Caterpillar with a Pompadour and More, this week’s links

Blogs we like

THE FREAKY: This site has all kinds of crazy stories you haven’t heard, many of them science related such as: Donald Trump Caterpillar. As a cat lover, I was relieved to see this one, proving dog lovers are crazy also: Extreme Dog Grooming.

News you may have missed

Neuroscience

Shocks to the Brain Improve Mathematical Abilities: Zapping your brain, ever so gently, makes you better at math… There goes my poker dominance.

Archaeology

Ruins of Lost City May Lurk Deep in Honduras Rain Forest: Lasers are frickin’ awesome and they do everything. In this case, they scanned the rain forest of Honduras and found ground formations that may be a lost city.

Public Policy

Child Abuse Billboard Only a Child Can Read: Remember those pictures that you got in Cracker Jacks that changed depending on the angle you looked at them? This is the same thing on a billboard scale. From the angle of a child, the billboard displays a message offering assistance to abuse victims.

Featured image is a moose I saw behind my house while hiking last weekend.

Robot tells you if you stink

Robot maker CrazyLabo has developed two robots that tells you if you smell bad. One is a woman’s head that smells your breath and tells you how good or bad it is. The other is a little bulldog that smells your feet and can either cuddle you or pass out, depending.

The woman robot is called Kaori-chan and the dog is called Shuntaro-kun. They both have four levels of responses. You breathe into a sensor in Kaori-chan’s mouth or put your feet up to Shuntaro-kun’s nose. Then the robot analyzes the components of the air and the strength of those components. This chart shows their responses:

CrazyLabo President Kennosuke Tsutsumi was inspired to make the robots after the earthquake disaster in the Tohoku region of Japan in 2011. He wanted to make something that would bring laughter to the people of the region. The result is these two robots that definitely made me smile when I heard about them.

The developers collected odor samples by having 10 male students wear the same socks for several days and/or eat foods that cause bad breath. The computer collected data on the odors and uses them to analyze the sample you provide with your own breath or feet. Tsutsumi chose bad breath and smelly feet because, according to his family, he needs help in those departments.

Sources:

Robotic dog, girl evaluate smelly breath, stinky feet By Tomomi Abe: full article

Female humanoid and a dog robot… source of diagram

Featured image “a smelly sock” license and attribution:
by â–“â–’â–‘ TORLEY â–‘â–’â–“

Face Blindness

I first heard of prosopagnosia, or face blindness, in an interview with Oliver Sacs on Radiolab. Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder in which individuals can’t remember faces. Suffers can remember other details about people, for example, their voices or hair color, but will not recognize the face of even their closest family members in extreme cases.

One way to test for face blindness is to do a facial recognition test where the individual looks at pictures celebrities with their hair removed and tries to guess who they are. There are varying degrees of Prosopagnosia, so some sufferers might guess 2 out of ten. Some won’t get any right at all.

When I heard about this, I knew I had it. I can’t remember faces at all. I have had people tell me we had met just a week or a few days before, and for the life of me, I don’t remember them. Sometimes with some hints it will come back to me, sometimes not.

Woman who doesn’t know herself

In NewScientist this week, there is an article about a woman who doesn’t even recognize herself. According to the article, around 2.5% of the population has this condition and she has one of the worst cases out there. At times, she has failed to recognize her own mother and mistaken someone else for her partner. On seeing herself in a mirror, she says:

“A few times I have been in a crowded elevator with mirrors all around and a woman will move, and I will go to get out the way and then realise [sic] ‘oh that woman is me’.”

Some neurologists think that they can help people with prosopagnosia recognize faces by stimulating the frontal cortices.

Testing for it

If you want to find out if you have face blindness, you can take a test here. I took the test, expecting to score in the 20% range. People score 80% on average, and people with prosopagnosia score much lower. I got a score of 97%… So, it turns out I’m not face blind after all; I’m just a jerk.

Featured image “Mouth“ license and attribution information:
by nathanmac87