Month: November 2016

Plant growth is heavily dependent on light, but it’s not just leaves and shoots that make use of the Sun’s rays, according to a new study in Science Signaling, and reported by New Scientist.

Using a flowering weed called Arabidopsis thaliana, researchers from Germany and South Korea discovered that the aboveground parts of the plant transmit light to its roots so that the plant can adapt its growth to the light conditions of the environment. Roots, they write, “directly perceive light that is conducted through the plant tissues,” with the stems acting as fiber-optic cables to transmit rays underground.

To confirm this hypothesis, the researchers exposed A. thaliana shoots to light, while keeping the roots from exposure, and vice versa, using an optical detector to record how much light made it underground. Some of the plants were genetically modified to turn off a photoreceptor known to detect light, found in both the aboveground parts of plants and in roots. They found that the stems conducted some wavelengths of light to the roots through the plant’s vascular system, affecting downward root growth. “Photoreception in the roots triggers a signaling chain which influences plant growth, especially the root architecture,” according to a press statement from Ian Baldwin from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, who led the study.

Scientists have hypothesized before that roots could sense light, but this is the first experiment to confirm it, according to the Max Planck Society.
 
[h/t New Scientist]

On the spectrum of things to dread, networking doesn’t have to rank near dentist appointments and airport delays. Believe it or not, it can be fun—and you can walk away with real contacts who can help you with your career. Networking pros share their tricks for stress-free, effective meet-and-greets.

1. GET THERE ON TIME.

If you show up late to a networking event, people will have already formed groups, making it harder and more intimidating to break in, says Devora Zack, CEO of Only Connect Consulting and the author of numerous books including Networking for People who Hate Networking. “If you’re not comfortable going up to people you don’t know, [doing so is] not a good idea,” Zack says. At the beginning of the event, the atmosphere is more casual and there are smaller groups that are easier to join, she says.

2. VOLUNTEER AT THE EVENT.

Working the event gives you a sense of purpose as well as an automatic reason to talk to everyone, Zack says. After directing the guests to the sign-in table, for example, you can introduce yourself and pass along your business card.

3. CHANGE UP THE CONVERSATION.

Don’t rely on stale standbys as icebreakers. “A slight change can be quite interesting,” Zack says. Instead of asking where they work, ask “What is something you love about your work?” “Think of questions that are interesting to you,” Zack recommends.

4. DON’T ASK FOR FAVORS IMMEDIATELY.

You never want your new contacts to feel like you’re using them for their status or connections, says Dorie Clark, an adjunct professor at Duke University and author of Stand Out. “Avoid that problem by focusing exclusively on building the relationship for many months before you ask for anything,” she says. The exception: If they offer to make a connection.

5. STAY POSITIVE.

It’s very tempting to talk about what’s wrong (with the event, your company, your personal life, or the weather), and it’s alarming how often people do this, Zack says. Instead, make positive comments that allow people to see you as the great, optimistic person you are.

6. MAKE A SMOOTH EXIT.

You want to end the conversation before the other person gets tired of talking to you—and you also want to network with as many people as possible. Zack offers two suggestions for ending one conversation gracefully so you can move on to the next: With a warm, genuine smile, say either, “It’s been great talking to you, but I promised myself that I’d circulate,” or “I’m sure you want to meet other people—do you have a card?”

7. FOLLOW UP.

There’s little value in networking if you don’t maintain the relationship, Clark says. A few days after meeting, send a follow-up email. Then, use topics you’ve connected on previously as reasons to reach out every so often. “For instance, if you learn they’re a football fan, you can email them when their team makes the playoffs. Or if you hear they’re planning a trip abroad in a few months, you can shoot them a note afterward to see how it went,” Clark says.

Do you like beer? How about fun facts? If you answered “yes!” to either of those questions, we have some good news: mental_floss is now on Untappd. We’ll be using it to share trivia about the history and science of your favorite stouts, lagers, IPAs, and more.

For example: Did you know that Cenosillicaphobia is the fear of an empty glass? Or that the victor in Finland’s Wife Carrying World Championship wins his spouse’s weight in beer?

Add us as a friend here (we promise we’ll accept!) to learn more about what we’re sampling this afternoon. Not yet an Untappd member? Consider signing up here. Cheers!

Tomorrow will be a paid vacation day for thousands of Americans, as more than 300 companies close their doors and urge employees to go vote.

Election Day in the United States has been held on a Tuesday since 1845, a time when many eligible voters organized their weeks around farm chores and the Sabbath. The decision was relatively sensible at the time, but these days, many argue, the weekday vote is only hurting our democratic process. The U.S. ranks 138th out of 172 countries when it comes to voter turnout, while countries with weekend votes are faring far better.

The hassle of getting to the polls can vary by location. Some states mandate paid election-day leave so that workers can vote, while others allow a few hours of unpaid leave as long as it’s requested ahead of time. Still others make no provisions for employees at all, leaving would-be voters scrambling to vote early or endure long lines before or after work. It’s no wonder so many Americans just don’t bother.

But private organizations can make their own Election Day rules, and some of the biggest employers in the U.S. are doing just that. So far, more than 300 companies, including General Motors, Ford, Patagonia, and many publishers and tech startups have pledged to close their doors tomorrow in order to give employees the time to vote.

This year marks the first such closing for some organizations, but at Hearst, giving non-news operations employees the day off is an annual tradition that was started by company founder William Randolph Hearst himself at the turn of the 20th century.

Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario has pledged to temporarily shutter all her company’s stores, its headquarters, and its distribution center on Tuesday. “As a business, we have a unique ability to take a stand and choose to prioritize the health of the planet over profit, and I think it’s important we take that opportunity when it truly matters,” Marcario said in a statement.

The bipartisan nonprofit Take Off Election Day is keeping a running list of companies offering paid time off to vote. If your employer isn’t among them, you can visit takeoffelectionday.org to send an anonymous email urging them to get on board the democracy train.

[h/t CNN Money]

Buddhist nun Pema Chödron may have said it best: “Everything—every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate—is always changing, moment to moment.” Though they often operate on a timescale that can be beyond our human perception, geological features are not exempt from the flow of time. In some places, that change happens fast. Geologists say chalk cliffs on England’s southern shore are eroding 10 times faster than they once did. The researchers published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The picturesque chalk cliffs known as the Seven Sisters swoop gracefully along the British coast, attracting tourists and photographers. Yet for their serene appearance, the cliffs are not exactly safe.

Chalk is one of the softest minerals and easily broken—especially when it’s being constantly pounded by the sea. The site saw major landslides in 1999 and 2001, and a massive cliff-fall in May 2016 sent tons of rock into the water below. (“While we would encourage people to enjoy the beautiful coastline of East Sussex,” reads the Seven Sisters Country Park website, “we would remind visitors that you do have a duty of care and responsibility for your own safety.”)

Understanding coastal erosion has become a big issue in a world facing rising sea levels. The tricky part is studying something that, by definition, is no longer there. Even tons of fallen rock will break down and be scattered by the sea.

But the ghosts of the old coastline still haunt the rock that remains. To find them, geologists used a technique called cosmogenic nuclide dating, which measures the extent of cosmic radiation in rock to determine its age and how long it’s been exposed. This, in turn, can paint a picture of how that rock has moved or been changed over time.

The white cliffs are studded with pieces of hard, chemically inert flint—a rock that makes a far more reliable historical witness than soft chalk. Working perpendicular to the cliffs themselves, the researchers pulled chunks of flint from exposed rock in a line beginning at the cliff and ending near the water’s edge.

They crushed the flint into microscopic pieces, then put them through a cosmogenic nuclide array to determine their age and history.

Next, the researchers fed that data into a mathematical model of the coastline, which allowed them to estimate the cliffs’ rate of erosion going back thousands of years.

They found that the coast is indeed crumbling fast—but they also learned that this pace is a relatively recent development. For most of the cliffs’ history, the authors write in their paper, the rate of erosion held steady at between 2 and 6 centimeters per year. But that rate has accelerated mightily in the last few centuries, now cruising along at 22 to 32 centimeters a year.

What changed (or changed more)? The authors can’t say for sure. Natural climate change is one possibility; wave action did become more violent during the so-called Little Ice Age, which took place from the 14th to 19th centuries. The cliffs have also become more vulnerable over the last few centuries, as ocean currents and human engineers picked away at the band of sediment protecting the coast from the ocean’s full force.

It’s election time again. And that means nothing but Instagram photos of people’s “I Voted” stickers, long lines at polling booths, and the occasional celebrity taking an ill-advised voting booth selfie.

Which begs the question: Is it illegal to take a voting booth selfie?

Short answer: Depending on where you live, possibly—although probably not for much longer. And, assuming you’re not taking the photo for some dark and evil purpose, your chances of being prosecuted are low. (But that’s not an excuse to do it!)

The reason for this has nothing to do with being a Luddite and everything to do with the integrity of the voting process in three main ways: vote buying, undue influence, and voter intimidation.

VOTE BUYING/VOTER INFLUENCE

In 2012, a citizen of North Carolina brought his smartphone to the polling booth. He had made his notes of which candidates he wanted to vote for on his phone, took out his phone to read the list, and was immediately descended upon by election officials, who ultimately made him leave the room, make notes on a piece of paper, and then return to cast his vote. As local station WRAL explained, there were two problems: The first was that, by having a cell phone, he could be texting someone and receiving information about who to vote for.

The second point was that if some criminal spent large sums of money to buy votes, the only way they could tell if a voter followed his or her instructions would be with a picture (widespread vote buying in the late 19th century is the reason we now have secret ballots). WRAL even mentioned stories of criminal syndicates giving people cell phones to document their votes in the polling booth.

Of course, these points are weakened slightly thanks to the proliferation of absentee voting. In 2000, a satirical website, Vote Auction, appeared. The premise was that you would auction off your vote and then fill in an absentee ballot. That absentee ballot would be sent off, verified, and mailed to the correct polling place.

The website, of course, was ridiculously illegal and was quickly shut down (the webmaster claimed it was a protest against the role of money in government), but it became another example of the increasing worries of how the internet would affect voting.

A closely related sibling to vote buying is voter influence—and this is where it gets dicey for celebrities. If it’s obvious a major star is voting for Candidate X, their fans may want to emulate that celebrity. In countries with strong anti-influence-election-laws, such as New Zealand, posting a completed ballot selfie online on Election Day can result in heavy fines, and the Electoral Commission says, “It also potentially exposes the voter’s friends to the risk of breaching the rules if they share, re-share, or repost the voter’s ‘selfie’ on election day.”

VOTER INTIMIDATION

There’s another worry about selfies at polling places: other people. According to The Huffington Post, in 1994 there were concerns that videos of polls in the South were “thinly veiled attempts to intimidate black voters at the polls.” And in the 1960s, there were reports that Texas Rangers were “in Mexican-American districts and used cameras, apparently taking pictures of the voters.” While these cases were never pursued, they helped create a wave of photographic restrictions not just in the polling booth, but in the area around them as well. Which makes sense, as the person behind you in line may not want anyone to know that they’re voting.

WILL I GET PROSECUTED?

Tough to tell. Several states don’t even really have enforcement mechanisms for the law (for a list of state laws, see here). And most states don’t care if you’re just posting it for your own benefit, as legitimate political speech was never supposed to be the target, although it’s never a good idea to gamble on the kindness of bureaucrats.

But they might soon be legal. The ACLU has been fighting several high-profile cases regarding these bans, with varying levels of success. So whether you take a selfie or not, you’re participating in the long struggle between freedom of speech and a free election.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

For nearly four centuries, the University of Aberdeen has housed one of the best-preserved medieval illuminated manuscripts in existence. The “Aberdeen Bestiary” depicts birds, bats, and other colorful creatures painted against backgrounds of brilliant gold leaf. Having once belonged to King Henry VIII, it was long believed that the book was published exclusively for the wealthy elite. Details revealed by high-definition digitization suggest that the manuscript was instead created as a teaching tool, Live Science reports.

The bestiary was published in England around the year 1200, and was first documented in the royal library of King Henry VIII in 1542. Recent digital enhancement provides several clues as to the book’s original purpose: On one page, dirty fingerprints indicate a spot where the teacher turned the book around to show his students. Accent marks throughout the text are believed to signify emphasis when read out loud. The high-definition photography also uncovered notes and sketches left in the margins by the manuscript’s creators.

So if the Aberdeen Bestiary came from such humble beginnings, how did it end up in the hands of royalty? Researchers from the university now believe it was ransacked from a monastery during the Reformation. Illuminated manuscripts were originally used by priests and monks, with the earliest copies dating back to the 5th century. It wasn’t until the 12th century that they gained popularity with more secular crowds.

Now, after remaining largely inaccessible for centuries, the book is being used for teaching once more—this time online. Every detail of the newly digitized publication, from the imperfections to the brushstrokes, is available to view through the university’s website.

[h/t Live Science]

All images courtesy of the University of Aberdeen.

The phrase “survival of the fittest” makes it tempting to think of natural selection as an unequivocal engine of progress, one that only makes humans stronger and healthier specimens. But, in reality, the process is more complicated.

“I preach about this in my classes all the time,” Karen Rosenberg, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Delaware, tells mental_floss. “We think of ‘fit’ to mean aerobically fit, or able to run far, but in evolutionary biology, ‘fit’ means being reproductively successful.” In other words, you just need to be able to survive long enough to pass on your genes to the next generation.

To achieve reproductive success, natural selection sometimes makes compromises, and as a result, humans have developed some traits that pose real challenges to our health today. From back injuries to difficult childbirth, here are six downsides of being human that you can blame on evolution.

1. WE HAVE BACK PAIN.

The birth of bipedalism was a high point in human evolution. Standing upright allowed us to travel long distances and freed up our hands to use tools and carry food, but it also came at a cost.

In chimpanzees and our other quadrupedal cousins, the vertebral column acts like a suspension bridge. “But if you take that horizontally stable structure and tilt it vertically, it loses its stability,” Jeremy DeSilva, a paleoanthropologist at Dartmouth College, tells mental_floss.

The most obvious way to make a structurally sound spine in an upright creature would be a straight stack of vertebrae. But this arrangement would block the birth canal, and clearly you need to have babies to ensure the survival of your species. So the human spine had to evolve into the “curved mess” that it is today to make way for our big-brained babies to be born, DeSilva says. The price we pay is back pain—and prevalent injuries like slipped disks and spontaneous compression fractures.

2. WE HAVE WEIRD APEY FEET.

If you look at the most high-tech prosthetic feet available today, their structure is more like an ostrich’s foot. They don’t replicate human anatomy because the anatomically correct human foot is sort of awkward.

“Humans were not designed from scratch,” DeSilva says. “We’ve inherited a lot of the anatomies we have from our ape ancestry, and the foot is a wonderful example.”

When we starting walking on two feet, we no longer needed the flexible feet that our ape ancestors required to climb trees and grab branches. In order to give us more stability and allow us to better push off the ground, evolution took a “paper clips and duct tape” approach, DeSilva says. But because we walk around on modified ape feet that can twist and roll quite easily, we sprain and break our ankles. We get shin splints, plantar fasciitis, and collapsed arches. This isn’t just a modern phenomenon; scientists even see some of these common foot injuries in the fossil record.

“It works well enough, and that’s all you really need in evolution,” DeSilva says. “What we have as a consequence of a just-good-enough foot is a billion-dollar podiatry industry.”

3. CHILDBIRTH IS TRICKY.

Compared with other apes, humans experience very difficult childbirth. That’s largely because the human pelvis is very narrow relative to the big heads and broad shoulders of our babies.

“The pelvis serves two conflicting functions in humans: allowing us to walk on two legs and allowing us to give birth to big-brained babies,” Rosenberg says. The shape of the pelvis is a compromise between those two things.

But humans have come up with an interesting cultural answer to the problem of long and painful birth. While birth is a solitary event for most mammals, Rosenberg pointed out that virtually all human mothers seek delivery assistance from relatives, midwives, or doctors.

In a paper in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Rosenberg and her colleague Wenda Trevathan wrote that natural selection likely favored the behavior of seeking assistance during birth. This probably wasn’t a conscious decision by expectant mothers. Rather, seeking help might have been driven by fear, anxiety, and pain, but over time, this led to reduced mortality.

4. WE CRAVE JUNK FOOD.

There’s a good reason it’s hard to give up fast food and candy. Sugar is a basic form of energy, and excess sugar is stored as fat to get us through times of hardship. Before the rise of agriculture and industrialization, when food sources were scarce or unreliable, a taste for sugar was necessary for survival. But now that processed sugar is readily available in grocery stores, humans are overdoing it. As a result, we’re facing an obesity epidemic and a rise in conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.

“The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful,” Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times a few years ago. (He was arguing at the time that New York City’s proposed ban on big sodas might actually help restore the healthy constraints of a hunter-gatherer world.)

5. A LOT OF US HAVE MENTAL ILLNESS.

Natural selection didn’t weed out potentially harmful conditions like schizophrenia and depression, even though many of these disorders are associated with lower birth rates. Some scientists have theorized that the unaffected siblings of the people with mental disorders might be responsible, as they may pass the mutations on to their own children, keeping these disorders in the gene pool. Other scientists have looked at the origins of mental disorders, showing that while devastating, some of these illnesses seem connected to an evolutionary advantage.

For example, while some symptoms of depression can be debilitating, some researchers have argued that the condition can also promote an analytical style of thought that can be very productive at solving problems. Other research has shown that schizophrenia-related genes may have helped humans achieve complex cognition.

6. OUR THIRD MOLARS ARE A PAIN.

After humans started walking upright, we underwent another major transformation: Our brains got much bigger. To accommodate a larger brain, the shape of our faces changed, and our jaws had to become narrower. But for many people, this means that their third molars, or wisdom teeth, once vital for chewing, have no room to erupt through the gums, so they become impacted. If these impacted teeth are not extracted, they can become extremely painful or cause infections.

But natural selection is still at work: A genetic mutation that stops wisdom teeth from forming has been spreading, and more people today are born without third molars.

Overfishing and a correlating rise in inbreeding may be one of the factors responsible for an uptick in two-headed shark sightings, according to a new paper in the Journal of Fish Biology.

The study’s authors recently discovered a dual-faced Atlantic sawtail catshark (Galeus atlanticus), which joins earlier discoveries of a bull shark fetus with two heads and blue shark conjoined twins. The bull shark was examined in 2011 by staff at Michigan State University: an x-ray found that the specimen had two heads, two hearts, and two stomachs.  

While seemingly fit for a Syfy Channel movie, these fish typically don’t live long enough to terrorize anything: The two heads make it more difficult to swim and gather food. As NatGeo notes, most don’t even survive birth. The abnormalities are often discovered by fishermen who capture sharks and then examine the offspring they’re carrying rather than ensnare live samples.

Scientists believe metabolic disorders, viral infections, and pollution could also be possible contributors.

If that wasn’t disturbing enough, in 2011 a fisherman caught a dusky shark and discovered it was pregnant with a one-eyed embryo—a.k.a. the “cyclops shark.”

[h/t NatGeo]

In the future, editing audio might be as easy as opening up Photoshop and cropping a picture. Adobe’s Project VoCo, two years in the making, is designed to make audio editing “really easy for the average person” according to Zeyu Jin, an audio researcher and intern at Adobe’s Creative Technologies Lab. With Project VoCo, you can easily crop out certain words by searching through a transcript—and even generate new words in the speaker’s voice.

The program debuted as one of 11 experimental projects at Adobe Sneaks, an event where the company shows off new technology “that doesn’t have a place in a product yet—or may never,” as Adobe Senior Research Scientist Stephen DiVerdi explains it.

Project VoCo just needs an audio sample and a transcript of the recording, then you can edit the transcript and let the program handle the audio, instead of cropping and stitching together the recording yourself. If you need to edit out curses or misspoken words, it’s just a matter of searching the text of the transcript. More impressively, the program can analyze a person’s voice and create new speech that sounds just like them, by cobbling together syllables and sounds the person used in the initial recording. (Because of this process, you can’t insert words that require sounds that person never used in the audio sample provided.)

For instance, you can change this first sentence below into one with a whole different meaning:

See a live demonstration at the recent Adobe Max conference in the video below. The meat of the demonstration starts just before the one-minute mark.

It doesn’t take much data for the program to be able to synthesize someone’s voice—it can do it with 10 minutes of audio, though for a really good mimic, 30 minutes is better.

In the ideal use case, you could fire up this program to fix speeches or podcasts or voice-overs where there was a mistake in the initial recording, and you need to re-record. Since audio is so sensitive, changes in the sound of the room or in the person’s voice (say, if they’ve developed a cold) make it next to impossible to re-record just a segment of the audio clip in question—to make it sound really good, you need to re-record the whole thing. Here, you can make corrections that sound seamless. That said, the ability to create audio featuring someone’s voice saying words that never came out of their mouth is ripe for serious misuse. But the Adobe researchers say that it’s not unlike the ability to Photoshop misleading images, like the fake viral images that circulate on the web.

Still, Jin says they “are looking for a technological solution to prevent misuse. We are investigating deep learning detectors to find the edited part [of the audio]” and create some sort of watermark for it.

All images courtesy of Adobe