The Antikythera Mechanism was discovered a hundred years ago in the wreckage of a 2000-year-old ship. In was corroded, crushed and initially unrecognized as the marvel of ancient engineering it was. For much of the last century, researchers have been trying to figure out what this complex mechanical device can do, and finally, new imaging techniques have revealed many of its secrets. Dr. Daryn Lehoux is a historian of science in the Classics Department at Queen's University in Kingston and is one of the many researchers fascinated with the machine. It's now been revealed that it operated as a complex calculator, a calender tracking multiple calendar systems, and a laptop-sized planetarium which could accurately predict the motions of the planets.

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The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project
Nature video on the Antikythera Mechanism
Dr Lehoux's home page

Babies & Talk

Which one quacks? Courtesy A. Vouloumanos/PNAS

Canadian researcher Dr. Athena Vouloumanos, a professor of Psychology at New York University, was interested in testing the idea that infants have a built-in affinity for human speech. So she performed a simple experiment on five-month-old babies, to see if, at that young age, they understood that speech was something that only humans produced. She showed the infants pictures of humans, monkeys, and ducks, and played recordings of human speech (in a language the infants had never heard), monkey calls, and quacks from Daffy. By monitoriing the attention they paid to the pictures, she was able to determine if they could match the sounds to the animal that produced it. To her satisfaction, the infants did match speech to human faces. More interestingly, they were able to match monkey calls to monkeys, but didn't match duck calls to ducks. She hopes understanding why this happened will help reveal the cognitive and evolutionary background to sound and speech recognition.

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Related Links

Paper in PNAS
News release from New York University
Dr. Vouloumanos' lab
Dr. Vouloumanos' web page
Not Exactly Rocket Science Blog
Dr. Vouloumanos previously on Quirks & Quarks May 26, 2007 March 4, 2006

Human Footprints in the Mud

Drilling for sediment cores - courtesy N. Michelutti (Queen's University)

Reconstructing the climate of the past is a vital part of understanding what's going on today, as greenhouse gases transform the world. Dr. John Smol, a professor of biology and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change at Queen's University in Kingston, and his colleagues, have analyzed a sedimentary record reaching back much farther than any found before. This sediment core from a lake on Baffin Island records 200,000 years of climate and ecological history - a record 20 times older than is generally available in North America. It covers the complete cycle of two Ice Ages and underlines how unnatural the recent warming in the Arctic has been.

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Paper in PNAS
News release from Queen's University
Dr. Smol's Lab
Dr. Smol's Web Page
Dr. Smol previously on Quirks & Quarks Sept. 8, 2007 Dec. 11, 2004 Dec. 2, 2000

Macaque Moms Go Goo-Goo

courtesy Peggy Wagner

Rhesus macaque monkey mothers interact with their babies in a very similar manner to that of humans. Mother macaques kiss their babies, make lip smack sounds and hold their babies just like human mothers do with their newborns. Dr. Annika Paukner at the National Institutes of Health Animal Center in Maryland has also observed the baby macaque mimicking the mother's various gestures of affection. This type of interaction was thought to be unique to humans. One difference is that with macaques, this maternal bond only lasts three to four weeks. Young macaques are weened from their mothers much earlier than human babies.

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Paper in Current Biology
Movies of Rhesus Macaque moms & babies
News release from Cell Press
Dr. Paukner's web page

Ribbon 'Round the Solar System

IBEX sky map, showing ribbon, courtesy SwRI

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft set out to map the region between the edge of the solar system and the heliosphere, the bubble-like structure that protects us from cosmic rays. But IBEX found something completely unexpected. Photographs from IBEX show a bright, arc-shaped ribbon made of particles called energetic neutral atoms. The ribbon seems to take its shape from magnetic fields beyond the solar system. According to Dr. David McComas, the IBEX Principal Investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, the creation of the ribbon is a big mystery because it was not predicted or detected by any previous research.

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NASA's IBEX mission
News release from NASA
News release from Southwest Research Institute
Video of new sky map from IBEX
Dr McComas' web page
CBC News story

Science Fact or Science Fiction: Reading in the dark

From time to time, we'll present a commonly held idea or popular saying - and ask a Canadian scientist to set us straight on whether we should believe it or not. And today's popular belief is: "You Will Ruin Your Eyesight if You Read in The Dark". To help us blow the bedcovers off this belief and shed some flashlight on the truth, we contacted Dr. Alan Cruess, Professor and Head of The Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Dalhousie University in Halifax. His verdict: science fiction.

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