Science Caturday – Page 21 – The Finch and Pea

Science Caturday: Happy Winter Solstice

Today, December 21, 2013, marks the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.

According to our friends at Wikipedia, “The axial tilt of Earth and gyroscopic effects of the planet’s daily rotation keep the axis of rotation pointed at the same point in the sky. As the Earth follows its orbit around the Sun, the same hemisphere that faced away from the Sun, experiencing winter, will, in half a year, face towards the Sun and experience summer. Since the two hemispheres face opposite directions along the planetary pole, as one polar hemisphere experiences winter, the other experiences summer.

More evident from high latitudes, a hemisphere’s winter solstice occurs on the shortest day and longest night of the year, when the sun’s daily maximum elevation in the sky is the lowest….The seasonal significance of the winter solstice is in the reversal of the gradual lengthening of nights and shortening of days.” (source)

Our science kitteh has kindly agreed to cut back his daily napping from twelve hours to ten for the occasion, with the proviso that he can attack the Christmas tree with impunity during the year’s longest night.

Science Caturday: One Code, Two Code…

Like a DNA nucleotide, this LOLcat is capable of playing multiple roles. It is good for creation vs. evolution, and so much more. Global warming vs. something else? You are covered. Homeopathy vs. physics? Done. Duons vs. the genetic code? In the bag.

Duons vs. the genetic code? What is a duon?

Good question. A duon is a DNA nucleotide that can do two roles. This perhaps makes it a rather lame nucleotide. DNA nucleotides have a lot of potential tasks they can do (eg, help encode an amino acid, be part of a protein binding site, indicate a splice site, etc) as part of their role storing information in our cells. The idea that a nucleotide might be subject to evolutionary pressure from several different tasks simultaneously is nothing new.

There is, as Emily Willingham points out at Forbes, no real “duon” controversy outside the minds of the folks that wrote the press release (and, perhaps, John Stamatoyannopoulos, if the press release quote is accurate, which I suspect it might be based on his advocacy for the ENCODE Consortium’s “junk DNA is functional” boondoggle). These researchers have provided some evidence to support the hypothesis that evolutionarily conserved codon bias (using one codon, of the several possible for an amino acid, in the genetic code more than expected by chance) is due to selection to maintain transcription factor binding sites.

This is not an unreasonable hypothesis, but it is hardly shocking, hardly requires a new term, and is hardly a controversy.

Science Caturday: Lolcats make u smarter

Best news we’ve heard all year: science sez cute kitty photos can help you learn stuff.

A language-learning app development company called Memrise looked at lots of data to see what helped their users retain information. After finding links between using the funny photos and students’ ability to recall phrases, they broke down the results of memory tests to see which photos worked best.

“We wanted to know what kinds of visual mnemonics were most effective at helping people to learn fast,” Ben Whately, chief operating officer at Memrise, told BBC News. “The pattern began to emerge that pictures of cats always featured disproportionately among the most effective,” he says.

Memrise used this research to develop CatAcademy, an app that shows funny photos of cats along with corresponding phrases in Spanish.

Want to know why this works? Of course you do. Because SCIENCE! Japanese researchers published a paper in PLoSOne last year showing that study “participants performed tasks requiring focused attention more carefully after viewing cute images.”