Why is belly button fluff blue? And other Ig-Nobel Prize-worthy questions

For all those who are newly unemployed and with plenty of time on their hands, The Telegraph (UK) has an article today on ultimate navel-gazing, revealing the answers to eternal questions like:  ”How do I get a fluff-free navel?”  Plus:  The one bright bit of news about our dismal economy is that wearing old clothes means less fluff.  Also mention of a guy who’s been collecting his for the past 25 years.

After three years of research, Georg Steinhauser, a chemist, has discovered a type of body hair that traps stray pieces of lint and draws them into the navel.

Dr Steinhauser made his discovery after studying 503 pieces of fluff from his own belly button.

Uneasy Rider

 

Swims like a drunken sailor. (© David Hall/seaphotos.com)

Once again, science makes my day. Researchers have discovered a wonderful new fish in shallow water off the Indonesian island of Ambon, much visited by great naturalists of the past including Alfred Russel Wallace. And this one just makes you want to keep looking and looking, even in the same places everybody else has looked before, because Mother Nature is such a relentless joker.

University of Washington scientist Ted Pietsch has dubbed the discovery Histiophryne psychedelica because, well, just look at that face. Or consider its swimming behavior, which also suggests that it has been dabbling in mind-altering drugs. It doesn’t so much swim as bounce off the bottom, using its fins to push off the seafloor and jetting itself forward by firing water from its tiny gill openings. Check out the QuickTime video at http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=47496.

It hops along with so little control that, according to the press release, it looks as if it “should be cited for DUI.”  Like other frogfish, it also uses its pectoral fins like feet to go stumping along the bottom.

Fortunately, psychedelica is covered with thick folds of skin to keep it from getting punctured as it bangs along the coral reef. It also has a flattened face with eyes directed forward, something Pietsch, with 40 years of experience studying and classifying fishes, has never seen before in frogfish. He speculates that the species may have binocular vision, overlapping in front, as it does in humans. Most fish, with eyes on either side of the head, don’t have vision that overlaps; instead they see different things with each eye.

Toby Fadirsyair, a guide in Ambon, and Buck and Fitrie Randolph, co-owners of Maluku Divers, first spotted the fish and alerted Pietsch. David Hall, a wildlife photographer and owner of seaphotos.com, speculates that the fish came by its crazy coloring by mimicking corals.

Here’s the citation: A BIZARRE NEW SPECIES OF FROGFISH OF THE GENUS HISTIOPHRYNE (LOPHIIFORMES: ANTENNARIIDAE) FROM AMBON AND BALI, INDONESIA Theodore W. Pietsch, Rachel J. Arnold, and David J. Hall Copeia, 2009(1):37−45, 18 February 2009

Can You Tell A-Rod Is Lying Just From His Face?

 

The New York Times had a very judiciously reported article yesterday on the art of reading facial expressions.  Though everybody seems to be looking for a Pinocchio Expression–the surefire sign that somebody else is lying, it doesn’t exist.  Even when Yankees baseball star Alex Rodriguez repeatedly lies in the video interview from 2003, the evidence of lying is highly subjective and conditional.  Sure, he shows repeated expressions of contempt, but that’s hardly a surprising response to journalists in general, or Katie Couric in particular.  Reporter Bill Marsh interviewed facial expressions expert Paul Ekman:

“The most reliable thing that he did is what we call a gestural slip,” Dr. Ekman said. Several times during his session with Ms. Couric, Mr. Rodriguez raises his left shoulder momentarily as he speaks.

“It’s a slight raise of one shoulder, a fragment that slips out of a full gesture,” Dr. Ekman said. In a full shrug, both shoulders rise, stay up, then drop.

A half-shrug can be prompted by feelings like helplessness in the face of tough questions, or a “Who, me?” response to accusations. It doesn’t square with firm denials, Dr. Ekman said.

In the interview, Ms. Couric asks: “What’s your reaction to this investigation?” referring to the Mitchell report on steroid use in baseball.

His shoulder appears to pop up three times as Mr. Rodriguez talks of being “extremely disappointed” and adds, “It would be a huge black eye on the game of baseball.”

He is also asked if he ever witnessed or suspected illegal drug use among players. His answer: “I never saw” – here, his left shoulder lifts – “anything. I never had raw evidence.”

‘Unilateral’ Contempt

Mr. Rodriguez also displayed what Dr. Ekman said might be repeated microexpressions of “unilateral contempt”:

Valentine’s Day With Fleas

 

Matchmaker? (from Robert Hooke's 1665 Micrographia)

So this isn’t quite as bad as getting eaten alive on a blind date (see the previous post).  But consider this: Romantic couples of the past 
used to exchange fleas as little tokens of love. 
       

I write about it in my new book, Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time—My Life Doing Dumb Things With Animals (W.W. Norton, May 4).  

Everybody used to have fleas, including kings and queens.   So by some peculiar twist of the human mind, they
became romantic surrogates. 
   

Gallant French lovers actually used to catch a flea from a woman 
they admired, and then keep it as a pet.  The flea hung in a tiny cage 
on a gold chain around the neck, and the man fed it daily on his own 
blood.  Less ardent lovers 
contented themselves with sending poems intended to woo the woman 
through her fleas.  

A seduction poem by John Donne is the most 
famous:

Valentine’s Day Woes? It Could Be Worse.

So maybe your loved one’s idea of a great Valentine’s Day gift is chocolate rhinoceros beetles.  They’re being offered by a Japanese web site for roughly U.S. $49.  Consider yourself lucky.  Here’s a report from Strange Behaviors intern Bronwen Tomb about deceptive mating practices in the natural world:

Spending the day of love alone, with a carton of Ben and Jerry’s or a handle of Jack? Abandoned by your one and only just last week, right after you finished putting him/her through grad school?

Well, it could be worse. At least you haven’t been eaten alive on a blind date.

Here’s how it sometimes happens in many species of moths throughout America, Africa, and Australasia.  To start with, the females in these species send out pheromones as a chemical advertisement of sexual availability. It’s like putting a profile up on match.com. The hypersensitive male moths detect the sex pheromones with their antennae, and come flocking by the dozen, ready for action.

But moth pheromones and dating websites can both be deceptive, and some of the moths don’t have quite the dating experience they envisioned.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin

It’s Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, so here’s a reprise of the  travel piece I wrote  for the September Atlantic Monthly. 

 

In paintings and sculptures from the last years of his life, the great naturalist Charles Darwin gives the impression of a man deeply wishing he could be somewhere else. At the National Portrait Gallery in London, he keeps his rumpled hat clutched in one hand, ready to bolt for the door. At the Natural History Museum, he has his coat folded across his lap, as if yearning to shed the burden of fame and slip quietly into oblivion. On the ten-pound note, his eyes are haunted beneath a vast furrowed brow, and there’s dismay behind that Biblical white beard.

This image of Darwin is everywhere, and that seemed to me, on a recent trip to London, to be a pity. Even the founding father of evolutionary theory was not born a gloomy old man. I began to wonder if it might be possible to walk Darwin’s London and get a sense of him when he was still young and caught up in the fray.  The landmarks of his life turned out to be all around.  One day, for instance,

Sexy Sundays: Happy Times for Lesbian Lizards

Equal opportunity sex

Here’s a cool item on sex by Strange Behaviors intern Bronwen Tomb.   (Oh, man up,  you can get past her brief, restorative bout of man-bashing):

Did you ever wonder why men play such a small part in the perpetuation of life, and spend so much time fighting, bragging, and leaving the toilet seat up? Did you ever wonder why they exist at all? Maybe you thought there should be some other way to accomplish their small reproductive task. Or maybe you thought the pleasure of being part of a sexual species was worth the hassle.

If you thought any of those things, your idea was not original. A Southwestern whiptail lizard species, Cnemidophorus uniparens, has cut out all the expense of sexual reproduction, but— unlike other asexual species— kept the fun part. These whiptails have an entirely female population, but continue to engage in sexual behavior called pseudocopulation.

During their erotic encounters whiptail lizards will assume “male” or “female” roles depending on

Hip Deep in Snake

First thing to be said:  It lived 60 million years ago.  So, sorry Hollywood, but no danger humans ever ran into this monster snake recently discovered from fossil vertebrae.  Length 42.7 feet.  Weight 2500 pounds.

 ”At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips,” said Indiana University Bloomington geologist David Polly, who identified the position of the fossil vertebrae, which made a size estimate possible. 

Here’s the press release:

Newswise — Scientists have recovered fossils from a 60-million-year-old South American snake whose length and weight might make today’s anacondas and reticulated pythons seem a bit cuter and more cuddly.

Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake’s vertebrae suggest it weighed 1,140 kilograms (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 meters (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip — and that’s a conservative estimate. A report describing the find appears in this week’s Nature.

“At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips,” said Indiana University Bloomington geologist David Polly, who identified the position of the fossil vertebrae, which made a size estimate possible.