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Motley, an affectionate cat (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

It took 120 hours of observing 40 cat-human pairs for scientists to conclude that the bond between the two can be similar to other human relationships. And, yes, I know that most of you who have cats—or know someone who has a cat—will not find that surprising, so let’s delve into the details. It turns out that this study isn’t as simple as it appears.

The scientists (whose study appears in the journal Behavioural Processes) sent a team of researchers repeatedly into the homes of cat-human pairs in Vienna, Austria. The team would visit for about 45 minutes around the cat’s feeding time, with one person interacting with the cat and human and the other wielding a video camera. They evaluated the personalities of both the human (with a personality test) and the cat, through both observations (e.g., did the cat accompany the human to the door?) and a series of tests that included the cat’s reaction to being picked up. The video of the cat’s behavior and interactions with the humans in the room was later coded and the researchers analyzed it all with a computer program that looked for patterns in the behaviors of the cats and the humans.

The scientists found some correlations between human personality and the behaviors of the cats—such as that cats with humans classified as “extroverted” or “conscientious” exhibited more complex patters of behaviors—and concluded that “it seems that an important area of negotiation between the owner and the cat is mutual attention and friendly tactile interactions” and that the patterns in the relationships between the cats and humans resemble other long-term and complex relationships, “such as those between humans.”

But then the researchers also went on to claim, in a story published by Discovery News, that their research indicates that women tend to interact more with their cats than men do.

“In response, the cats approach female owners more frequently, and initiate contact more frequently (such as jumping on laps) than they do with male owners,” co-author Manuela Wedl of the University of Vienna told Discovery News, adding that “female owners have more intense relationships with their cats than do male owners.”

While I find the study interesting, I have a few quibbles. First of all, there is little in the study to back up the researcher’s claims about the differences between men and women in their relationships with their cats. Their sample included only 10 male owners, and this hardly seems like an adequate number for making conclusions about all male-cat relationships.

In addition, if I think about the realm of personalities and interactions that exist in just one friend’s cat household (he’s got three), I find it hard to imagine that 40 cat-human pairs would be enough of a sample to adequately analyze the large number of behaviors (162!) and personality traits included in this study.

My other problems with this study stem from my own human-cat relationship. My kitty, Sabrina, is a 13-year-old tortie, and she wouldn’t fit neatly into this study. She is a very different cat with me (friendly and cuddly, though she refused to pose for a photo for this post) versus people she has met before (friendly but often standoffish) versus strangers (where did she go?). And I suspect other cats may be the same. Any study in which you place total strangers into the animal’s home environment is going to produce some abnormal behavior, and judging a cat on that behavior only is probably unfair to the cat.

Furthermore, some of the tests of the cats’ behavior may not have given an accurate accounting of the cats’ personality. For example, they tested the cats’ response to a novel object, a plush owlet left on the floor. Many cats, like Sabrina, ignore most anything simply lying on the floor (perhaps they are used to messy housekeeping) but are happy to pounce on on object suspended just an inch above. And there are some cats, like my own, that do not enjoy the sensation of being picked up (would you?), even by their own human, but are otherwise quite friendly.

If I were to do this study, I would use a much bigger sample size, add more behavioral tests and have the human in each study pair repeat the tests without the researchers present but in front of a camera.

All that said, the researchers deserve some credit for being the first to attempt to tackle the complex personality dynamics within cat-human relationship. Sadly, though, they only scratched the surface of this complex world.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus in 3-D (Credit: Ivan Konstantinov, Yury Stefanov, Aleksander Kovalevsky, Yegor Voronin, Visual Science Company)

This may look like a cross between something my friend Helen would knit and a Good Eats model of a droplet of fat covered in lecithin, but it’s actually a three-dimensional illustration of the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, and the winner of the Illustration category in the 2010 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. Here’s the explanation of the image:

Ivan Konstantinov’s winning illustration reduces HIV to unnerving simplicity. His team at the Visual Science Company in Moscow spent months combing through the latest research, compiling data from more than 100 papers and assembling the information into a coherent image of a 100-nanometer HIV particle. They depicted the proteins in just two basic colors: Gray equals host, orange equals virus.

The World Health Organization reports that 33.3 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and another 2.6 million people are infected each year. “You have this gaping mouth [in the illustration] that almost looks like it’s ready to eat you the way AIDS is eating away at society,” said NASA’s Tom Wagner, one of the competition judges.

Current and past winners and honorable mentions in all five categories—including photography, informational posters and interactive games—can be found online.

Hanny's Voorwerp and spiral galaxy IC 2497 (credit: NASA/ESA)

Did you watch IBM’s Watson supercomputer trounce two humans playing Jeopardy last week and do you now fear a future controlled by these jumbles of wires and circuitry with really boring voices? No? Me neither. And not just because I refuse to be intimidated by an invention that contains more information than I could possibly remember and has reflexes faster than any human. You see, computers just aren’t good at some things, including science, as I was reminded recently at a session at the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.

Discoveries in science often depend on finding some piece of data, like a weird green cloud in a picture of a galaxy, and saying, “that’s funny.” Computers aren’t that good at doing that, and humans are also much better at spotting patterns visually. That makes us much better prepared to look at, say, a picture of a galaxy and properly classify it. That’s how the first Galaxy Zoo was born–out of the need to identify all the galaxies imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

That first project finished in 2007 with the classification of 10 million galaxies (and the identification of plenty of odd stuff, including Hanny’s Voorwerp, the weird green cloud I mentioned above), and now there is an entire Zooniverse, where you can help scientists to complete tasks like find planets, study the moon, or recover weather observations from World War I-era Royal Navy ships. But even people who aren’t actively participating in projects like these are being mined as human computers for grand projects–though you might not realize it.

You know when you fill out a form online and get to that box with the difficult-to-read jumble of letter or words? That’s called a CAPTCHA. You can figure out what the letters say or spell, but a computer can’t. It’s a block for spammers. The latest iteration is called a reCAPTCHA, and these boxes contain two words. What you might not have noticed is that when you decode those words, you’re helping Google to digitize books. Google puts one word it knows and a second one that its digitizing program has labeled as a word but can’t identify into that box and asks you what both are. By decoding 200 million of those words each day, we’ve helped Google to digitize millions of books.

Chris Lintott, an Oxford astronomer and one of the Zooniverse founders, noted that soon the tide of data will be so large that it will overwhelm what humans can handle. When the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope goes online in a few years, for example, it will scan the sky every three days, producing as much data as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey did in years. At that point, humans will still be needed, Lintott said, to train the machines.

A USGS shakemap for the recent New Zealand earthquake shows where shaking and the potential for damage were the worst. (Click to view larger)

A magnitude-6.3 earthquake shook Christchurch, New Zealand yesterday, collapsing buildings, triggering landslides and flooding, and killing dozens of people. A more powerful magnitude-7.1 quake rattled the city last September but didn’t cause nearly as much damage, with no fatalities. Why do some earthquakes kill hundreds or thousands of people while others do little damage? There are several factors that determine just how destructive an earthquake can be:

Location: This one is kind of obvious—an earthquake that hits in a populated area is more likely to do damage than one that hits an unpopulated area or the middle of the ocean.

Magnitude: Scientists assign a number to represent the amount of seismic energy released by an earthquake. The Richter magnitude scale, as it is known, is logarithmic, so each step up represents an increase in energy of a factor of 10. The more energy in an earthquake, the more destructive it can be.

Depth: Earthquakes can happen anywhere from at the surface to 700 kilometers below. In general, deeper earthquakes are less damaging because their energy dissipates before it reaches the surface. The recent New Zealand earthquake is thought to have occurred at a more shallow depth than the one last year.

Distance from the epicenter: The epicenter is the point at the surface right above where the earthquake originates and is usually the place where the earthquake’s intensity is the greatest.

Local geologic conditions: The nature of the ground at the surface of an earthquake can have a profound influence on the level of damage. Loose, sandy, soggy soil, like in Mexico City, can liquefy if the shaking is strong and long enough, for example. That doesn’t bode well for any structures on the surface.

Secondary effects: Earthquakes can trigger landslides, fires, floods or tsunamis. It was not the 2004 Sumatran-Andaman earthquake that caused so much damage in 2004 but the Indian Ocean tsunami it triggered. Nearly a quarter of a million people in 14 countries were killed when coastal communities were inundated by the water.

Architecture: Even the strongest buildings may not survive a bad earthquake, but architecture plays a huge role in what and who survives a quake. The January 2010 Haiti earthquake, for example, was made far worse by poor construction, weak cement and unenforced building codes.

Babies start learning about language before they are born, Werker says (image courtesy of flickr user Michael Comeau)

Learning a second language is certainly useful if you want to travel the world, or if you live in a place where there are a lot of people that speak that language natively. But there are also plenty of benefits beyond simple communication, as a session at this weekend’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting demonstrated: It gives your brain a much-needed workout and may help to protect against Alzheimer’s. Children who become bilingual learn how to prioritize information, as their brains have to figure out how to handle two sets of words for everything. All that mental juggling, as one speaker called it, appears to be a good thing for the brain.

But what intrigued me most was research presented by Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. She studies babies who grow up in bilingual households and has found that these babies demonstrate certain language abilities at birth that babies exposed to just one language don’t. For example, a newborn from a monolingual household will show a preference for listening to its native language only. But a baby born into a bilingual home shows equal interest in both languages it has been exposed to in the womb.

Bilingual infants are also better able to discriminate between languages visually. See, languages look different in the speaker’s face. English speakers, for example, produce a “th” sound in which they put their tongue between their teeth, while French speakers do not have this sound in their language and thus don’t produce that shape with their tongue. It’s how you might be able to pick out a speaker of your native language during a cocktail party in a foreign country when it’s too loud to hear distinct sounds.

In Werker’s experiments, all babies, monolingual and bilingual, can discriminate between speakers of different language classes at four and six months old, but the monolingual infants lost this ability by eight months of age. The bilingual babies, however, are even more special. In one experiment, Werker exposed eight-month-old babies who grew up in households speaking Spanish, Catalan, or Spanish and Catalan (i.e., bilingual) to videos of women speaking English or French. The bilingual babies, but not the monolingual ones, were able to tell the difference between the two unfamiliar languages.

“The number one lesson [of this research] is that learning two languages is as natural as learning just one,” Werker says. Babies learn through listening and watching to figure out the properties of language, whether it’s one or two, and bilingual babies are able to figure out which is which and not confuse the two.