Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Weird Science always runs a current through its brain before speed dating

And it relies on robotic frogs to increase its attractiveness.

A jolt to the brain, and suddenly everyone looks pretty. Our brains are driven by electrical activity, so it's no real surprise that altering the electrical environment can alter the brain's function. In fact, just passing a small current through the right areas of the brain can greatly improve performance on some tasks (a fact that has led one company to offer to zap your brain for better performance in games). But, practically, this should really only work with areas of the brain that are close to the surface; there's just too much insulating material between your skull and the deeper bits of your grey matter.

But some scientists found a clever way to work around that limitation. Looking at the brain's wiring diagram, they realized that there are many connections between the midbrain, which ends up deep inside the skull, and the prefrontal cortex, which is right near the surface. So, a bit of current to the prefrontal cortex could potentially activate areas buried in the midbrain. And indeed it did, with a rather remarkably specific result: everyone started looking pretty. The current caused "increases in participants’ appraisals of facial attractiveness." So, whether or not beer goggles actually exist, electric goggles certainly could.

If a jolt to your brain doesn't do it, then maybe a robotic frog will. Animal courtship displays can be an elaborate mixture of visuals, sounds, and rituals. But how important are the individual parts? To find out, researchers turned to the túngara frog, whose males use a two-part vocalization performed while inflating a large vocal sac on their necks. If you play the two calls separated by too much time, females show no interest, presumably because they don't think the sounds are connected. But the vocal incompetence can be rescued with a robotic frog. If the robot inflates its vocal sac in the awkward gap between the two sounds, the females will realize they're connected and interpret them properly as a mating call.

Forget the last supper; for some lizards, it's the first supper that matters. The common lizard (Zootoca vivipara) has an uncommon parenting approach for lizards, in that it gives birth to live young. As soon as they're born, however, parental care ends—they've got to manage to find their first meal by themselves. Researchers have now found that the ease with which they find that meal makes a huge difference.

The researchers gathered a bunch of newborns, gave half an easy meal, then released the whole bunch into the wild. Not surprisingly, those that ate well tended to stick around the area where they were born, although the researchers had a lot of trouble catching them. And, as they matured, the ones that were fed had smaller litters of offspring.

The authors suggest that the lizards have a critical period just after birth, much like the period in which human infants are especially adept at learning language. It's just that their critical period happens to be only a single meal long.

Fake name, real math improvements. There have been a number of studies looking for reasons why performance in math tests can be influenced by gender stereotypes. Some authors reasoned that the stereotypes had become part of people's self-identity, so they subverted that by having a group of women take a math test under a fake name. Their scores were higher than those of their peers who used real names (males were unaffected by changing names). "These findings suggest that women's impaired math performance is often due to the threat of confirming a negative stereotype as being true of the self," the authors conclude. They also get bonus Weird Science points for including the phrase "L'eggo My Ego" in the title.

A machine may finally tell us if a baby is faking it. Infants cry for all sorts of reasons—attention, food, serious illness, what have you. Since their cries don't communicate specifics, parents are left guessing as to what the cause might be. But a Brown University researcher named Barry Lester ("who has studied baby cries for years," which sounds a bit sadistic) hopes to change that. Lester has developed a computerized shriek analysis system that he hopes can divide a baby's cries into all their salient features. Once he has that, he can start using machine learning to see if there are common features when babies are crying for known reasons. Potentially, this work can ultimately lead to some simple infant translation devices.

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