking out from the galaxies, wisps and tendrils of stardust that are skinny and hard to see, but apparently very heavy.

I knew we'd find it somewhere. Just harder to find missing stuff when there's no couch cushions to look under.

Best Optical Illusions

There's a contest for the best optical illusions of the year.

Below is first place. Second place (on the page linked above) is also awesome.

The dots keep changing color continuously, but when they move you focus on movement and not color change. It's unlikely that a lion trying to eat you is going to change color, so it's good we evolved this way, but interesting nonetheless.

Robots Evolve Altruism

Yes, robots can learn to share.

Some scientists set up a robot arena where robots compete for "food". The programs of the robots evolve, mimicking natural evolution. Whichever robots get the most food have the most copies of them made; lather, rinse, repeat. After a few generations, some robots started sharing food with other robots. Ones that are "related" to them, having similar programming.

Exactly as predicted by the theory of evolution. Awesome.

The difference between poisons and toxins

I just learned the technical difference between things that are poisonous and things that are toxic.

Toxins are produced biologically, where as poisons are anything that kills you. (Venom being a toxin injected through a bite or sting.) Behold my glorious Venn diagram.

So snake venom is a poisonous toxin, ricin is a toxin and a poison but not a venom, and arsenic is just poisonous.

Since latex is produced biologically, it’s both a toxin and a poison.

Learning!

Ridiculous optical illusion

I just saw an optical illusion that was hard to believe was an illusion. The "blue" and "green" in the spiral below are actually the same color. REALLY.



What's even more amazing about this illusion is that it fools software too. The color blindness software I posted about yesterday translates this illusion into the colors we perceive, not the colors that are actually there. In fact, so does image compression software. This "bug" might reveal something interesting about how human sight actually works.

Double Wow.

smartphone app for colorblindness

Dan Kaminsky has created an amazing app that can translate colors into things the colorblind can see!

The Dan Kam "quantizes color", collapsing complicated color spectra into 7 isolated colors. Like lasers for real life. It makes red and green single colors instead of broad ranges. And the two particular colors it uses are different in enough ways that someone who's red-green colorblind can tell them apart!