In 1958 the US military loaded a monkey named Gordo onto a rocket (a modified medium range ballistic missile, in fact) and fired him into space. Monkey telemetry revealed that Gordo was alive and well upon reentry but at a crucial moment the floation device attached to Gordo’s capsule failed and so he sank to the bottom of the ocean. Somewhat ignominiously the military promptly decided not to publicize the experiment and never to mention Gordo ever again.

In 1959 they tried again, this time with Peruvian squirrel monkeys called “Baker” (supplied and trained by the US Navy) and “Able” (supplied by the Army).

Baker was female, two years old – that’s around eight in monkey years – and hand picked for the mission by Donald Stullken in the Bioastronautics team at the US Naval School of Aviation Medicine. Six hours before launch she was loaded into a tiny oxygenated, temperature controlled capsule then stuffed into the nosecone of a Jupiter missile.

At lift-off she was observed to be ‘mildly startled’ but was otherwise calm throughout her flight, which involved speeds 10,000 mph, nine minutes of weightlessness and, at points, 38 g.

This time the floatation device worked as expected. Both Able and Baker were rescued quickly and immediately rewarded with a banana and a cracker. Baker ate hers then rolled over and took a nap.

An operation to remove the monitoring electrodes from Able ended badly and she died four days after landing, leaving Baker the only surviving American space monkey. Press interest exploded and she briefly became world famous, appearing on the cover of LIFE as the first monkey to survive being shot into space (strictly speaking untrue, as Gordo and Able both died of complicating factors once they were back on Earth).

“Such action as this falls within the category of scientific devilry rather than scientific research … in the name of humanity we beg of you to drop these vile experiments.” – Letter from the League Against Cruel Sports to the American Embassy in London

Baker eventually retired to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, home to Space Camp. She has been through two staged monkey marriage ceremonies, once in 1962 with a monkey named Big George and again when Big George died, to Norman. Her birthday was celebrated each year at the Space & Rocket center, often with television crews and local celebrities in attendance.

Baker died in 1984 of kidney failure. She was the oldest squirrel monkey ever recorded.

It has become a tradition at Space Camp for kids to leave bananas on her grave in the car park at the entrance to the Rocket Center.

Able’s body was preserved and is now on display at the National Air and Space museum in Washington D.C.

Brave space monkeys, we salute you.

“I’ve done it in animals and I don’t see why it couldn’t be done in a human. I think I’ll go ahead.”

LIFE magazine has made its picture archive public through Google Images. I’ve been searching it for interesting science photos (inspired by others).

Anyway, I liked this one:

We don’t need no stinkin’ fume hoods.

The man in the picture is Dr Evarts Graham from Washington University’s School of Medicine. Graham was a pioneering thoracic surgeon – he performed the first successful lung removal operation on a patient with lung cancer in 1933.

Graham spent the late forties on a large scale study of the effects of smoking on health. This cumulated in an influential paper in JAMA in 1950.

He was a heavy smoker but when his own research began to suggest a link between smoking and lung disease he quit.

Tragically but perhaps unsurprisingly Graham died of lung cancer in 1957.

Dudes, I don’t like Sarah Palin at all either and I’m pretty sure that she’d be bad for science in the US. But why is everybody getting riled up about the fruit flies thing?

It’s this that she’s talking about, right (google ‘fruit fly research in paris france’, read comment threads)?

Members of Congress requested funds for all these pet projects and thousands of others last year, according to the latest copy of the annual “Pig Book” released by Citizens Against Government Waste.
[…]
Some lawmakers defended their earmarks, such as Rep. Mike Thompson, D-California, who channeled $742,764 to olive fruit fly research.
“The olive fruit fly has infested thousands of California olive groves and is the single largest threat to the U.S. olive and olive oil industries,” he said.

Here’s the Paris France connection.

Does she know high school biology? Dunno. Does she shoot wolves from helicopters? Yes. Does she think biomedical research using drosophila is a waste of money? Probably not…

Am I missing the point?

That consolidated groups feed I mentioned a while back was broken for a bit. It is now working again.

Sorry for the delay…

That is all.

A story in the NY Times has created some buzz around Innocentive recently.

Innocentive allows big companies to post challenges which anybody can then solve in return for cold, hard cash. The challenges are of the ‘come up with a chemical compound that allows x’ and ‘write a white paper on microarray technology’ variety rather than word puzzles or spot the ball, sadly.

If you’re not a bored biochemist or genius inventor then the best thing about the Innocentive site is that it gives you a glimpse of a brighter, happier future, just like Tomorrow’s World on the BBC used to do.

My favourite Innocentive challenges so far:

Bakeable cheese technology
“The Seeker, a Fortune 200 company with more than 30 billion dollars in annual sales, is looking for partners capable of developing a technology for making bakeable cheese fillers for baked snack products.”
Reward to be negotiated.

Skin perfume by oral ingestion
“Compounds able to generate agreeable skin odors after oral ingestion are desired.”
$20k reward.

Flavor Change Technology
“We are looking for a technology that allows a timed-release flavor change to occur in a food product.”
$50k reward.

Born in 1792, Sir John Herschel was a mathematician, chemist, philosopher and astronomer. He was buddies with Babbage, pals with Peacock. Darwin was his homeboy. He won two Copley medals from the Royal Society and named the moons of Saturn and Uranus. The first line of The Origin of Species – ‘that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers’ – refers to him. In short he was that rarest of things: a rock star scientist.

One day in 1835 Herschel got talking to Sir David Brewster (renowned in the field of optics; inventor of the kaleidoscope). Herschel had a problem with his telescope: at higher magnifications not enough light reached the viewer, leaving images indistinct. The two men were discussing how this situation might be improved.

Suddenly Sir John had a breakthrough. Might it be possible, he wondered, to use the same principle as Brewster’s new illuminated microscopes but on a larger scale?

Sir David sprung from his chair in ‘an ecstasy of conviction’. ‘Thou art the man!’ he exclaimed (no, really).

Within months the two men had acquired a £70,000 grant from the Royal Society and had completed a seven ton mega-telescope capable of clearly magnifying distant objects up to six thousand times. Naturally the first thing that they pointed it at was the moon.

The view was incredible. They recorded some interesting basaltic rock formations.

Then they noticed a patch of greenish-brown vegetation. And some lunar tree-melons. What looked like reindeer with a single horn and, um, beards gambolled in meadows. Winged humanoids flapped around a golden domed temple.

Panning left (possibly) they come across some moon beavers who walked on their hind legs and whose huts were ‘constructed better .. than those of many tribes of human savages’. The beavers had also discovered fire, the better to cook bearded unicorn steak with.

Not that’s a proper hoax. They knew how to do it properly, back in ’35.

To be fair Sir John didn’t have a clue that he was being attributed with having discovered bipedal beavers – it was a stunt by the New York Sun to increase their circulation (it worked). Complete story here, a contemporary account and the complete text of the collected articles is in pamphlet form here .

(via Metafilter)

I’m finding it really difficult to keep up with the groups that I’ve joined on Network – for a casual visitor the snapshot page can be next to useless because it fills up so quickly with commenting activity. The comment threads on Network are awesome but I’d like a single pointer to the posts growing them instead than fifty individual comment alerts!

Groups do all have other alerting mechanisms, though, in the form of email and RSS.

Email alerts are just evil and subscribing to fifty different RSS feeds would be messy, so I hooked up a single, consolidated feed using Yahoo! Pipes:

Consolidated groups feed

Enter your username where it says ’what’s your Nature Network username?’ and then click on ‘Run Pipe’ – it’ll fetch all your (public) group memberships then merge all of the RSS forum and noticeboard feeds into a single consolidated feed.

Once the pipe has run use the ‘more options’ menu to get the RSS feed.

Your username is the last bit of the web address of your profile page, e.g.

http://network.nature.com/profile/euan username is euan
http://network.nature.com/profile/UB614A588 username is UB614A588
http://network.nature.com/profile/henrygee you get the idea

If you join any new groups they’ll be added to your consolidated feed automagically.

post over, rambling nerdiness follows

The nice thing about Pipes is that if you really want you can get updates via SMS or Instant Messenger when somebody posts a new forum topic. JSON, too, if you fancy building a blog sidebar.

You can also build on existing Pipes, so it’d be good to extend this one to, for example, filter out everything that wasn’t authored by you. Then you’d have an RSS feed of your activity on Network – perfect for FriendFeed.

I’d like Network to have some sort of ‘follow’ mechanism – a little icon next to comment threads, blogs and groups which when clicked added any updates there to a single, personalized feed. There’d be a single page where you could uncheck items and set up filters like the one described above.

I find the science of face perception fascinating. The human brain is highly tuned to identify, process and interpet faces – understandable, as they play a tremendously important role in our social interactions. It’s a hardwired proficiency that kicks in early and if anything works too well (Toast. Ebay. $28k. Say no more).

Chernoff Faces are a visualization technique developed in the 70s to take advantage of our innate ability to detect small differences in the size, shape and expressions of human faces. The idea is to take a dataset and then map each dimension to a different facial feature, be it the slant of the eyebrows, size of the nose or the chubbiness of cheek (Herman Chernoff, who came up with the idea, suggested ten different possibilities).

It’s an appealing concept. Sadly Chernoff Faces never really took off, possibly because existing implementations don’t produce anything that looks like a face. You’d have a hard time finding anybody who prefers the faces produced by R to the data table they were derived from.

Computer graphics have moved on a bit from 2D lines and circles, though. Photorealistic 3D facial models are de rigeur nowadays in everything from Second Life to video games. What if we took the technology from there and applied it to Chernoff Faces?

I gave it a go. Check out Pubmed Faceoff (and be gentle – it hooks into other webservices and can be quite slow).

Pubmed Faceoff is a mashup of Pubmed, Carl Bergstrom’s Eigenfactors dataset and Scopus, inspired by something that Pierre Lindenbaum mentioned on Twitter. It renders PubMed results as a set of photorealistic Chernoff Faces whose facial features are determined by the age, citation count and journal impact factor associated with each paper. The idea is that you can tell at a glance which papers are new, exciting and high impact and which are languishing, uncited and unread.

I’m quite pleased with how the system turned out although to be honest I still think the usefulness of Chernoff Faces is debatable. Does it actually work? Is the amount of time it takes you to adjust to scanning the faces more than the amount of time it’d take to simply scan a table of data? Or is it just cute?

The gender and ethnicity of each face are picked at random to add a bit of visual interest but personally I find it slightly easier to interpret the faces when they’re all male and European. That I’m rubbish at reading women comes as no surprise but the ethnicity thing is interesting as it fits with research into cross-race facial recognition that suggests we’re each better at recognizing the types of faces that we see every day.

While the photorealism helps it’s important with Chernoff Faces to map dimensions to the right features to aid comprehension. It definitely helps that it’s a short logical leap from ‘happy faces’ to ‘happy papers’ (in good journals that have been cited lots). The age feature for age of paper is also a no-brainer.

It’d be interesting to incorporate other dimensions into the faces, though. Perhaps the number of authors of a paper could determine how fat or thin a face is? A spotty complexion could indicate a first time author? Nature papers could be represented by Chuck Norris?

update: for more on the ‘sort by impact’ idea have a look at the commentary surrounding Pierre’s original tweet.

Beach, bath, bus, bed… not just a good plan for the weekend but some of the reasons given for producing paper copies of journals instead of switching to online only. The four Bs (thanks Geoff) are all places where you’d rather have a printed journal than a PDF on a USB stick.

Almost all of the scientist-turned-editors straw polled inside Web Publishing said that they’ve read papers while on beach holidays before, but maybe they’re freaks that’s just selection bias – editors are paid to read papers, after all.

How about you? Do you take reviews to the tub? Scan papers in the pub? Click on the links below to participate in the public poll, we can analyze the results in a week or two.

On the beach: yes or no

On the bus: yes or no

In bed: yes or no

While bathing: yes or no

Did you know that you can pick up a homemade EEG kit and the open source software to run it for under fifty quid? I have been irrationally excited by this all week.

Admittedly it does ship from somewhere in Bulgaria as a bare PCB board and comes with documentation explaining that attaching it to humans or animals ‘may result in electric shock or seizure’ – you probably wouldn’t want to mention that to your initial test subjects.

The neuroscientists in Web Publishing have explained to me that EEG can’t actually read your mind as such since the electrical signal it detects isn’t localized. It’s only useful as a general measure of brain activity.

Still, I reckon it’s worth thinking about (or something?). Forget Singstar – at your next house party why not invite some rhesus macaques and hold a monkey vs human mental ping pong tournament? Totally doable with EEG.

We could put the personal touch back into email messages. As you write the EEG records your emotional state and then retroactively formats the message appropriately – so angry sentences are larger and in red, distracted, off the cuff missives are in a scribbly font, calm and collected messages are a cool blue.

From a work perspective you could harness the collective intelligence of entire departments without them actually having to do anything – except wear a silly hat with cables coming out of it that occasionally results in shocks or seizures, obviously. I suggest we hook up all of Nature’s editorial staff and record their brain activity while they are browsing scientific papers, then use the data to automate the ’Editor’s Picks’ sections of journals, or perhaps create a sort of upmarket scientific Digg…?