SAVE SANTA'S SHINBONE: THE HAPPY NEW YEAR POST! (PART2)

Ooooh hallo dear English speaking-thinking-reading visitor, welcome back to me @sciencemug, the blog that talks about science, the subterranean war penguins fight to overcome bunnies and become the new official Easter pets, and the pressing issue of carob addiction among the Santa’s reindeers.

Aaaand that does all of this in Eng?ish, a language that is to real English what Alien vs Predator was to a “non-commercial art driven only project”, “the soup of the day” to something one orders lightheartedly at the restaurant after having seen Fight club, aaaand homeopathy to something that actually work.

Sooo, there’re Dr. Donath and these five other scientists of the University of Basel who do an experiment to test the probability Santa Claus has to trip and fall and injury himself while doing his job on Xmas Eve.

The researchers recruit seventeen 20-40 years old, fit, healthy males for their experiment. A bunch of these guys is dressed up with Santa’s garb and handed up with a 20 kilograms [pick the joke about the metric-system AKA SI that you prefer and say it outloud three times in a row in front of a splintered mirror, then spit on your left hand and make a 180 degree turn on yourself… And realize that there’s no sense at all in it (I mean, I’m not talking of the SI, that’s absolutely rational and functional, no, I was referring to the things I mentioned after the SI)… Gee, are you always so gullible or is it just that there’s a sensible lack of oxygen in your brain since your stomach is sucking most of the blood given you’re still digesting all the food you've gulped down during the holidays?] heavy sack. This is the Santa Group (SG).  The other guys are in the Non Santa Group (NSG) and, as you can imagine, they dress normally and carry no sack.

All the volunteers take three tests, two to check their gait (a walk along a short path and a brief session on a treadmill), and one to monitor their sway (a short stand on a plate connected with sensors). The volunteers take all tests barefoot (in order to exclude anything that can alter their responses during the tests. Or, maybe, but it’s just a guess, ‘cause Donath et al’s initial idea, before it were sunk by the lack of funds, was to couple their experiment with that of a group of Lapp endocrinologists interested in determining the amount of sweat - and therefore the intensity of the stink - produced by Santa’s feet on Xmas Eve and to set, like that, the level of biohazard he represents for the children of the world exposed to high doses of his “residuals” on Xmas early morning SM’s Note).

I S.W.A.Y. (by sciencemug)

Moreover, the Donath’s volunteers go for the tests both while focusing just on them, and while doing at the same time also a

LE DIMENSIONI (DEL CERVELLO) CONTANO, SE SEI UNA PESCIOLINA TROPICALE

Sig. Guppy (Pub Dom img)

Avere un cervello grande aumenta la capacità di sopravvivere ai predatori nelle femmine, ma non nei maschi, di Poecilia reticulata, una specie di piccoli pesci tropicali detti guppy. La scoperta, fatta da un gruppo di scienziati delle università di Stoccolma e Vienna, è riportata sulla rivista scientifica Ecology letters

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SIZE DOES MATTER (WHEN IT COMES TO BRAIN AND YOU ARE A FEMALE LITTLE FISH)

Mr. Guppy (Pub Dom img)

Size does matter. At least when it comes to brain and the ability of surviving predators' attacks and when you are a female of Poecilia reticulata, a species of small tropical fishes called guppies. The discovery, made by a group of scientists from the universities of Stockholm and Vienna, is reported in the journal Ecology letters.

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The following text is that of the podcast
in Eng?ish

O-oooooh hallo dear English-hearing-speaking-thinking listener, welcome to the third of my podcasts in Engmark, that is English-question mark, a language that is to real English what “spaghetti bolognese” is to an actual Italian dish and the combination of a piece of evil chalk scraping a blackboard with Marge Simpson’s voice is to velvet.
Speaking of voices, the one you’re hearing is that of my avatar, a dumb human controlled via a wireless-voodoo trick by me, “sciencemug”, the blog which tells you about science, sings the song of love but scrambles all the words while skipping the rope of summer in company of ice creams in a blue mood aaand while shutting down the alien conspiracy which aims to take over the world production of donuts in order to change the recipe and make them taste like deep space tofu, that is as saaaad as the Earth’s one, but colder and with a bit of a Haggis aftertaste.
Soooo, what am I telling you this time? Weeell, I’m telling you a science story about dimensions, brains, little tropical fishes, predators and evolution! 

by sciencemug

[The guppies pic is a Public Domain image adapted by sciencemug (source: wikia.com)]

Size does matter, as usual. At least when it comes to brains and the ability of surviving predators' attacks and when you are a female, hence not a male, of Poecilia reticulata, a species of small tropical fishes called guppies. The discovery, made by a group of scientists from the universities of Stockholm and Vienna, is reported in the journal Ecology letters.

Ooooh, well well, doctor Alexander Kotrschal (which I’m gonna call Alex, from now on, to avoid to plead guilty of consonant slaughter in a trial for mass murder of the poor people of the alphabet and then face the wrath of the ghosts of those innocents letters for the rest of my blog-life, and, by the way, according to the usual reliable sources of the internet, 1 blog’s year is equal to 5 leap years of a sloth), so, doctor Alex, I was saying, and other 5 scientists form Sweden and Austria (and I‘m gonna call this science bunch “the Alexanders”, ‘cause, well, I think it’s really really cool) they decide to try to understand whether and how evolution kisses the kiss of blessing to the bigger brains. To do that the Alexanders decide to study little tropical fishes, the guppies, and to analyze the relationship

THE TALKING BIRDS AND THE RESEARCHER: AN INTERVIEW

 (in Eng?ish)

The interview opens with PiPs, on its way to the lunar-monthly appointment with its dermatologist (PiPs still can’t figure out how those damn armpits of its really work), passing by a chirping mayhem of birds that form a very long feathered line outside of, and fill the foyer up to the ceiling (literally, I mean, they’re birds, they can fly for [fill in with the deity of preference by the way Bacco seems a fun guy or Thunder pretty hard core it too] sake!) of the movie theatre “The fun’s beak” formerly known as “The high-flyer” (name dismissed ‘cause it made the theatre to be confused, on and on, with a Dutch coffee-shop for pilots) and before that as “The bald eagle’s wig” {name eventually dropped ‘cause it discouraged the other winged species which thought it was a filthy playground for adult narcissistic predators only and offended the eagles [notoriously among the touchiest creatures in the world along with dodos (which, science says, went extinct ‘cause they refused to feed unless a formal apology had came, and it obviously never did, from the ‘UNB’* for the fact that the other birds kept on mocking them for their look and inability to fly)] and all the ferns (no one really understood why)} while storming the sugar-coated worms/roasted bugs/not-popped corns/candy-seeds shops before the show begin**. And the film projected, hence the multitude, is: “Angry Birds: the movie! (In 3D)”.

PiPs and "The (Angry) Birds" (by sciencemug)

But PiPs sees also another thing in all that noisy chaos. It sees a human standing still among the tweeting animals. She’s a girl. In a lab coat (ok people, ok, the whole thing is absolutely cuckoo, but, as it has been remarked before, PiPs' reality is a very very, very peculiar place).

PiPs by SM

PiPs- I’m sorry to bother you miss, but, unless this is the weirdest creation of Madame Tussaud and you’re one of the most realistic wax sculptures I’ve ever seen, well, you’re alive. And human. So, may I ask who are you?

 

Miss MFV by SM

Miss Farias-Virgens - Hello! My name is Madza. I’m a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at University of California at Berkeley. I work in one of the branches of Anthropology called Biological Anthropology [aka BioAnthro]. BioAnthro is dedicated to the study of human evolution and biological variation. But I’ve not always being a biological anthropologist, I started out my college level studies in the Biomedical Sciences, and later specialized in Medical Genetics during my Masters in Brazil (I’m Brazilian). I have made proteins wiggle and gotten lost among A T G C sequences [A, T, G, C are nucleobases, that is the four letters of the DNA’s alphabet. Ever wondered why Andrew Niccol entitled his movie “GATTACA”, well, “GATTACA”? SM's note] . Those were fun times, but I always thought of pursuing questions in Human Evolution, and the conclusive motivation came after reading pieces of Professor Terrence W. Deacon’s fantastic book "The Symbolic Species". Professor Deacon is now my PhD adviser and we work together in the BrainEvoLab. Professor Deacon and I are studying how the human language