My son introduced me to the cutaneous rabbit illusion a few weeks ago. It's a pretty interesting phenomenon. Basically the nerves in your forearm aren't wired for strong spatial resolution, so the brain fudges a little to figure out where along your arm a given sensation originated from. As a result, some taps at your wrist and elbow can be perceived as a series of taps running up the length of your forearm, even though nothing touched the middle area. … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Where’s the (Roast) Beef?
Science
Science Corner: A Bridge Too Far
Communicating science to the public is a dicey proposition. Science employs a tighter precision than our everyday language usage. Preserving that precision can leave one's writing inaccessible to many. Analogies can be employed to improve accessibility. Analogies are like bridges; they help people get from wherever they are to somewhere new, often spanning a conceptual gap that might otherwise be much harder to cross. But what happens when the analogy morphs into fact? … [Read more...] about Science Corner: A Bridge Too Far
Science Corner: You’ve Got A Lot of Nerve(s)!
It's been a while since we had some real science news in this space. My favorite recent story is the sequencing of the octopus genome. I've shared previously my fascination with ants; octopuses (not octopi, as it turns out, since octopus is Greek, not Latin) are rapidly joining them among my favorites. Did you know that octopus tentacles are capable of independent sensory processing, even if they are severed? The genome sequence reveals a number of interesting genes involved in nerve cell function, including genes not … [Read more...] about Science Corner: You’ve Got A Lot of Nerve(s)!
Science Corner: Entertaining Lies and Real Truth
It's not exactly science news, but this item on the role of fiction in engaging the scientific imagination really caught the eye of this science fiction fan. I'm familiar with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Flatland, both of which encode interesting mathematics questions as narrative, but I had no idea scientific fairy tales were a whole genre. The one with the various chemical elements embodied as fairies sounds particularly fascinating. Knowing how much my daughter and her friends love fairies, perhaps it's … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Entertaining Lies and Real Truth
Science Corner: Behold the Brontosaurus
So many of us have had a dinosaur phase at some point, and chances are if you did you learned that the Brontosaurus is a creature that never existed. That factoid is often used to separate the proto-paleontologists from the Flintstones fans. Only now, it turns out that maybe Brontosaurus did warrant a separate classification after all. I wonder how that news will play at my local natural history museum, which already has a history with the Brontosaurus controversy. Deciding what separates one species from another is … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Behold the Brontosaurus