Quirky Science

It's not so much 'eureka' moments as it's the sweat of one's brow

Simply put, engineers make things. But is finding that "new" invention a massive mental leap from point A to point B, or are there scores of unnoticed intermediate steps in between?
The University of Pittsburgh's Joel Chan and Christian Schunn say that not enough has been done to understand how engineers create. Understanding the process, they say, may provide a road map for speeding up innovation.
So, along with Chan, Schunn used multiple hours of transcripts of a professional engineering team's "brainstorming" sessions and broke down the conversation systematically, looking for the path by which thought A led to thought B that led to breakthrough C.
What they found in the sessions they studied is that new ideas didn't spring fully formed after massive cognitive leaps. Creativity is a stepwise process in which idea A spurs a new but closely related thought, which prompts another incremental step, and the chain of little mental advances sometimes eventually ends with an.

More left-handed men are born during the winter

Men born in November, December or January are more likely of being left-handed than during the rest of the year. While the genetic bases of handedness are still under debate, scientists at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, obtained indirect evidence of a hormonal mechanism promoting left-handedness among men.
Psychologist Ulrich Tran and his colleagues published their findings in the scientific journal Cortex.
Various manual tasks in everyday life require the use of the right hand or are optimized for right-handers. Around 90 percent of the general population is right-handed, only about 10 percent is left-handed. The study comprised two large and independent samples of nearly 13,000 adults from Austria and Germany.
Channeling Thomas Edison's dictum that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, Schunn concludes that "inspiration creates some … perspiration."

Why are girl babies winning in the battle for survival?

Sexual inequality between boys and girls starts as early as in the mother's womb, but how and why this occurs could be a key to preventing higher rates of preterm birth, stillbirth and neonatal death among boys.
A team from the University of Adelaide's Robinson Research Institute has been studying the underlying genetic and developmental reasons why male babies generally have worse outcomes than females, with significantly increased rates of pregnancy complications and poor health outcomes for males.
The results -- published in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction -- show that male and female babies develop in very different ways, and the placenta plays a key role in these gender differences.

Biological basis for magic mushroom 'mind expansion' discovered

New research shows that our brain displays a similar pattern of activity during dreams as it does during a mind-expanding drug trip.
Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms can profoundly alter the way we experience the world but little is known about what physically happens in the brain. New research, published in Human Brain Mapping, has examined the brain effects of the psychedelic chemical in magic mushrooms, called psilocybin, using data from brain scans of volunteers who had been injected with the drug.
The study found that under psilocybin, activity in the more primitive brain network linked to emotional thinking became more pronounced, with several different areas in this network—such as the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex—active at the same time. This pattern of activity is similar to the pattern observed in people who are dreaming. Conversely, volunteers who had taken psilocybin had more disjointed and uncoordinated activity in the brain network that is linked to high-level thinking, including self-consciousness.

Compiled by Amitava Kar