A review of Alex & Me, by Irene M. Pepperberg
232 pages
MJF Books, 2008

“He’d sometimes say ‘You tickle,’ and bend his head so I could scratch his face. As I did, the white area around his eyes turned a subtle pink, blushing as Greys do when being intimate. His eyes would squint almost closed.”

How often pet owners must fantasize that their cat or dog will tell them, in speech, to initiate a favorite belly rub. But Alex the African Grey Parrot was not a pet. He was a science experiment. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Alex packed plenty of personality into a pound of feathers. Upon his death in 2007, he was mourned not only as a television star but as a scientific icon. Irene Pepperberg, an associate research professor at Brandeis University who teaches animal cognition at Harvard University, had worked with Alex for thirty years, teaching him a limited vocabulary of English words, which he used to interact with humans and his surroundings. She chronicles their journey in her book Alex & Me, first published in 2008. Full Review »

Think of chemistry and you probably imagine a lab filled with beakers and flasks, bubbling with colorful liquids in a variety of hues.  There’s an element of this in Will Tisdale’s chemical engineering lab, which overlooks a courtyard on the MIT campus dominated by a huge red modernist sculpture.  Here, his team mixes together chemicals and boils them in oxygen-free environments to make a substance called quantum dots.

But in the Tisdale lab, these dots are often just a means to an end.  On a dreary December afternoon, two lab members, Ferry Prins and Aaron Goodman, shined lasers on colorful quantum dots to explore how they share energy and electrons with a two-dimensional chemical called molybdenum disulfide. Full Article »

My father says now that he knew as early as his teenage years that he couldn’t feel for other people.  The son of a small-town pastor, he couldn’t manufacture tears at funerals, surrounded by the weeping members of his community.  Usually, he faked the appropriate emotion well enough to keep up the charade.

He held me as an infant, small enough to fit between the crook of his elbow and the tips of his fingers, and squeezed my leg as I wailed, not shifting his position, unable to figure out that he was applying pressure directly where I had just had my vaccinations.  After a middle school orchestra concert, he asked if I thought I had played well enough to deserve a cookie at the reception. I was mortified, and another child’s mother was visibly shocked.  “It was a joke,” he said later in the car.  “You don’t understand my humor.”  Full Article »

Deep in swampy salt marshes, among the knotted roots of the cord grass, lives a special microbe—the first living organism that scientists have ever directly shown to be attracted to hydrogen gas.

“It is a new finding that there is [attraction] to hydrogen,” said Reinhard Wirth of the University of Regensburg, who was not involved in the recently published research. “This is the first time this has been reported.” Full Article »

Dainty neon-blue damselflies, flitting along the streams of southern Europe, might soon be replaced by a different species, perhaps one that doesn’t even exist right now.
Many organisms are coping with a warming climate by moving to new areas. There, they sometimes bump into similar species that are already present. The outcome of these interactions could be serious. “Increased overlap [of species] will have massive consequences,” said Maren Wellenreuther of Lund University. Full Article »

The blood coursing through Fido’s and Fluffy’s veins could hold the key to a better genetic understanding of our own blood diseases.

A recently published study of sixteen blood characteristics—including both platelet and white and red blood-cell counts—in over 6,000 dogs from almost forty different breeds is the first to show on such a large scale that different breeds have different “normal” levels of many of these characteristics. By establishing these breed differences, the article by Oliver Garden and colleagues at the Royal Veterinary College of London lays the groundwork for discovering genetic reasons for these variations, which will likely pertain to human disorders as well. Full Article »

A new non-destructive computational technique that measures the strength and condition of the canvas beneath great works of art could one day help museum curators determine if it is safe to loan rare pieces, according to art conservators.

A research team led by Dr. Marta Oriola of the University of Barcelona and Dr. Matija Strlic of University College London tested the new method on twelve Dali paintings. They found that the painted canvases were strong enough to travel to other museums.

Interestingly, their method also revealed that Dali used cheaper cotton canvases during his student days in Paris before later upgrading to linen. Previously, it would have been impossible to identify the canvas material without cutting out a piece to examine under the microscope. Full Article »

The Arctic Ocean is becoming more acidic at a much faster rate than expected, a change that might be helped along by melting sea ice.

The change may also threaten the future of one particular – and beautiful — species, the delicate sea butterfly, or Arctic pteropod, known for the graceful translucent wing-like protrusions from its shell.

Pteropods make their protective shells from forms of calcium and carbon that are vulnerable to chemical changes in the environment. For example, a 2010 study found that when ocean water contained more dissolved carbon dioxide than usual, the pteropods had greater difficulty acquiring calcium to make their shells.

The new findings came from the recently published analysis of 34,000 data points collected during two one-month voyages in the western Arctic Ocean in 2010 and 2011. Full Article »

Do you have a memory you’d rather forget? If you do, chances are that over time it will seem to fade away as you begin to associate the words or places or smells that trigger that unpleasant recollection with a more positive experience. Researchers call this process fear memory extinction, but that’s a bit of a misnomer. We actually don’t delete memories; we write new ones called extinction memories that come to mind faster than our older associations. Our brains accomplish this trick by flipping genetic switches on and off in the process of learning and forming the new memory.

Recently, researchers at MIT identified a molecular mechanism that contributes to memory extinction. They did so using mice lacking a single gene that helps regulate a part of our genetic control system, a chemical process called methylation. Surprisingly, those mutant mice were unable to forget fearful memories.

Full Article »