“Laughter,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”

Putting an evolutionary tweak on that idea, Albert Rapp, in his 1951 treatise Origins of Wit and Humour, opined that “all laughter has developed from one primitive behavior, the roar of triumph in an ancient jungle duel.”

It seems a bit of a stretch to lump all of laughter together like that, but it is instructive to note just how ubiquitous sadistic laughter is.

To cite but a few famous examples: Romans laughed heartily at Christians being mauled by lions; and torture and execution were considered fun for the whole family until practically yesterday—in the late Middle Ages, the citizens of Mons actually purchased a condemned man from a neighboring town so they could have the pleasure of quartering him themselves. In the 18th century, the well-heeled would visit insane asylums to amuse themselves by taunting the inmates.

Laughter was widely reported during the ethnic violence in Kosovo, Indonesia, and Rwanda; and was allegedly present at many lynchings in the South. The boys who shot up Columbine were said to have been laughing throughout much of the massacre.

And it could be plausibly argued that such gleeful sadism is very much in evidence in some versions of so-called “reality television.”

Type “face plant” into YouTube and ask yourself why, oh why it’s so irresistibly funny to watch people fall down. (There’s an especially pleasing subgenre of falling models, among which videos you will find a pole-dancer face-plant that’s a touch too racy for this family program.)

If you’re too sophisticated or compassionate to laugh at suffering, remember the last time you laughed at Bush’s verbal blunders, or even a malapropism in Shakespeare, and consider Rapp’s claim that “frailty, deformity, and error are modern substitutes for the battered appearance of one’s opponent.”

Have you wondered if there is another you out there? Somewhere? Sitting in the same chair, reading the same blog post, wearing the same clothes and thinking the same thoughts? Well, Brian Greene says there must be one. Or two. Or lots and lots and lots and lots and… Why? You ask, well listen to Greene’s argument in this week’s podcast.

We are still furiously working on Season 5, so while you wait we bring you today’s podcast of a conversation between Robert Krulwich and Brian Greene, physics and mathematics professor and director of the Institute of Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University. The interview is part of a series called “Giants of Science” hosted by venerable New York institution, the 92nd St Y.

Robert and Brian discuss what’s beyond the horizon of our universe, what you might wear in infinite universes with finite pairs of designer shoes, and why the Universe and swiss cheese have more in common than you think.

Take a listen here:

PLEASE NOTE: Our apologies, there’s some noise at the end of the recording, please don’t be alarmed! It’s us, not you.

You can see a video of Brian talking about string theory here.

Here at Radiolab we’ve been known to tinker with sound…. cutting music, ambi, and big ideas all together to get the point across in the most fun, interesting and understandable way. It’s not your typical public radio interview. Recently, we decided to check in with some of the guests on past episodes to see what they thought. Were they over-edited? Mis-represented? Did they love the show? Hate it?

In the Stress episode Dr. Sapolsky explained the physiological representations of stress and how it helps and hurts us today.

You can hear Dr. Sapolsky in the Stress episode here:

Linda Evarts recently asked Dr. Sapolsky what he thought of the episode:

Here at Radiolab we’ve been known to tinker with sound…. cutting music, ambi, and big ideas all together to get the point across in the most fun, interesting and understandable way. It’s not your typical public radio interview. Recently, we decided to check in with some of the guests on past episodes to see what they thought. Were they over-edited? Mis-represented? Did they love the show? Hate it?

Deborah Gordon is a professor at Stanford University and an expert on ants. She showed Jad and Robert around her lab in the Emergence episode.

Listen to part of the episode here:

Linda Evarts recently called Deborah up to see what she thought of it:

Here’s what listener Ross Bennet thought about the video:

It’s a short video of a man singing a song to a litter of very active but attentive boxer puppies. The instant he begins singing, the entire litter of puppies begins shuffling around for a place to sleep like some narcoleptic version of musical chairs. By the time he’s been through two refrains of “Goodnight, Sweetheart” the pups are out cold. It’s definitely worth the 1:40 to watch it.

Now watch closely. This is more than just providing a soothing sound that creates a comforting environment conducive to relaxation. There’s something triggering sleep. These puppies zonk out as quickly as a trained dog will “sit” or “shake.”

As I’m watching this, recalling your episodes on sleep and musical language, so many questions come to mind.

What is a lullaby?
What is this connection between music and sleep?
Is this an inborn trait that we reinforce to become a conditioned behavior? Or is there something else going on here?
What makes a good lullaby?
Who was the brilliant person who hit on the idea of a bedside clock radio with a sleep timer?
Have there been any clinical studies about using music to treat insomnia?
And what exactly is insomnia? Could it be a lack of music?
What does a lullaby look or feel like to a synaesthesia patient? Do they look or feel different than other music?

A few staff favorites:

- The Goat on the Cow from “Detective Stories”

- Sometimes Behaves So Strangely from “Musical Language”

-The Upholstery Mystery from “Stress”

What are your favorite stories? Comment here or email them to radiolab@wnyc.org and your pick may end up on our CD in the fall!

NOTE: This CD should come out just before our new season of one-hour shows is released. (I know, I know, you are waiting! Well, we’re working on it!) All I can say about that is we’re working hard on some very interesting new topics : race, decision-making, diagnosis…

Here at Radiolab we’ve been known to tinker with sound… cutting music, ambi, and big ideas all together to get the point across in the most fun, interesting and understandable way. It’s not your typical public radio interview. Recently, we decided to check in with some of the guests on past episodes to see what they thought. Were they over-edited? Mis-represented? Did they love the show? Hate it?

In the Space episode Ann Druyan, widow of Carl Sagan, told us a story about the Voyager expedition, true love, and golden record that travels through space.

Listen to part of the episode here:

Here’s what Ann Druyan thought of it! (She’s speaking with intern Linda Evarts):

The excellent Brooklyn-based quarterly Cabinet dedicated its Spring ‘05 issue to laughter. You’re just going to have to buy a copy, because only a very small portion is available online…including this fine essay by Chris Turner on the fluid boundary between laughing and crying:

“Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on Painting, “either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks.” With the difference between the physical expression of emotions so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary Magdalene”?

To do so, artists relied on a staged iconography of expression and posture, codified in handbooks such as Charles Le Brun’s A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1667), in which Le Brun adapted Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649) into a visual lexicon of twenty-four emotions. Here, a menacing portrayal of the laughing face immediately precedes the illustration of a crumpled, crying one, almost as if the expressions were modulations of one another, but with certain differences artificially accentuated, especially in relation to the ruffling of the brow. Thus Le Brun created a stylized, histrionic vocabulary of the passions easily recognizable as tragic or comic on both canvas and stage.

Hydrogen sulfide stinks, but you knew that already, didn’t you. Hydrogen sulfide is flammable, but you probably knew that too (and I won’t ask how). But did you know hydrogen sulfide lowers blood pressure? and might protect the body from injury?

As little as 10 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide can irritate your eyes. 1000 ppm can kill you almost instantly. But some scientists like John Wallace of the University of Calgary say it also possesses some protective properties as low doses can stimulate gastric ulcer healing. It even protects mouse hearts from artificially induced heart attack says David Lefer of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Of course, how all this works is a bit harder to squeeze out (sorry..) and some say it could be that the gas soothes the perturbed mitochondria in the cells, effectively dodging the trigger to self-destruct.

But the key to the little stink bomb’s success might have to do with Sleep. Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has found that it can induce a sort of suspended animation:

Exposed to 80 ppm of hydrogen sulfide, mice enter into what we call a “hibernation-like” state, where their core temperature can be reduced as much as 11 degrees and their metabolic rate as judged by carbon dioxide production and oxygen consumption drops 10-fold. We’ve kept the animals in this state for 6 hours and they recover completely.

He and others in the field note that hydrogen sulfide and other mechanisms to alter the metabolic rate might make it possible to slow down the clock for trauma victims and preserve human organs for transplant. But nothing’s FDA approved.. so you don’t need to plug your nose at the ER just yet.

We’ve gotten a lot of great responses to our show Laughter. Tom was so inspired that he changed his voicemail:

“I was so excited that when I got to work I changed the end of my daily telephone greeting to “…make it a groovy day.” For some reason I then decided to start laughing like the laugh track people on your show.

When I finished I turned to look at my cube mates who were grinning from ear-to-ear. They didn’t know what was going on of course but my laughing sure “charged” their morning. Less than a minute later I started getting phone calls from others in the office who wanted to listen to my greeting. (My cubies must have told). I got 15 calls within 10 minutes and then things got back to normal. All day as I passed people in the hall I’d get “…hello Tom.” and then a big smile would come across their face.”

Listen to his giggle-fit here:

What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? That’s our question this hour. We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, even our very own brains. Featured: author Steven Johnson, fire-flyologists John and Elizabeth Buck, biologist E.O. Wilson, Ant expert Debra Gordon, mathematician Steve Strogatz, economist James Surowiecki, and neurologists Oliver Sacks and Christof Koch.

Helene Meyer Tvinnereim and a team of Norwegian scientists are collecting milk teeth from 100,000 kids to create what may be the world’s largest tooth bank. A dental biomaterials researcher at U Bergen in Norway, Tvinnereim seeks to find links between diseases and prenatal/childhood exposure to chemicals. The normally discarded teeth function as a ‘black-box’ recording of the chemicals children are exposed to, and have excellent shelf-life when dried and stored. Of course, this is a lot easier to do when you have a streamlined national health-care and record keeping system..

A listener recently sent us an email alerting us to a new dietary supplement released in June called Obecalp. Obecalp, which is Placebo spelled backwards, is a cherry-flavored chewable dextrose pill meant to trick children into believing they are getting a medicine that will make them feel better. Jennifer Buettner, the creator of the pill, has this to say on her website:

Hi. I’m Jen. I am a mommy. It’s what I love. It’s my job to make owies go away. Whether it’s a kiss or a Band-aid, the magic happens immediately. This is the power of placebo. I have a baby girl and two sons. One of them always needs my comfort and the knowledge that I will make them feel better. I invented Obecalp when I realized that children might need a little more than a kiss to make it go away. Obecalp fills the gap when medicine is not needed but my children need something more to make them feel better. You’ll know when Obecalp is necessary.

At first glance, the idea of it seemed absurd and possibly irresponsible. But searching the topic turned up a New York Times article on Obecalp that brought up an interesting point. Despite the fact that most medical professionals interviewed scoffed at the idea of Obecalp or even protested that it might be dangerous, the reality is that many doctors have admitted to prescribing antibiotics under pressure to patients whom they are nearly certain are suffering from a viral illness that antibiotics won’t cure. Few would argue that this is a good practice, but it’s certainly common enough that doctors sometimes find it easier to send patients home with an actual drug just to make them feel better psychologically.

What do you think about this? Would you give an upset child a sugar pill and tell them it would make them feel better?

And if you haven’t heard our Placebo show, check it out.

In the early 1940s, Esmond Emerson Snell (1914-2003) was trying to figure out why baby chicks who were fed raw egg whites (I know.. how cruel..) showed symptoms of biotin deficiency despite having plenty of it in the diet.

So who’s getting the biotin? Turned out the egg white itself just wouldn’t release the biotin for the chicks to use. So Snell purified the protein that held the biotin so tightly, which is no small feat today and even harder to do back then. He called it “avidin” (avid + biotin or “hungry for biotin”).

Snell said of his work: “The ability of this substance to take up and release biotin specifically and quantitatively suggests its possible use as a tool in the purification of biotin.”

He underestimated his contribution because this very strong and very reproducible interaction has become the foundation for probing all sorts of biological processes.

This week, a piece from one of our favorite radio-makers, Jonathan Mitchell. “City X” is a history of the modern shopping mall through perspectives of people living in a real, yet unnamed, city. Using a sound rich audio mosaic of observations and ruminations, all scored to Muzak, the universal mall experience comes to life, for better or for worse.

City X was commissioned by Hearing Voices with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

“Have you quantified that?”

Answering “no” to this question will usually trigger a collective humph from the crowd at a scientific meeting. We don’t want to know that there’s more or less of some biological activity unless you can say exactly how much different it is from normal.

Now Ron Milo, Paul Jorgensen and Mike Springer at the Systems Biology department in Harvard have attempted to sate this appetite for numbers with a new site called BioNumbers, which contains referenced entries for numbers like the total nasal epithelial cell surface area in a mouse nose (about 300 square millimeters in case you didn’t know).

And the Top Ten Bionumbers are?! drumroll…

1. Rate of ribosome translation in E. coli = 12-21 amino acids per second
2. Doubling time of cell lines in humans (check database)
3. Number of ribosomes/cell in E. coli = 6,800-72,000
4. Absolute abundance of tumor protein p53 in humans = 160,000
5. Number of mRNA/cell in E. coli = 1,380
6. Average number of neurons in the mouse brain = 75,000,000
7. Average number of neurons in the human brain = 100,000,000,000
8. Number of synapses for a “typical” human neuron = 1,000-10,000
9. Concentration of ATP in rat neuron = 2.59 mM
10. Ribosome + RNAn –> Ribosome·RNAn+1 in E. coli = 100 base pairs/sec

I know what you’re thinking.. How many BioNumbers are currently known?

..1718 and climbing.

British behavioral psychologist Richard Wiseman set out to track humor on an international scale and discover the funniest joke in the world.

After analyzing 1.5 million Internet ratings of 40,000 jokes, Wiseman’s Laugh Lab discovered that Germans were easiest to please, ranking first among nations in finding all sorts of jokes hilarious. Americans squeaked in at number eight with their love of put-downs, right behind the Belgians, with their penchant for the surreal.

Of course the results are extremely skewed, since they take into account only that portion of the populace willing and able to fill out surveys about jokes on the Internet.

Details from the study, as well as the official winning joke, are here.

A great article in the Toronto Star explored a possible new frontier in sleep disorders…sleep texting. The article notes that claims of sleep texting are popping up on blogs and message boards. It seems that two possibilities exist here: 1) some people are actually able to text while sleeping (as some people sleep walk), and 2) sleep texters may actually be awake while texting, but experiencing a kind of sleep amnesia. Apparently, if you’re awake for less than 3 minutes, your brain doesn’t create new memories of that experience. This leads me to wonder how many things I might be able to accomplish in under three minutes in the wee hours of the night. And it inspires me to keep my cellphone out of reach when I nod off.

Have you ever sent a sleep text? Did you really, or were you just embarrassed about sending a late-night message?

On this week’s podcast, we share an excerpt from Wordless Music on WNYC, a 4-part music program hosted by Jad, exploring the boundaries between classical and pop music. The series pairs rock and electronic musicians with more traditional chamber and new music performers, to create an entirely new concert experience. On this week’s selection, Jad waxes googly-eyed fan when he gets to talk about one of his favorite bands, Stars of the Lid.

Why do we play, an activity that is, by its definition, without an immediate objective? Does play serve an important purpose in humans and in other animals?

The science of play draws from the work of neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, ethologists, and psychiatrists, among others, and many researchers are studying the appearance of play behaviors in other animals in an attempt to understand what role it may play in brain development.

In our show about Laughter, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp talks to us about tickling rats. He went on to tell us in our interview about his experimental work tracking changes in brain structure brought about by play in rats, and surgically inducing ADHD in rats and observing what effects ample play, or a lack of it, had on their behavior and their brains.

The New York Times Magazine took on the huge subject of “play” in the February 17, 2008 issue, and mentions Dr. Panksepp’s interest in play as it relates to ADHD. He spoke with us about his plans for studies with children in D.C.

We have long recognized that mammals other than humans engage in play behaviors…

…but only recently has experimental evidence emerged that play may extend into the realms of birds and reptiles. Gordon Burghardt, who told us about snakes who play dead in our Deception episode, conducted a series of 31 experiments over the course of 2 years with Kraken, a female Komodo dragon raised at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, to observe her interactions with a variety of objects, with and without her keeper present, and sometimes marked with different scents. Her behavior with food or blood-scented items differed from her behavior with other objects, and this video of her stealing a handkerchief from the pocket of her keeper Trooper Walsh is an example of behavior that looks suspiciously like a puppy playing.

If you’re not getting enough play in your life, fear not! The all-ages Come Out And Play Festival 2008 is coming to NYC June 6-8.

MORE LINKS:
-More on the National Institute of Play
-Gordon Burghardt’s book The Genesis of Play and his website

June, 2007: Czech artists hack a live national weather camera to show the blast of a mushroom cloud over the Bohemian countryside. Frantic audience members call the station thinking nuclear war has broken out. The artist collective, known as Ztohoven, faces legal action.

January, 2007: Suspicious objects found throughout Boston, shutting down bridges, water ways, and highways. The objects (made of colorful LED screens and wiring) were later discovered to be a part of a viral marketing campaign for the cartoon show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and showed the cartoon’s character Err. The Turner company, who owns the show, issues an apology.

October 2006: Computer researchers stage a fake presentation at a computer security conference in which they “divulge” exploitable flaws in the web browser Firefox. See their presentation.

1988: Rock group Negativland sends out fake press releases and sparks a media virus that attributes one of their songs, “Christianity is Stupid” to a quadruple ax murder by a 16 year-old boy in Minnesota. The band finally admits to the hoax after it is broadcast on television.

1985: Fake radio advertisements run several times a week for Plummet Mall, the first “vertical (underground) mall” in Cincinnati. The final ads state mall will not open because seismological activity has shifted its location. Teenage girls across Ohio sorely disappointed.

1981: In a stunt on live television, Andy Kaufman refuses to say lines during a comedy routine, sparking a violent brawl among the actors and production staff.

If you happen to have caught our “brain on love” podcast a while back, you may remember those groovy mini-jingles we made for the 3 different love chemicals (dopamine, norepinephrine, oxcytocin).

Those stings were the work of an amazingly talented musician by the name of Jen Scaturro. Her musician name is I Am Jen.

Jen is a major talent. She writes, producers, programs and even animates her own videos. And she’s got a new EP out.

Give a listen…and if you dig, show Jen some love.

(Image: Keysar and Wu/Psychological Science)

The view on the left shows what the test subject sees. The view on the right shows what the ‘director’ sees. Following instructions from the director, student volunteers moved objects from one compartment to the next. But notice there are some repeated items, one of which the director cannot see. In order to move the correct piece, the student would have to consider the director’s view.

Q. So what was the difference between those who scored high and those who scored low?

A. Culture.

Students raised in the US scored lower than students brought up in China. A lot lower. So why do Chinese students solve this puzzle faster? Psychologists Boaz Keysar and Shali Wu at the University of Chicago say a culture of interdependence rather than individualism probably accounts for it.

On this week’s podcast, Jad presents a piece by one of his favorite producers: Ben Rubin.

Rubin created this audio portrait called “Open Outcry” as a part of a sound installation called Sonic Garden commissioned to celebrate the reopening of the Winter Garden, an atrium space within the World Financial Center, after 9/11.

The trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange may look and sound chaotic to the uninitiated, with circles of hundreds of traders shouting unintelligible phonic abbreviations and numbers back and forth. But it’s a complex and sophisticated human system in flux and since 1872, the mosh pit full of traders has driven the prices of energy, metals, livestock and other commodities through this open outcry trading. The trading floor of the NYMEX was destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001 when the building that houses it, the World Financial Center, was seriously damaged.

Want to learn more about this piece? Ben did an interesting interview for the Third Coast International Audio Festival and you can learn more about this piece and his approach here.

Fluorescent microscopy can illuminate neurons genetically engineered to express fluorescent proteins. “Two-photon” microscopy is special because it lights up the fluorescent neurons only at the focal point allowing scientists to piece together multiple sections in order to obtain a 3D image.

So how does this “two-photon” technology produce fluorescence only at the focal point if the fluorescent laser beam is penetrating all of the surrounding tissue? The theory is that the chances of two low-energy photons hitting the fluorophore at the same time with enough energy to produce a fluorescent event are extremely slim.

Imagine you’re at a cocktail party and you’ve had a couple drinks. It’s a big room and even though you’re stumbling around, you haven’t bumped into anyone with enough force to spill your drink. Now shrink the room a bit. People are closer so you start bumping into them one by one. But what are the odds that you’ll bump into two people at the same time with enough force to spill your drink? The odds are slim to none. But when you shrink that room small enough (the focal point), the chances of bumping into two people (photons) at the same time is enough to make you spill the drink (fluorescence).

Though it’s practically a truism by now that anthropologists’ reports often say more about the writers’ assumptions than about the cultures in question, the valiant attempt by Mahadev L. Apte to compile an anthropology of laughter is laudable, if often hard to believe.

Here are a few highlights from his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach:

The Dobuans of New Guinea revile laughter and have made a virtue of dourness.
Pygmies are very quick to roll on the ground, slap their sides, and snap their fingers in uproarious laughter.
The Greenland Inuit resolve disputes with public-humiliation contests, and the winner is chosen by how much laughter he summons to his cause.
Lower-caste Tamil men giggle when addressing someone from the upper caste in order to express humility.
The 40 million speakers of Marathi, in Western India, have a robust lexicon for laughter, including:

Khudukhudu: soft pleasant laughter of infant
Khadakhada: loud laughter of an infant
Phidiphid: vulgar and obscene laughter.
Khaskhas: mild appreciative laughter
Khokho: loud uproarious laughter
Khikhi: horselike laughter
Phisphis: derogatory laughter
Hyahya: superficial polite laughter

Of course, English has a respectable list as well, including giggle, chortle, chuckle, cackle, guffaw, snigger, snicker, snort, titter, crow, yuck, and the regrettably obsolete cachinnate. Perhaps this is what a cachinnation sounds like—you’ll want to fast forward through the first two minutes.

Apte also notes a few universals:

“…humor in traditional societies grossly appears similar to our own. Examples involved such varied situations as laughter at the antics of children, lewd comments, sexual jokes, teasing, mocking others who were too serious or in positions of authority, spousal jibes, slapstick maneuvers, uncomfortable laughter to save face, and humor to quell conflicts within a tribe.”

–doggo

Read doggo’s full comment.

I checked this out by dividing the total words by the number of figure panels in a few recent Reports to Science and Letters to Nature. It seems a picture is worth more like 606 +/- 381 and 296 +/- 97 words, respectively.

Doesn’t matter anyways, because scientists are all watching movies these days. Watch the neutrophil (white blood cell) below chasing the little bacteria.

Here’s the second installment of “Music Lab.” A place on the blog where Jad gets to play some of his favorite music and tell you why he likes it. Take a listen.

Song 1: A Place In Between
By: Kiln
Album: Thermals

Song 2: #13
By: Karl Heinz Stockhausen
Album: Stimmung

Song 3: July
By: So Percussion
Album: Amid the Noise

MORE LINKS:
-More about Kiln

THIS EVENT IS FULL!! WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING RESERVATIONS

The World Science Festival and WNYC Radio present You and Your Irrational Brain, a live, outdoor event (rain or shine) Thursday, May 29th at Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City, Queens, NY.

Have you ever wondered why you might think it’s okay to steal a pen from work, but not money from the petty cash box? Ever splurged on a lavish meal, only later to clip a 25 cent coupon for a can of soup? Ever taken something FREE, knowing full well that you didn’t really want it? Why do we make these decisions that are so clearly irrational?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, along with science writer and Radio Lab contributor Jonah Lehrer, will join Radio Lab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich to explore the often surprising factors that motivate and dictate human behavior.

The FREE event will combine discussion with live group experiments, games and demonstrations that test the ideas in Ariely’s book, followed by food, drink and music under the stars and on the sand.

WHEN
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 from 7 pm to 8:30 pm, followed by music, DJ, beer and beach-side merriment

WHERE
Water Taxi Beach (Google Map)
2nd Street and Borden Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

For the full experience, take the 5-min water taxi to the beach. There’s a shuttle ($5) leaving at 5:45pm, and it’s departing from the pier at East 35th Street. THIS IS A SPECIAL ONE-TIME SHUTTLE set up for tonight’s event!

The Beach is also within walking distance of the Vernon/Jackson station on the 7 train.

Water Taxi Beach has concession stands for snacks and beer, so no outside food, but feel free to bring your beach towel, chaise lounge, volleyball, sand pail etc. And bring vaild ID (21 +). Minors are only allowed to come with their parents.

THIS EVENT IS FULL - WE ARE NO LONGER TAKING RESERVATIONS

Over the course of human history, the methods used to determine if someone is telling the truth have ranged from horrific to downright silly. The legend of La Bocca della Verita holds that if someone fibs with their hand in the mouth, it gets bitten off.

More recent research looks at brain activity during deception. We also interviewed Britton Chance about the possibility of remote lie detection using infrared examination of brain activity. New research directs our attention to the skin, where sweat gland activity may be detected from a distance. The helical structure of a sweat gland allows it to behave like an antenna for electromagnetic frequencies in the range of 100 GHz.

Skeptics note that this is just another way to detect stress, not lies. Even the researchers say the most appropriate application of the technology is to monitor medical patients or athletes.

A bamboo fencing around a military encampment appears in Burma on Dec 13 2006.
Top image: © GeoEye, Inc.
Bottom image: © 2007 DigitalGlobe.

Hello Jad here.

First off, thanks to everyone who sent me Starbucks cards for my birthday (what a nice surprise!)

And while we’re on the subject of ME, let me say a few words about about narcissism. Actually, no. What I’d really like to do is to play you a song I’ve had on repeat for the last month, a song about a boy who falls in love with another boy who lives in a river.

The singer of the song (Bradford Cox, of Atlas Sound) seems to be doing his own spin on the classic Narcissus myth.

Here’s an excerpt from Ovid’s version, written in 8 AD…

“While he is drinking he beholds himself reflected in the mirrored pool—and loves; loves an imagined body which contains no substance…He cannot move, for so he marvels at himself…consumed, and slowly wasted by a hidden flame…And in his body’s place a sweet flower grew, golden and white, the white around the gold.”

In Ovid’s telling, poor forlorn Narcissus stares so long at the `stranger’ in the water that he turns into a flower. A nice notion.

But why? What exactly is so nice about a guy so entranced with his own reflection that he starves and then drowns? Seems deranged to me.

Well, it turns out Ovid’s is not the only verison.

In 1896, two Oxford archaeologists discovered a giant rubbish heap outside the town of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt containing 7 centuries of trash (Grocery lists, census forms, porn, you name it). The dump was packed up into boxes, shipped to England, and for the past hundred years, scholars at Oxford have been working to read it all (much is very very faded). Recently, a guy named Ben Henry discovered a scrap of papyrus which contains the earliest known version of the Narcissus myth. The poem was written fifty years before Ovid, likely by a fellow named Parthenius. And Parthenius takes a much less romantic view of Narcissus.

Here listen…

In Parthenius’ version, before turning into a flower, Narcissus drowns in a pool of his own blood.

My guess is that Ovid read this version and thought “oh dear, that will never sell!” And so he did what Hollywood producers do all the time nowadays: he sanitized the ending.

But I think Parthenius had it right: obsessive self love can only end badly. With blood, not flowers.

Still, this song is amazing. It’s called River Card by Atlas Sound (a solo project from Bradford Cox of the band Deerhunter). Let me know what you think of it…

Vintage Radiolab alert! You’ll hear the very first piece Jad and Robert made together. It’s an audio-experiment called “Flag Day” that they submitted to This American Life. TAL’s Ira Glass and Julie Snyder phone in to share what they thought of it.

In our research on the show Laughter, we came across Dr. Helen Pilcher’s formula for writing hit British comedy.

x = (fl + no ) / p

where funniness (f) of the punchline times length of build-up (l) is added to the amount someone falls down (n) times the physical pain or social embarrassment (o for “ouch”). All this is divided by the pun (p), which reduces laughter and produces more of a groan.

The story was picked up by Robert Siegel a while back.

Skeptics noted that the equation is not really based on any real research and see it as just another installation in the endless abyss of junk math including formulae for biscuit dunking and the perfect cup of tea.

I love spontaneity in my comedy, but I’m a sucker for slapstick too. Keep in mind Americans seem to differ from the British in their opinion of nasty jokes according to some recent studies. How do you take your humor?

Earlier this week, an article in the New York Times reported some good news about the genetic diversity of captive tigers. Apparently, a new study found that up to 20% of captive tigers are purebred, with genetic variations that no longer exist in the wild.

The article also pointed out that only 3,000 tigers now exist in the wild (that’s down from 100,000 in about 100 years). And of the tigers in captivity, only about 1,000 are part of breeding programs aimed at saving their respective species.

Three such tigers in South Africa made the headlines last month. A South China tiger–one of the most threatened tiger breeds–named Cathay gave birth to two cubs. The cubs, along with another born in November, are all the offspring of a South China tiger named Tiger Woods. They’re the first cubs of their kind to be born in captivity, and therefore raise hopes of saving their species–which The International Union for Conservation of Nature already declared extinct in 2002. The cubs are part of program in South Africa that aims to breed tigers, and eventually “re-wild” them after creating reserves in China.

For more information, check out this article at Times Online.

BerserkerBen/wikimedia (Click to view animation)

As Radio Lab explores some of the tangents from our show on Deception, we’ve interviewed neuroscientists attempting to detect lies using changes in brain activity. But how do we see brain activity and get such colorful pictures of it? You might think it’s based on neural electric activity. This is true for EEG but not for fMRI, which is used in the majority of these brain function studies. As Wired.com’s Steve Silberman explains, it all starts with hemoglobin. Yes, the tiny protein responsible for carrying oxygen to the brain or any other organ for that matter, is the basis for studying brain activity.

To get a better sense of how hemoglobin tells us what we’re thinking about, Silberman goes to Professor Joy Hirsch’s lab at Columbia to see exactly what goes into these studies of lie detection.

Listen to this clip of Robert’s interview with Steve Silberman:

The exact functions of these brain regions can be controversial but they may be involved in deception:

IFC, Inferior frontal gyri or Inferior frontal Cortex (semantics and control over behavior)
Premotor Cortex (activate motor activity through the primary motor cortex)
ACC, Anterior Cingulate Cortex (reward, decisions, empathy)
Fusiform gyrus or body (face recognition)

Listen to Dan Langleben talking to Jad about these brain regions:

Pre-911, before Dr. Langleben received heaps of money to study deception, he studied children with ADD. Here he discusses the connection between two seemingly disconnected areas of research and the improvements in the technology that made his transition possible:

In his study, Langleben was careful to control for “salience”. This means he wanted to make sure the brain activity he saw wasn’t just due to excitement in seeing the card in their pocket. But there may also be some usefulness for this control:

Gearheads, take note! The Bent Festival is in NYC all weekend long!
It’s a three day-long exploration of hardware hacking, DIY electronics, and circuit bending. Artists from around the globe perform music with their homemade or circuit bent instruments each night of the festival, teach workshops to adults and children alike, and create amazing, interactive art installations. The festival brings together artists of all ages and showcases the state of the art of DIY electronics and circuit bending culture.

Dates:
April 24-26

Location:
DCTV
87 Lafayette St
New York, NY, 10013

Tickets:
Each concert is $10.
A Festival Pass to all events is available for $25.

If you can’t make it to New York, the Bent Festival is also coming to Minneapolis May 1st-3rd.

For more information go here.

Last month, a report came out detailing some of the ways in which expectations affect our responses to pain medications. And according to an article about this report in The Baltimore Sun, one factor that influences our expectations is price. The article goes on to explain that two groups of test volunteers were given placebos after receiving an electric shock. One group was told the placebo pills they were given cost 10 cents each. The other group was told each pill cost $2.50. 85% of the volunteers in the $2.50 group reported pain reduction with the placebo, while only 60% of the volunteers in the 10-cent group did.

We hope the fact that this joyful ringtone (from Placebo) is free won’t make you less likely to get a kick out of it.

Right click to download MP3 to your desktop then contact your service provider for further instructions.

marj k/flickr

In our show (So Called) Life, we interviewed undergrads at MIT giving bacteria genes to make them smell minty fresh. If you are at all disquieted that such young minds are given such profound tools, sorry, bioengineers are getting ever younger..

As part of a program designed to help teachers in NYC schools run a DNA transformation lab, I’ve seen 5th graders engineer bacteria to glow like a certain species of jellyfish found off the coast of Washington State.

These 10-year-olds readily absorb the concept that the DNA code is universal and that bacteria swap and take up bits of DNA in the form of plasmids. Using this information, they predicted the expected results before the experiment. “Why shouldn’t bacteria glow in the dark?” they said. “As long as they have the instructions, it’s easy!”

Tell us what your little scientists are doing these days!

Why do some songs mercilessly stick in our heads and repeat themselves over and over? What makes these hooks so hooky? And how does a songwriter will a song forth from the ether? In this episode, nightmarish stories of musical hallucinations, songs that transcend language, and the triumphant return of the Elvis of Afghanistan.

In light of Jad’s recent birthday, we thought we’d share this video. It’s sort of like a video version of “Nancy Grows Up” from our Time episode.

It’s Jad’s birthday today.

If you want to make him happy, here’s what you can do. He’s got a mocha addiction that you can help support. Send a Starbuck’s gift card to:
Jad Abumrad
Host/Creator/Producer, Radiolab
WNYC
1 Centre Street
New York, NY 10007

If everyone pitches in, I’m sure we can make season 5 in full alertness!

Send your birthday wishes to: radiolab@wnyc.org.

Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “Panta Rei”, which means “all things flow”.

Rheology (”flow”-ology) is the study of viscoelastic materials like Jello that are a little bit liquid and a little bit solid. But even the most liquid of liquids have some solid character. And even the most solid of solids have some liquid character. Take those beautiful stained glass windows in gothic cathedrals. For a long time it was thought that these windows are thin at the top and thick at the bottom as a result of centuries of slow viscous flow. As it turns out, it would take much more than centuries for glass to flow (see comments below).

But as we saw in our show (So-Called) Life, scientific observation soon turns to manipulation. In the world of biomechatronics, scientists are using “magnetorheologic” fluids to emulate the complex motions of human limbs to help victims of trauma, disease or birth defects.

Watch the closely related “ferrofluid” in action.

Luke28OR/Youtube

Reflecting on Heraclitus’ statement, Marcus Reiner, one of the fathers of modern rheology said “Everything will flow. You just have to wait long enough.”

Tell us what’s begun to flow in your life..

NPR’s David Kestenbaum ran a piece yesterday on Morning Edition about a 16-year-old climate skeptic named Kristen Byrnes. This ambitious teenager has set up a website and dedicated huge chunks of her time to arguing that the rise of global temperature is part of a natural cycle and not, as most climate scientists agree, caused by human action.

The debate about the piece swirling around the science blog world provides a fascinating view into questions of expertise, critical thinking, and role of the media in covering the issue of climate change.

Kestenbaum draws us into what seems like a feel-good story about a young girl who has done something rather unusual. But his piece is really about much larger, and much more complicated issues: We’re not all scientists, so we have to look to others for expertise. At the same time, we should be critical in the face of that expertise.

Perhaps Kristen is a good example of critical thinking; as Kestenbaum says, “Kristen has a quality you want in a scientist, she is skeptical.” And she definitely tackled a pile of data and technical information that most teenagers would balk at. But Kristen may also have some qualities you don’t want in a scientist, particularly if she’s just seeking out evidence that supports her prior beliefs. She herself says “I never really believed in it.” And some of her science is questionable.

Toward the end of the piece, Kestenbaum does point out that “the overwhelming consensus is that humans are causing global warming, and the consequences could be serious.” Many of the science bloggers argue that Kestenbaum was wearing kid gloves during this interview. But then again, Kristen is a kid. And, in the end, maybe Kestenbaum is making a more subtle point. While the discussion of hard science is somewhat absent, the story takes us to the true front lines of the climate debate: the hearts and minds of Americans who have a lay person’s understanding of climate science and how to evaluate complicated scientific evidence.

Check out the story and the bloggers’ response, then come back to us and let us know what you think.

During the making of the show Deception, Radio Lab explored the possibility of fMRI-based lie detectors. But what if we could detect lies remotely? What if we could know someone’s lying without them knowing that we know they are… Well Britton Chance takes us one step closer to making science fiction a reality.

Jad and Ellen go to visit this professor of biophysics and he likens the brain’s prefrontal cortex to a familiar Disney friend:

He then explains the concept behind remote lie detection. His “Phased Array Image System” uses light to detect a lie from across the room:

Using the plans below, build your own phased array images system!!

Brought to you by the man who developed RADAR:

Sorry all- this event is SOLD OUT

On April 24th we’ll be coming to DC to share some of our stories of experimentation. We’re partnering with WAMU 88.5 to bring you a live event at the Koshland Science Museum.

As you probably know, our show is about… curiosity. We talk to all kinds of scientists to get to the bottom of our questions and sometimes we like to hit the streets to test out their theories. And when we do take science into our own hands, the results are often enlightening, sometimes disastrous, but always surprising. Come join our hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, for an evening of taking science out of the lab and into the real world.

WHEN
Thursday, April 24, 2008 from 6 pm to 8 pm

WHERE
The Keck Center of the National Academies
500 Fifth Street, NW, Washington, DC

TICKETS
Tickets are $15/$7 for students and are available by contacting the Koshland Science Museum box office at 202.334.1201 or email ksm@nas.edu

Not all scientists are the quiet, serious type. Science writer Carl Zimmer offers a unique peek under the lab coat on his site Science Tattoo Emporium. Julian, who sent Carl the above picture of his tattoo of the testosterone molecule, writes:

The tat has to do with my love of lifting heavy weights and the most important molecule for that is testosterone. People can take all the synthetic testosterones and steroid derivatives they want but nothing feels better than knowing after a heavy lift that all you used was that which your testes produced.

So much for the stereotype of the timid scientist who avoids sports or physical exertion.

What are the consequences when humans start playing with life? The human imagination has always dreamed up fantastic creatures, but now biotechnology is making it easier and easier for us to actually create forms of life that have never existed before. In this episode Radio Lab looks at the uneasy marriage between biology and engineering, and asks what counts as “natural?”

Remember that morality experiment about the oncoming train and the track workers dying? Dr. Joshua Greene explained how his neuroimaging research shows that making this kind of moral decision draws on a complex combination of emotional and “cognitive” processes in our brains. It seems that studying biology, as well as society, can help us understand how we decide what’s right and wrong.

A recent article in The Economist highlights some other fascinating experiments that wrestle with the issue of how biology and morality may be related. The article focuses on “Explaining Religion,” a European project aimed at exploring how human biology relates to religion—a seemingly uniquely human practice. One big question is whether there are evolutionary advantages to religion. Which leads to another big question…are there biological explanations for believing in God?

These are profound questions. Can brainscans and morality experiments shed light on philosophy and theology? If our morality is somehow wired into our brains, does that make it more or less legitimate? And would we have to rethink our moral instincts if we knew they evolved when our ancestors faced challenges to survival that are very different from the ones most of us face today?

–Kyle K

Read other comments in this thread.

Listen to War of the Worlds.

Swarm Art Project /http://orbswarm.com

Radio Lab listener and electrical engineer, Mark Alexander, wrote in to let us know about a project that he’s working on and we think it’s just too cool not to show to yous guys.

Swarm is a collaborative art project with the idea to make a swarm of semi-autonomous rolling robots that travel and interact with whatever is around them. The thing is the robots communicate with one another as they roll around to figure out where they’ll go and what they’ll do, using sensor inputs and wireless communication. They’re also really pretty. The engineers put lights inside them that can change to any color. The orbs make music depending on the pattern they travel in and how close one is from another.

This reminded us a lot of the episode Emergence, where we examine what happens when there is no leader. (Though, technically speaking, there is a “mothership” that gives directions in the Swarm project.)

To learn more about the project you can go here.

“Vida 10.0″ is a quick documentary on the project:

When I was a kid, my family drove across the country every summer - from Montana, where we lived, to New Hampshire, where my father grew up. There was only one kind of music that played in that ‘74 Pinto station wagon as the great plains rolled by: Willie Nelson. And the favorite song was, of course, “On the Road Again.”

A couple of years ago, we took a family trip to my mother’s homeland: Latvia. We landed in Riga, the capital, and then hired a car service - some guy with a car and time on his hands - to take us to a town in the countryside where my mother’s cousin lives.

Once we were out of the city, our driver, Janis Osis, turned to us and asked, “you know Willie Nelson?” When we replied with enthusiastic surprise, he started singing “On the Road Again” … in Latvian. Thousands of miles from the plains of middle America, driving into the eastern European countryside, we were being serenaded with a bizarre rendition of our favorite family travel tune. Turns out, Janis is in a band called the “Country Stones,” and they play covers of American country songs all the time. Here’s a little video sampler:

If you want to know more about country’s global appeal, including why Zimbabweans flock to Dolly Parton cover bands, keep an eye out for the Pop Music show. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your stories about country music in foreign lands.

Xerones/flickr

Is this your card? Don’t lie or neuroscientist Dan Langleben may catch you. In our recent show Deception, Radio Lab explores how Paul Ekman can see the truth “leak out” through microexpressions in the face, but Langleben wants to go deeper.

What if we could watch the brain as it’s telling a lie? Would we see something different? This is the first topic in our new series of explorations in neuroscience, “Mouse in amaze”. Jad asks Langleben how he uses fMRI and the “Guilty Knowledge Test” to see what’s happening in the brain when we tell a lie. $20 to fool a brain scanner? Sign me up!

Listen to Jad’s interview with Dan Langleben:

See what Jad is being shown (if you’re currently listening it’s best to open it in a new window):

The concept behind this test is actually taken from an old paradigm previously used to determine the accuracy of the polygraph. Th