Rejection hurts..literally

It hurts to be rejected. Really.

The pain of social rejection may be very similar to the way we experience physical pain, say researchers down the road at UCLA.

You mean--getting fired may actually feel the same as getting beat up?

The proof is genetic--people who have damaged mu-opiod receptor in their brain, structures that dampen painful sensation, are also more likely to be dramatically affected by social exclusion.

Ha! I knew the first time i went through a break-up felt like recovering from surgery!

Animal High Society

Orangutans make music. It's a fact, say researchers at the University of Utrect in the Netherlands. Hanging high in a tree, orangutans strip leaves off a nearby twig, cup them in their hand, like using a blade of grass as a reed, and blow to make sounds.

But, unlike kids messing around on a sunny day, they don't do it just for fun. Orangutans make noise to ward off predators. Birds, whales, dolphins and other animals often use sound to signal danger, identify food, or just to say hi.

The researchers say orangutan's musical whistling is the first evidence of "culture" in animals. But, what does culture actually mean? Can it be defined simply as using a tool for communication or does it mean something more?

Culture in humans means the capacity for symbolic thought, social learning, and a set of shared goals and behaviors within a group. The foundation of many cultures is a religion or a strong sense of history/tradition. True, orangutan whistling shows evidence of social learning and shared behaviors, but what sense of history and tradition do orangutans show? Without this, it seems like orangutan "culture" would be very 2 dimensional, if you can call it that at all.



Photo Credit: M. E. Hardus

MATHEMATICS IS COOL

Why would i title this blog post in a way to brand myself the biggest science geek on the planet? Because it's true--not that im the biggest geek (hopefully), but that mathematics is pretty interesting. The more i get into it (ive been writing about chaos theory, applied to describe patterns in crosstown traffic) and talk to mathematicians about their theories, the more it woos me. It's this language that expresses huge, tiny, or abstract concepts that the human mind cannot get a hold of. It gives a collection of numbers a shape and gives ground to seemingly ethereal human phenomenon. I imagine grasping math as akin to first learning a language--if i remembered the frustration of thinking before talking, then i might be able to compare it to before i learned how we model the world using math.