astronomnomy

Hi, I'm Lottie, a postdoctoral scientist in neuroscience with a PhD in astronomy. Happy to answer questions :)!

[femscinerd]

may 2017 be a year where sciencing hard brings you good data, good grants, good papers, and good presentations. let’s solve some problems.

[socimages]

The anthropology of optical illusions.

By Lisa Wade, PhD

Which line is longer?

Most people who grow up in industrialized environments will be at least a little bit tricked by this optical illusion, called the Müller-Lyer illusion. At first look, it may seem as if the line on the left is shorter than the line on the right. In fact, if you look closely and carefully, you can probably see that both lines are the same length.

Some psychologists theorize that susceptibility to this illusion is due to a strongly “carpentered” environment, one built by humans with the help of machines. Such environments are made mostly of straight lines and right angles. If this geometry is all around us all the time, our brains get very good at interpreting these environments.

That advantage, though, is a disadvantage when looking at the Müller-Lyer lines because our brain learns to associate angles like the one on the right with distance and ones like the one on the left with closeness. Then, it alters our perception of their height to adjust for perceived space.

Bear with me.

Consider my drawing of a room and hallway below. You can see that the corner closest to us (A) has lines like the point of an arrow on both ends (like the line on the left above), while the one further away (B) has lines like the rear of an arrow on both sides (like the line on the right). Our brain gets so used to inferring distance when it sees these angles, it assumes that any line with angles like B appears inaccurately short because it’s far away. That’s how the illusion tricks our brain.

People who don’t grow up in a carpentered environments, though—hunter gatherers and other groups who spend most of their time in nature and other uncarpentered environments—don’t have brains adjusted to understanding straight lines and angles, so the illusion doesn’t work on them.

The Müller-Lyer illusion, then, is a great example of how our brains get acculturated in ways that shape even simple and straightforward perception tasks.

Lisa Wade, PhD is a professor at Occidental College. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture, and a textbook about gender. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

[astronomnomy-blog]

“@BrunoMerin: @ESAGaia Data Release #1: T - 24 hours ! This page summarizes all the data released tomorrow https://t.co/ZmDybX8r0o pic.twitter.com/6RuZgS41E5 “ Image: “Gaia DR1 sky density plot for the TGAS sources in equatorial (ICRS) coordinates, (L. Lindegren et al., 2016)” from [here] with other plots Gaia is an ESA space telescope mission mapping stars in the Milky Way. Masses of data will be released tomorrow! The plot is showing the number of stars found at each visual-band magnitude (brightness). In astronomy the higher the magnitude the fainter the star is. The y-axis is in a log-scale, too, so each increment is ten times the last one. We can see Gaia has gone much fainter and much further out in the Milky Way than previous missions. And this is only the beginning with two million stars. The final data release will have one billion. It’s amazing! I’m pretty sure they’re going to be showing a map of these stars and show how they’re moving (I would), so we might get some more tentative confirmation on the shape and structure of the Milky Way galaxy we live in! AND more to come! You can WATCH the results livestream [here] Wednesday 14th September 9:30–11:00 UTC. 

[astrojax]

I wrote my thesis using this catalogue :’) I don’t want to go home yet. There’s so much more work to be done!!!

[astronomnomy-blog]

So, what is it about physicists that somehow we all end up in neurobiology? I've been noticing this more and more!

I know right? The person I work “opposite” in my collaboration is also ex-astro. We’re everywhere, timsing both sides by dx with great abandon. (The greatest mysteries of the world are the laws of the Universe and the mind, maybe that’s what’s so attractive! ) 

[neil-gaiman]

When going through your personal first draft of a script, what are the things you consistently have to delete/fix?

I normally wind up at some point googling “and then” and then doing everything I can to replace it with something else. Or getting rid of it altogether.

[speciesofleastconcern]

Tickled Pink: Scientists Have Determined What A Happy Rat Looks Like

By tickling rats and then photographing them, researchers found that a rat's ears are more pinkish and are positioned at a more relaxed angle when it is experiencing positive emotions.

[underthehedge]

@knight-enchanter

Happy ratties.

[sixth-light]

Finding North America’s lost medieval city

Cahokia was bigger than Paris—then it was completely abandoned. I went there to find out why.

This is a very good article on a fascinating archaeological site, but I thought you would all particularly enjoy the bit where they lick the science, For Science. (It’s a legit method. Nobody dies.) 

[astronomnomy-blog]

You know when everyone knows you’re good at computers and you get calls from family asking you to help out? Same thing happens when you’re an astronomer. My Dad and Uncle just called me now from a taxi: “WHAT IS THAT STAR ON THE HORIZON? IT’S REALLY BRIGHT?” “Errr probably Venus?” “THANK YOU ASTROPHYSICIST BYE!”

[galaxybuilt]

Raise your hand if today the government told you that as far as they’re concerned, you’re out of a job in three and a half months

[astronomnomy-blog]

Not me but my household has possibly been screwed over by this.  Any news anywhere else, everyone? No one can search on twitter for the funding body in question because it shares an initialism with a football club (hint hint) and no one’s openly talking about it yet.

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Many experimental techniques in fluid dynamics use lasers. One such technique, particle image velocimetry (PIV), introduces tiny particles into the flow and uses a laser to illuminate the particles. By taking pictures in rapid succession and comparing them, researchers can measure the velocity in different parts of the flow. This technique is incredibly powerful but it’s rarely used to study topics like animal flight, except using mechanical substitutes for live animals.

Part of the reason researchers don’t typically use live animals in this type of experiment is that these very powerful lasers can blind people or animals that aren’t properly protected. So to protect their test subject, Stanford researchers designed and built a special pair of laser safety goggles for their parrotlet. This let the bird fly safely despite the lasers and enabled the researchers to measure flow around realistic bird flight conditions. (Image credit: Stanford News, source, and E. Gutierrez; research credit: E. Gutierrez et al.; submitted by Simon H. via Wired)

[anaisrassat]

An article I wrote for the CERN website and CERN Bulletin on how new technology in high-field magnets for high energy physics can have an impact in medtech and industry. Find out more here.

[astronomnomy-blog]

This is an interesting article about knowledge transfer, thanks for writing it :) Also I hope that brain wasn’t used in a general study because wow good luck warping that brain to standard space(!).

[exceptionals]

[thesevennationarmy-deactivated]

@habitualshaker

[monaut]

@commentyourcode

[mapsontheweb]

English dialects in England.

[astronomnomy-blog]

One - this is awesome Two - scroll through the notes and see all of us English people suggesting improvements, it makes the post so much funnier. Three - The clearances in parts of East London helped moved the Cockney accent out East to create Estuary English and my family still talk more on the Cockney end of it. My accent has generally softened but I still have what I just found out is delightfully called “dark-L vocalisation”, “L is light if it is followed by a vowel: otherwise it is vocalised to o” and loads of other features. That dark-l gets the piss ripped out of me a lot as it’s so loud in my voice (it hurts my throat not to do it). I use some cockney rhyming slang too non-ironically! It’s just the word for things! When talking about my work I get the uni accent a bit but when I get annoyed, offended or am being flippant the home accent drops back in!  Fun story that shows you how strong the accent can be: In the first week of undergrad people said there was an event on in the ‘South’ building that sounded cool. But I couldn’t find the building on the campus map to join up with them so I gave up. After pointing this out on the map as we went past it one day people were in stitches “no, not the south building, the SAF building!” South and SAF were homophones to me at the time. Now south comes out of my mauf as ‘sauf’ mostly, but that’s still seen as cockney sounding! 

[astronomnomy-blog]

I’m not 100% on what that Anon message was for, but looking at traffic stats over the last few weeks I’m pretty sure it was for this post.  It’s now my biggest post by a factor of 15. Working with ethically restricted data has brought my “here’s exactly what I did today” blogging down on here so I don’t have as many pictures (which tumblr loves), and even then the astro data wasn’t pretty enough (not in a bad way, just how this site rolls). It was never about chasing notes themselves, more chasing reach for public engagement. A number of times I’ve been tempted down the press release/Astro pic of the Day route to get that reach in follower count and then dot in my research but decided there’s more focused blogs for that. The response to that post though? Genuinely never expected it. It’s a long, rambling post, no pics or memes or hot political anger. But I keep seeing the reblogs and I’ve clicked on every single one to read the tags and everyone is positive or adding their own experiences and I’m just blown away by it? When it hit 200-or-so notes I went through and copied out some of the positive tags people had written about how it was helpful and how they appreciated it, and that note is now pride of place on my wall at work. I’ll probably be seeing the professor mentioned next week as I’m going back for the Christmas Do. I might tell them, since at the end of the day it was their advice.  If it remains my biggest post I will be so happy. As someone working in mental health research now with the hope to make some impact- I’m glad it’s helping :)

[astronomnomy-blog]

Thank you

Nonnie <3 All the best, friend. 

[dr-dendritic-trees]

I just had the weirdest thought.

So, in academia, who trained you is really important (this makes sense, because no matter how smart you are, if you are taught a ginromous doofus, it will impair your education especially when your education functions on, essentially, the apprenticeship system, which it does). 

If you’ve ever been to a lecture with a guest speaker you probably remember that they were introduced like this “Professor did their Ph.D. with Supervisor, etc etc). This is called an academic pedigree and we treat it like one, you can even find websites which trace the academic ‘family tree’ of people. So your supervisor is like your academia-dad (or academia-mom)

Well, this isn’t just a formality for introductions. My Dad’s a prof*, so all through my childhood he and his prof friends would hang out (academics all hang out with each other, they don’t have time to meet anyone else) and they’d say ‘Oh I ran into so-and-so at that conference, have you met them they’re such-and-such’s student’, like, this is actually how we talk about each other.

And it just occurred to me, that the closest outside equivalent of this is, like, fantasy naming “This is Thor, son of Odin”

*This makes this extra bonus goofy for me because my Dad’s academic reputation (which wouldn’t show up in my formal, written academic pedigree) is known to people, so I get introduced and known as both “this is dendritic-trees she’s [Supervisor]’s student” and as “this is dendritic-trees, she’s [Dad]’s daughter.

@betterbemeta I just have a feeling you’ll be interested in this for some reason.

[elodieunderglass]

For those who don’t know, the Academic Genealogy is serious stuff to some people - and really is treated like a family tree!

[astronomnomy-blog]

Unavoidable N^2s

Me last week: This code is super fast it can analyse this many regions in the brain in seconds

Boss: That's great, can we do smaller regions?

Me: Yeah it will do it

Boss: 6000? Comparing against the other 6000?

Me this morning: Welp. 60 hours. That answers that question.

And yeah you guessed it I can't see an obvious speed up anywhere, urghhhhh.