Science In My Fiction

Last weekend I got lost twice, once going to and then coming from a local bookstore that I’ve been to several times. I only travel out of town in cases of rare necessity. My ability to get lost defies the assistance of MapQuest and the like.  The timing of my adventure couldn’t be better. It was the event that tipped the scales in favor of rats vs. the promised glowing fish from my last article.

I knew as soon as I saw the link to “A Sense of Where You Are” on Jay Lake ‘s Link Salad, that I had to explore the topic here. The article discusses two doctors, May-Britt and Evard Moser. The husband and wife team direct the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory  which is a neuroscience research center at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Under their direction, the center has become known for the discovery of grid cells. The cells help rats know where they are, remember where they’ve been, and understand where they are going.

“The scientific goal of the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience is to advance our understanding of neural circuits and systems. By focusing on spatial representation and memory, the investigators hope to uncover general principles of neural network computation in the mammalian cortex.” (Wikipedia Kavli stub article)

My husband is very good at finding his way around our city and reaching destinations without getting lost. My parents are too. In fact, I couldn’t remember a single time that we got lost on road trips as a kid. I decided to call my mom and fact check my memory against her’s.

Mom told me that Carol is more like me. She has difficulty placing the city, county, and state on the map in her mind without one in front of her. I just hadn’t known Mom was her co-pilot for our road trips back when we were kids. Mom then reminded me of Kittery, Maine.

We’d been house hunting in the great state of Maine, and Kittery was one of few towns that a motel that allowed you to take dogs inside. We always stayed there a few times while going up and down the state. When Carol and I would go out foraging for local take out, we got lost. Often. I remember crossing a bridge that meant you were leaving Maine and going into New Hampshire. The roads were confusing to us, and somehow we kept making the same mistakes. It was scary at first but funny after a while. it turned into Groundhog Day – the you aren’t from around here version. I had a good laugh when Mom brought up the movie. That is exactly how it felt.

It got me thinking about how Bill Murray’s character learned the layout of town and the timing of the events of the day. Rats in these experiments become familiar with their mazes and will often return to where they found or stored food even with their sense of smell taken out of the equation. (Researchers apparently put food under the maze to mask where it might be in the maze.) It isn’t just rats; squirrels and birds also remember where they put their food. I have no link for the squirrels. I have a friend that could attest to this: something about flower pots and peanut shells. I am not sure I recommend that you ask her, though.

Rats also know how to get out of a flood. I’ve seen it in movies and read it in books countless times. In times of disaster, you follow the rats out. There is a test that demonstrates this, Morris water navigation task.

In reading about Spatial memory I began to understand some of the reasons behind my uncanny ability to get lost anywhere. The added layers of sensory input, echoes of previous trips that went to nearby locations (which blur landmarks, boundaries  and my  association to them), the distracting traffic and receiving imput from a passenger who is a little challenged herself with this at times (the overlay of routes she’s taken with others does this to her) all work together to confuse the Grid cells that create my Cognitive map. At least, this is the theory I am going with after the research I’ve been doing for this article.

Maybe with my brain sorting through data in unorganized, rapid succession I get gridlocked. No, that isn’t a scientific term, but maybe it is coming. Speaking of gridlock, some scientists have tested taxi cab drivers in virtual settings. Hello, The Matrix! They found out that these spacial memory experts are better at recall of this nature and worked to understand why. In another study, a virtual taxi driving game was used to further analyze this sense of direction while testing  to see if stimulation of this memory area in the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex (EC), while learning, makes the memory stick. The entorhinal cortex is one of the first areas affected Alzheimer’s Disease causing patients to suffer the loss of spacial memory very early in the progression of the disease. This research, Memory Enhancement and Deep-Brain Stimulation of the Entorhinal Area, might tie into ways to counteract those effects.

Here are some random thoughts I had regarding this topic:

I wonder if my inability to accurately translate dance moves I see to ones produced by my body has any relation to my frequent adventures in getting lost. Spacial memory is also in charge of movement. Does this explain why I can’t dance?

Is the memorizing technique, Method of loci, more difficult to use for those of us with a poor sense of direction?

Are we more or less likely to notice when things are rearranged at home or work because it upsets our landmarks and boundaries that we rely so heavily upon even in these familiar places? I know it leaves me feeling off kilter.

Do grid cells, cognitive maps, and spacial memory tie into animal migration and navigation? Some animals are born with an understanding of where they should be headed when they get older. Elephants remember where their ancestors are buried. So are there genetic markers that lead the hippocampus to develop this understanding? How does this factor into their social learning?

Consider what might happen if scientist found a way to tinker with this in animals.  Imagine being able to create natural psychological boundaries for packs of wolves, the selling point being they would be kept off the farmland or ranches and kept in their sanctuaries. We have bears that keep coming into Greensboro. It is a little exciting and unexpected. Local wildlife authorities just tranquilized a bear that has been here twice now. He is tagged and they know this for certain. What if there was a way to steer him clear of this danger before someone decides he is just going to keep coming back and should be shot? Say a nanobot-sized thing could be put in the drinking water of a herd, and the nanobots could wind up in the brains of a herd of moose and steer them clear of say the busier highways or cities so that as they travelled they would face less peril.

In Stephen King’s Cell the not-zombies seem to flock and seem to migrate. I wonder if the heart of that fictionalized action could also be based in the hippocampus as the non-zombies still possess their motor skills.

We have GPS systems at our finger tips. Will this memory exercise become stale for us? Five generations out from now, will we only be able to travel with the aid of technology. Will we lose our sense of direction?

And just for fun because I enjoy this series and it is remotely related: Tattoo Typos, Senses, Posters and Bad Movies –  A Vlogbrothers YouTube Post

There’s no way that humans can head into space all by themselves. Even leaving aside the bacteria, fungi and arthropods that inhabit our bodies, and without which we won’t stay healthy for long, once we go in for large-scale space travel and exploration it’s going to be incredibly hard to keep insect pests and even small mammals from hitching a ride. (I don’t think any space programs so far have reported roaches or mice, but do you think they would?)

What about animals we intend to spend into space? Decades of animal research have resulted in dogs, cats, monkeys, chimps, and many, many lab mice in orbit. Also guinea pigs, frogs, fish, many species of insects… yes, even cockroaches, but only on purpose.

Those have all been for science, but science fiction at least has posited that people will want to have their familiar animal companions (or their science fictional equivalents).

We think that our pets are cute (and we might even be hard-wired to do so), but pets could also be good for us. There’s some evidence that animal companions can lower blood pressure, reduce anxiety, and improve immune system function. Those sound like good things, even in space (likely a stressful environment, don’t you think?).

Cats, ferrets and terriers would also be good at controlling the accidental animals, the rats and mice of our habitats. They’ve been bred for just that sort of work for centuries if not longer, as well as to live well in the company of humans. Or we could genetically engineer something new to fit our new lifestyles, instead of working through centuries of conventional breeding.

So what do you think? Would you take your pet into space, and why or why not? Will future creatures be just as cute as today’s pets? Will they have to work for a living, or is companionship enough?

… so little time.

There’s so much nifty science out there that our small group of writers is utterly overwhelmed, and that’s why we need you.

That’s right, you too could be part of the SiMF crew. We’re looking for people who love science and fiction both, regardless of their formal qualifications in either, love to write, and want to share those enthusiasms with the world. SiMF is an all-volunteer outfit: we do it for love, not money.

We’re most interested in short essays about how current science topics are relevant to speculative fiction, and we’re not particularly interested in reviews. An ideal writer will be able to contribute something every couple of months, but we’re also willing to consider one-off guest posts.

To apply, please email sarah.goslee at gmail dot com with a brief description of your qualifications and why you’re interested in SiMF, and either a link to relevant online articles you’ve written or a sample of your work that would be appropriate for SiMF.

A couple of weeks ago, the “offbeat news” feeds lit up with the discovery of a Japanese striped beakfish off the Washington state coast. What was surprising about this find was that the fish was in a bait box on a Japanese fishing boat believed to have drifted to its current position following the March 2011 tsunami in Japan.

This little guy laughs in the face of tsunamis. Creative Commons image, attributed to user E-190, retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.

The fish has, it seems, generated a lot of publicity for the Oregon aquarium now housing it. But it puts me in mind of another, even more unbelievable journey.

Our story starts around six hundred years ago with some Bavarian brewers of beer. Now, beer has been around since approximately a week longer than there have been humans, or at least humans who farmed barley¹. By the 15th century, in Europe², you could even say they’d gotten pretty good at it. Many of the styles of beer that we’re familiar with today were being produced³, and while yeast wasn’t well-understood by brewers until much later, they knew that adding the dregs of a good beer to newly-cooked wort would make the result similar, and these carefully-tended “starters” became the closely-guarded trade secrets of commercial and monastic breweries.

The good old days, where nobody minded if you stuck your hand in the beer.
Public domain image retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.

All that beer had one thing in common: it all used strains of yeast that preferred to ferment sugars under warmer conditions. These so-called “top-fermenting” or “ale” yeasts, nearly always strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae⁴, had a tendency to result in a cloudy beer, and to leave behind often-unwelcome⁵ flavors in the beer through the production of esters if the temperature was too high or not stable enough during fermentation. They also didn’t keep very long, developing a funky, “skunked” taste soon after they were brewed, as undesirable bacteria and yeasts moved in to metabolize sugars and proteins that S. cerevisiae left behind.

The stability problem was helped by the addition of hops, perfected sometime in the 13th century. The mildly antibiotic properties of hops help to keep bacteria and non-brewing yeasts from getting a foothold in the fermenting beer, while allowing the brewing yeast, usually introduced as a well-established colony via a starter, to ferment the wort without competition⁶. Despite this innovation, however, even hopped beers had a tendency to deteriorate over time, and many people didn’t care for the flavor they imparted to the beer.

Something changed in the late 15th century, though. Those Bavarian brewers I spoke of earlier started making a new type of beer. Brewed in caves, deep cellars, or even under blocks of ice, lager, as the new beer was called, could be fermented at much lower temperatures than previous beers⁷. Brewing at lower temperatures meant that other organisms were too sluggish to reproduce in the wort to levels that resulted in off-flavors, and caused grain proteins as well as the yeast itself to fall to the bottom of the beer more quickly and completely, resulting in a clearer, more stable brew, with a cleaner taste. These lagers actually benefited from prolonged storage, as long as the temperature was kept low, becoming clearer and cleaner with time, and they were often stored for six months or more⁸.

Today lagers are the most-often drunk beers in the world.
Public domain image retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that the fermenting action of yeast would become understood, and the various strains of it used in brewing classified. In 1883, a chemist working for Carlsberg brewery isolated the strain of yeast responsible for lager. He called it Saccharomyces carlsbergensis, but today it is more commonly known as S. pastorianus.

Ben Franklin supposedly said beer is proof that God loves us. Does that mean yeast are God?
Public domain image retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.

What happened in the 15th century to cause S. pastorianus to be discovered and rise so quickly to prominence in brewing? For many years, it was believed that S. pastorianus was a hybrid of S. cerevisiae and another strain of yeast (or sometimes two or more). Saccharomyces bayanus, Saccharomyces monacensis, and Saccharomyces uvarum, all used in wine and cidermaking, have each been proposed at one time or another as “second parents” to S. pastorianus, but with the advent of genetic sequencing in the 20th century, it became clear that none of those strains were a perfect fit. Each strain left too many stretches in the S. pastorianus genome that couldn’t be traced to either proposed “parent”, leading some researchers to postulate that another, heretofore undiscovered, strain of Saccharomyces must have been responsible, and others to suggest that the new strain must have undergone a large number of mutations before finding its home in some lucky brewer’s fresh wort.

That is, until 2011, when an international group of researchers announced that they had identified a likely candidate for the mysterious “second strain” of S. pastorinanus‘ parentage – in South America. The group isolated and sequenced Saccharomyces eubayanus, a strain of yeast that likes to live on beech trees in Patagonia (and one that’s yet to be found in the wild in Europe despite extensive searching), and found that it possesses genes that represent 99.5% of those found in S. pastorianus and not in S. cerevisiae, making it a compelling candidate for S. pastorianus‘ ancestry.

But how did S. eubayanus find its way into the breweries of Europe from Patagonia? Likely the same way our friend the striped beakfish got to the waters off of Washington: on a boat. One theory is that fruit flies, attracted to barrels of beer or fruit juice on the earliest European vessels to cross the Atlantic to the Americas, brought the yeast with them, stuck to their feet. From there, S. eubayanus somehow found its way into a brewery (maybe through the reuse of barrels or on a person who visited the brewery soon after getting off the ship) and from there into beer, where it got up close and personal with S. cerevisiae, giving rise to a child strain that was perfectly suited for lagering: able to grow and reproduce in much colder temperatures and to thrive on the mix of sugars and nutrients found in beer wort. Now that’s a hell of a journey.

Footnotes
1.A week being about how long it will take to ferment barley and water into something you could call beer, if you were really hard up or had no tastebuds. <<back
2.And quite probably other places, but I’m not familiar enough with the history of beer outside of Europe to say for sure. <<back
3.Some of them by breweries that still exist, and produce beer, even now; the oldest continuously-operating brewery in the world will celebrate its thousandth birthday in 2040. <<back
4.”Saccharomyces” means “sugar mold”. Try not to think about that the next time you’re enjoying an adult beverage. You’re welcome. <<back
5.But not always: the distinctive “banana and clove” flavor of Hefeweizens is a result of esters produced by the yeast used, for example. <<back
6.This was the reason for the creation of the IPA, or India Pale Ale style: it was highly-hopped so as to help it survive long shipping times from England to India during the colonial period. <<back
7.Today beers fermented at higher temperatures are typically called ales, although the term has meant several different things over the centuries. <<back
8.Modern ales usually undergo a period of conditioning as well, but this became possible due to the 19th-century advent of pasteurization and germ-aware sanitation techniques that prevent the beer from becoming infected with undesirable organisms. <<back

Clearly it has been too long since I’ve visited the good folks at Science in My Fiction. I’ve forgotten how to insert pictures and videos. Do make with the clickie though folks. You will not be disappointed. I promise. I’ve found you some interesting reading accompanied by cool pictures. Our editor here recommended a few topics for me as I get myself back in the groove. My first choice of those topics was “animal pigmentation patterns.” Of course it was! I love any excuse to talk a bit about my beloved cephalopods.

David Gallo: Underwater astonishments  (YouTube) I’ve enjoyed several TED talks. This one covers several sea creatures but also one octopus in particular that does a stellar job of making like algae. I was hunting a video of one octopus I saw ages ago that kept changing from one thing to another. If you happen to see it or remember it, please leave a link in the comments.

Octopus Escape (YouTube) This is another example of an octopus blending in quickly with its environment. You will see the blanket like spans between its tentacles also change color. Here is a cool article about a blanket octopus (RealMonstrosities). It even has a neat video with it.

When you start looking into camouflage  and more specifically animal coloration, you find a history of study going back hundreds of years.  The Wikipedia articles linked in the previous sentence do a great job of discussing the how, why, types, and applications of the topics. I encourage you to read them and chase down the links. Yes, I will make you tangent hounds yet.  Seriously though, much of what I want to cover in this post involves the new things I learned, some comparisons I had between animals and humans, and some loose story ideas.

Now about the title of the post,  when you visit the animal coloration article, the first thing you see is the spotted finned and tailed, striped oriental sweetlips fish hanging out while two  striped cleaner wrasse clear off parasites. According to the article, the sweetlips’ spots signal sexual maturity. While  ”the behaviour and pattern of the cleaner fish signal their availability for cleaning service, rather than as prey.” So much of this leaves me wondering exactly how. In human behavior, uniforms often help convey our participation in a specific profession.

The concept of mimicry was one I recalled from middle school science. In Batesian Mimicry, harmless species imitate the harmful ones. In Müllerian Mimicry, the harmful creatures look like each other. Think bees and wasps here. In everyday life you can convert this to think of various law enforcement agencies resembling each other. Not that they are harmful, but the uniforms are meant to convey authority.

I learned that some frogs change their skin color to regulate body heat. There has to be something here to work with. While others have use melanin to tint their bodies to protect from sunburn. Sound familiar?

Here are three new things I learned from How Animal Camouflage Works (HowStuffWorks):

Chameleons might not only change their color to match their environment and as a matter of signaling, but also to broadcast their mood. My clothes, my hair style, my makeup often are affected by my mood. I wonder what it would be like if I could choose to shift my skin color and hair color by my mood. I wonder what it would be like if these parts of me gave away my feelings. Now imagine what that would be like in the political and diplomatic arenas. I read an anthology a while back about alien life. It had more than one story in which a person communicated with another by changing the tones of their skin.

Nudibranches change their color gradually thanks to a change in diet. I love pizza. I had bad acne as a teenager and young adult. Make of that what you will. I can assure you I turned red while deciding to share it.

Some fish change their appearance by released hormones that react to a change in environment. I know some couples start to look alike after being together a while. I really don’t think I’ve taken on the appearance of the cities I’ve lived in. It could be interesting though. I mean think about the folks that get painted up to support their local sports teams. On a scarier note, I am back to thinking about hormones that can change the way you look without your input on the matter.

One more article for the road: Why do some organisms glow? (KSL.com)This one also includes a cool video. This has to be one of my favorite aspects of this topic. I have always been fascinated with deep sea creatures. I am thinking of covering this topic separately in my next post. Interested? Leave me a comment. Also, share with me some stories in which camouflage played a role. Does this post inspire some story ideas for you? What neat things did you learn from making with the clickie?

Thanks for reading; it’s so nice to be back.

*All links are to Wikipedia unless otherwise noted.

Just when you think you’ve got it figured out: vertebrates use red blood with hemoglobin. The hemoglobin carries oxygen in the bloodstream. Even some invertebrates use hemoglobin, although not octopuses: they have a blue copper-based compound in their blood instead.

And then there’s the icefish. These fish have no hemoglobin, or anything else to bind oxygen in their blood. Instead, they have clear plasma. Because they live in very cold areas, and have very low metabolisms, icefish can get away with having oxygen simply dissolve in their blood.

Scientists have known about the icefish and its clear blood since at least 2006, but it wasn’t until recently that a specimen has been kept in captivity. The Tokyo Sea Life Park has a mating pair of ocellated icefish. Not only do these deep-water Antarctic fish have clear blood, they have no scales.

Just another example of evolution disproving what we think we know, and laughing at our generalizations. There are certain physical and chemical laws involved, of course: this strategy may save the fish the metabolic cost of maintaining hemoglobin and red blood cells, but would only work for a lethargic fish in cold, deep waters.

It’s springtime in the Northern Hemisphere, so much of my attention has lately been on my nose. Working in the garden exposes me to an array of allergens, and like anyone who enjoys examining most of their experiences through the lenses of science and fiction, I began searching for interesting nose-related research. Because the end of winter and the onset of allergy season also coincide with the return of my interest in social contact, I’m in the mood to share the highlights of my search.

What does nose science have to do with writing science fiction? Plenty! My simple search for sniffles-related research turned up several worthwhile writing prompts within the study of the sense of smell.

Did you know that the vibration of scent molecules may have as much to do with the detection and identification of different odors as their shapes and surfaces? Apparently, even we weak-nosed humans can tell the difference between molecules that are identical except for a feature as tiny as how their atoms transfer electrons. Where’s the story idea in that? Well, if your main character has a device or an ability to change the way their body odors, maybe they can escape the police. Or affect their perceived age.

Why do we humans have such a comparatively weak sense of smell, anyway? One reason is that, unlike other mammals, it seems that our olfactory bulbs don’t continue making neurons after birth. For the sake of a story, one could speculate about how changed a character’s experience of life might be if they were born with anosmia or hyposmia and later developed a keen sense of smell. Or vice versa; a character with hyperosmia might find a coworker’s perfume so antagonistic that they develop scent-cancelling ‘white odor‘ nose plugs, sell the idea for a fortune, and retire from the cubicle farm.

But what if your main character’s odor issues don’t live in their nose or their brain, but in other organs or their blood? What if exposure to scent molecules triggered unusual experiences instead of the full body yummy feeling most people get from eating or drinking something they like, or the visceral disgust we get when we ingest something foul? To me, that smells like a reasonable science-basis for ‘magic’ potions.

Which reminds me of reading The Scent of Magic by Andre Norton. That was years ago, but it was the first and remains the most memorable use of olfaction I’ve read in a piece of fiction. If anyone can recommend other or more recent stories that put the nose to the literature stone, I’ll be grateful. In the meantime, I’ll amuse myself with more sniffing science.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the endochronic compound thiotimoline, first reported by noted biochemist Dr. Asimov. No? His original publication on the subject is a model of scientific writing, as is apparent in this excerpt from “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” (Asimov, 1948).

It has been long known that the solubility of organic compounds in polar solvents such as water is enhanced by the presence upon the hydrocarbon nucleus of hydrophilic – i.e., water-loving – groups, such as the hydroxy (-OH), amino (-NH2), or sulfonic acid (SO3H) groups. Where the physical characteristics of two given compounds – particularly the degree of subdivision of the material – are equal, then the time of solution – expressed in seconds per gram of material per milli-liter of solvent – decreases with the number of hydrophilic groups present. Catechol, for instance, with two hydroxy groups on the benzene nucleus, dissolves considerably more quickly than does phenol, with only one hydroxy group on the nucleus. Feinschreiber and Hravlek in their studies on the problem have contended that with increasing hydrophilism, the time of solution approaches zero. That this analysis is not entirely correct was shown when it was discovered that the compound thiotimoline will dissolve in water – in the proportions of 1 gm./ml. – in minus 1.12 seconds. That is, it will dissolve before the water is added.

Not current on your organic chemistry? Then just read the final sentence of the above excerpt, though I do recommend making an attempt at the full paper linked above.

Dr. Asimov went on to publish several more studies on the subject, including “The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline” (Asimov, 1953) and “The Marvellous Properties of Thiotimoline” (Asimov, 1957).

Other scientists have picked up the topic, expanding greatly on the potential applications of this compound.

A 1989 letter to the British Medical Journal clarifies the history of thiotimoline research (Croall, 1989).

A researcher at Sun Microsystems has been pursing the use of thiotimoline for debugging computer systems (Davidson, 2001):

We have used thiotimoline to build a silicon debugging platform that works as follows. We apply a functional test to two units under test (UUTs) running in lockstep. When the test system detects an error in unit A, a signal alerts special equipment to add water to a thiotimoline sample. Exactly 1.12 seconds before the water is added, the thiotimoline dissolves. This action triggers the sending of a signal, which travels to unit B and stops its clock after a programmable number of cycles. The 1 s between the addition of water and the thiotimoline’s dissolution is far longer than the error latency.

“Yet Another Application of Thiotimoline” appeared in the same journal, IEEE Design & Test of Computers, in the subsequent year (Nelson, 2002). The author proposes a thiotimoline-based keyboard to help overcome writer’s block.

Dr. Asimov himself returned to the study of thiotimoline in 2007, to propose an application in the social sciences: using a telechronic battery to prevent election fraud.

There are myriad competing theories about just why men and women think and behave differently from each other. From the evolutionary, to the physical and chemical, to the social, explanations for gender differences in behavior, personality, and ability are nearly as varied as they are ubiquitous.

There’s just one problem: all too often, no one bothers to check if those differences actually exist first.

Countless pop-science articles and books (as well as numerous scientific studies) exist that purport to categorize, measure, or explain differences in the way that men and women view the world, react to stimuli, behave in relationships, and so on. The same sort of thinking is applied to works attempting to prove, justify or explain differences in male and female intellectual achievement, particularly in areas like science and mathematics. What I have for you today is some evidence, in the form of an analysis of a number of large datasets of personality traits, suggesting that all these articles, books and studies are putting the cart before the horse, and that most observed psychological differences between men and women are either much less marked than is commonly believed or show considerable overlap and cross-over between the sexes, pointing at causes much less fixed and immutable than many people would suggest.

Researchers at the University of Rochester analyzed data from 13 studies (comprising 13,301 individuals in total), and performed a variety of statistical analyses on each, attempting to determine whether any of the 122 indicators studied (and if so, which) formed such distinct groupings between male and female subjects that they could be used, either individually or in concert, to predict with a high degree of confidence whether a person was male or female – and by association, whether that person shared other such sex-linked traits with other members of their group.

The authors contrast their approach with one that notes an average difference between sexes (as is common in a lot of pop-science writing, among other things) and then attempts to explain it or treats it as an innate difference that distinguishes men and women. The latter approach is less useful because it masks some very common features of these sorts of datasets – the amount of overlap between groups and the amount of variation within each group, which can point at the differences being studied as much less significant than they are widely assumed to be.

To start, the researchers demonstrated the use of their analysis on datasets that would be largely noncontroversially accepted as broadly different between male and female subjects – size, physical strength, and “traditionally sex stereotyped” leisure activities, such as boxing and cosmetics. They showed that these variables could be used to accurately sort men and women into distinct groups, with very few cross-overs. This result, as the researchers note, is unsurprising – sex-based differences in size and physical strength are well-established, and the leisure activities used in the validation phase were selected for being overwhelmingly preferred by one gender over the other. However, the results demonstrate that their analyses are capable of finding sex-based differences in a given dataset.

Moving on to the meat of the analysis, however, the researchers took on a slew of other personality and behavioral attributes, grouped broadly into four categories:

• Sexuality and Mating (comprised of data about sexual behavior, attitudes, and partner or mate selection)
• Interpersonal Orientation (broken into two subsets related to empathy and relational interdependence)
• Gender-Related Disposition (among other things, measures of masulinity, femininity, and inclination towards science), and
• Intimacy (both with romantic partners and in non-romantic contexts, such as with a close friend)

They analyzed these sets of variables separately, and then all together, looking for evidence that they could be used to predict whether a given subject was male or female. And what they found, with a very few exceptions, was…nothing.

For all but a handful of the variables studied, the results showed that rather than displaying distinct psychological differences between men and women, each variable instead fell along a continuum, with considerable overlap between the sexes. Furthermore, they found that having an especially “male” or “female” score in one trait was not predictive of a subject scoring similarly in other traits. In other words, if you simply take the average of the sexes for each trait, you’ll find that men are more aggressive and women are more talkative – but finding that a given person is especially aggressive doesn’t let you predict how talkative they’ll be, or vice versa. This continuum of responses makes it less likely that the analyzed traits are sex-linked in a biological sense, also, since we’d expect them to be much more nearly universal within the sexes (as, for example, having breasts is among women, or facial hair among men) if they were.

This has implications for how we write characters of both sexes – because a character who falls into neatly delineated sex-based categories in all of their personality traits is not only likely to be less interesting than a more nuanced one, they’re also demonstrably unrealistic – and just as it makes for a better story when our characters’ physical worlds are well-developed and realistic, so, too, do we benefit when their inner worlds reflect the same kind of nuance.

Science fiction may often focus on new planets, but we don’t even know much about our own. The Deep Carbon Observatory aims to change one not-so-small piece of our ignorance. The multidisciplinary group of scientists wants to better understand what happens to carbon deep inside the earth, including carbon caught up in living things. That’s right: there is life outside the thin zone that we think of as habitable.

The project is organized into four sections: Deep Carbon Reservoirs and Fluxes, Deep Life, Deep Energy, and Extreme Physics and Chemistry. Even their titles seem science-fictional.

I’m a biologist, so Deep Life is my favorite. The first guiding question for that section: “What’s down there?” How many science fiction tales have “What’s out/down/in/under there” as their guiding question?

Even the chemistry and physics are complicated. We can’t do experiments easily or at all because the temperature and pressure are hard to duplicate: Extreme Physics and Chemistry indeed, at pressures of hundreds of tons per square inch and 2500F.

Reservoirs and Fluxes has to do with movement of carbon into and out of the earth. Volcanoes, anyone? And plate tectonics, with chunks of crust sliding into the mantle and taking carbon with them. The deep carbon cycle operates on a huge scale, and we don’t know much about it.

Deep Energy is just as poorly understood. Our major energy sources are carbon compounds: oil and coal are fossil biological carbon. But it’s also possible that life isn’t needed to produce hydrocarbons, that these compounds are also formed in the deep crust or mantle.

Want to learn more? Living on Earth just interviewed DCO Executive Director Robert Hazen.

Dr. Hazen doesn’t talk about science fiction at all. But what do you think? Doesn’t this just spawn all sorts of science fictional ideas?