Weird Science
Crank up the music with your kids
Most siblings have memories of — happily or unhappily — listening to whatever Mum or Dad had on the car radio on long trips. In our unfortunate case, endless doses of Jim Reeves, Kenny Rogers and, if we were really unlucky, Engelbert Humperdinck.
Now researchers say sharing music can do wonders for parents’ future relationships with their sons and daughters.
University of Arizona’s Professor Jake Harwood and his colleagues surveyed a group of young adults, average age 21, about the frequency with which they engaged with their parents, as children, in listening to music, attending concerts or playing musical instruments.
Participants reported on their memories of experiences they had between ages 8-13 and aged 14 and older. They also shared how they perceived their relationship with their parents now.
Although shared musical experiences at all age levels were associated with better perceptions of parent-child relationship quality in young adulthood, the effect was most pronounced for shared musical experiences during adolescence.
“With young kids, musical activity is fairly common — singing lullabies, doing nursery rhymes,” Harwood said.
“With teenagers, it’s less common, and when things are less common you might find bigger effects, because when these things happen, they’re superimportant.”
Are penguins eating enough?
For Antarctica’s emperor penguins, diminishing sea ice due to climate change means less fish to eat.
Researchers at USbased Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have developed a way to determine the foraging success of the penguins by using time-lapse video observations relayed to scientists thousands of kilometres away.
Off all the penguin species, emperor penguins tend to be the biggest eaters. And for good reason: they make long treks on sea ice to reach their foraging grounds — sometimes more than 100km during winter — and feed their large chicks when they return.
But as sea ice diminishes, so does the microscopic plankton living underneath, which serves as the primary food source for the fish penguins eat.
Sea ice also provides an important resting platform for the penguins between foraging dives, so melting can make foraging that much harder.
Scientist Dan Zitterbart said information from the time-lapse video observations correlated with sensor-based measurements of air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation and wind may ultimately be used to come up with conservation measures to protect emperor penguins.
Studies have shown the bad aspects of using Facebook — such as the platform driving up levels of stress-related cortisol.
But if your grandma or grandpa “likes” one of your posts, researchers say that’s something to smile about. A new paper has found social networking sites offer tools and activities that may help older adults feel more empowered and less isolated.
In a study of Facebook use, older adults who posted a lot of personal stories on the social networking site felt a higher sense of community, and the more they customised their profiles, the more in control they felt. Distinguished Professor S. Shyam Sundar, of Pennsylvania State University, said: “What distinguishes this study is that it makes an effort to go in and see what people do in Facebook — and that’s what matters.”
In other words, he said, social media, by itself was neither good, nor bad — and it all depended how we used it.
For older adults who may be less mobile, Facebook and similar social networking sites could play a critical role in easing isolation and making them feel like they are part of a large community, the researchers said.
“This is important, especially for older adults, because they have mobility constraints that limit their ability to socialise,” Sundar said.
New animal species are sometimes named after celebrities because of their trademark looks. That’s how we got the blondhaired Donald Trump moth and the big-armed Arnold Schwarzenegger fly. However, some wellknown people are enshrined in animal names not for their looks, but for what they do for the environment.
This is how a newly discovered water beetle, described in was given the name of Hollywood actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio.
The tribute marks the 20th anniversary of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) and its efforts towards biodiversity preservation.
“We can all have an impact,” DiCaprio said, “but we have to work together to protect our only home.”
The water beetle, Grouvellinus leonardodicaprioi, was discovered at a waterfall in the remote Maliau Basin, Malaysian Borneo, during a field trip by Taxon Expeditions.
Having identified three water beetle species new to science, the expedition participants, and staff of the Maliau Basin Studies Centre voted to name one of them after DiCaprio in honour of his efforts to protect untouched, unexplored wildernesses.
“Tiny and black, this new beetle may not win any Oscars for charisma, but in biodiversity conservation, every creature counts,” Taxon Expeditions’ founder and entomologist Dr Iva Njunjic said.