Your Tuesday Sort-Of SciAm Moment

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--from The Gulag Archipelago--as quoted in Michael Shermer's Skeptic column from the latest issue of Scientific American:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Suddenly I understand why my mom had all those Solzhenitsyn books on the shelf when I was growing up.

Today's SciAm Moment

Another excerpt from the July 2007 issue of Scientific American, this time from the Fact or Fiction? column (yes, guess what I've been reading on the bus to work):

Most modern cars, however, are designed to employ a specific compression ratio, a measure of how much room is available to the fuel when the piston is at the bottom and the top of the cylinder. This compression ratio—somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to one—tolerates lower octane fuels (such as regular gasoline, good old 87 octane) without knocking. "The compression ratio is fixed by the designer of the engine," Green says. "The regular fuel will burn properly and the premium fuel will burn properly and therefore there is no reason you should pay the extra money."...

...Such high compression ratios—and the premium fuels that go with them—could be turned to efficiency, rather than speed, Green notes, especially if put into the engines of lighter cars like his Honda Civic. Other automotive fuels, such as ethanol, can also offer high octane ratings, allowing oil companies to use more volatile gasoline in such blends. But for standard cars on the road today, purchasing premium gasoline is simply paying a premium for a fuel that delivers no added benefits. "If you think you need it," Green says, "you're being very eccentric."

Once Again: Scientists Continue to Prove That Scientists Just Hate Mice

From Joe Z. Tsien's article "The Memory Code" from the July 2007 issue of Scientific American (emphasis mine):

Witnessing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, surviving an earthquake or even plummeting 13 stories in Disney's Tower of Terror are things that are hard to forget. So we developed tests that would mimic this type of emotionally charged, episodic event. Such experiences should produce memories that are long-lasting and strong. And encoding such robust memories, we reasoned, might involve a large number of cells in the hippocampus, thus making it more likely that we would be able to find cells activated by the experience and gather enough data to unravel any patterns and organizing principles involved in the process.

The episodic events we chose include a lab version of an earthquake (induced by shaking a small container holding a mouse), a sudden blast of air to the animal's back (meant to mimic an owl attack from the sky) and a brief vertical free fall inside a small "elevator" (which, when we first started doing these experiments, was provided by a cookie jar we had in the lab).

Really, the part that had me ROTFLing was the image of some undergrad at Boston University who gets to explain to people that he got his research credits for picking up a mouse cage and shaking it around.