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mercy if they do not ask the right questions and listen carefully to the answers how to make your doctor s appointment better than standard advice from a standardized patient find a physician who will ask you many questions and listen carefully to the answers do not assume if you ve talked to a medical student or other proxy that they have conveyed all the information to the physician your physician should give you more than one possible diagnosis in other words they should tell you what they are thinking unless they are absolutely certain what is wrong this should be like a conversation between you and your physician don t be afraid to ask are there any other possibilities for what this could be pay attention to your own body notice when the pain started and what makes it better or worse does it happen at a certain time of day or after certain activities have you changed your diet recently tell your physician about everything you ve noticed that is not normal for you even if you don t think those other symptoms or changes are relevant as i learned with my knee problem some medical students because they are not overly confident and are willing to ask not assume are better than some doctors image craig breil university of michigan msis not a picture of amy 2 comments labels disease education language medicine screwups newly discovered ant convinces others to be its slaves email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest by elizabeth preston on tuesday january 14 2014 studies of ants have the ring of medieval epics there are queens castes warring soldiers and scouts certain ant species go on violent raids of neighboring colonies picking up the young in their jaws and carrying them back to their own homes the stolen ants become workers that live to serve these slave makers a newly discovered slave making ant species though sometimes accomplishes the same kind of coup without the need for violence slave making ants live all over but scientists have so far found the new species in just three spots in the early 2000s the ants turned up in a state park in vermont and a nature preserve in rensselaerville new york in recent years they ve been found at sleeping bear dunes national lakeshore in michigan if you stand on the sleeping bear dunes you might never guess that this postcard perfect vista hides a small scale war but in the forest tucked inside holes in acorns sticks and hickory nuts temnothorax pilagens the pillage ant is at work bernhard seifert of the senckenberg museum for natural history in goerlitz germany and his colleagues say pillage ants have two preferred host species temnothorax longispinosus and temnothorax ambiguous yes all three share a name because they re relatives ninety percent of slave maker ants are related to their slave species seifert says the pillage ant is much closer than usual to t longispinosus though comparing the ants dna revealed that the two are sister species the slave makers don t treat these sisters well scouts from a slave maker colony go out looking for nests to raid either alone or with up to four worker ants following when they find a target and charge inside they may meet resistance in this case the slave makers make frequent and effective use of the stinger the authors write a sting by a pillage ant quickly paralyzes and kills a host ant in the raids that the scientists observed casualties in the invaded ant colony could reach as high as 100 percent yet the takeovers could also be peaceful in some cases especially in nests without a queen the invaded ants barely objected to their pillaging guests slave makers carried off not just larvae and pupae from the colony but adult ants too occasionally host workers tried to drag slavemakers out of the nest the authors write but at other times they didn t resist the whole raid could go off with hardly any violence the scientists think pillage ants somehow disguise themselves so that ants in the invaded nests surrender without objecting seifert says different forms of camouflage could be responsible the slave makers might mimic the coloring shape or movement of their hosts well enough that the hosts don t notice when the raid begins or the mimicry might be chemical pheromones given off by the slave makers might convince their victims everything s fine back at the pillage ants home nest a typical colony includes about four workers and a dozen slaves compared to other slave makers the pillage ant is unusual for its tiny raiding parties seifert says this species is also unique in that a good number of raids can be undertaken without experiencing resistance surrounded by the beauty of the dunes the slave makers victims are lulled into submission by the time their young grow into hostage adults in their enemies nests it s too late to fight images top miriam papenhagen bottom me bernhard seifert isabelle kleeberg barbara feldmeyer tobias pamminger evelien jongepier susanne foitzik 2014 temnothorax pilagens sp n a new slave making species of the tribe formicoxenini from north america hymenoptera formicidae zookeys 10 3897 zookeys 368 6423 note it s not always too late to fight in what scientists call a slave rebellion some enslaved ants have been seen tearing their captors young to pieces or abandoning them outside the nest 0 comments labels bugs posts that will bring me creepy internet traffic whether to panic the more your friends change the more your social network stays the same email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest by elizabeth preston on tuesday january 07 2014 for the most part people move in and out of our lives at a trickle a new coworker becomes a friend a neighbor moves away but there s at least one cataclysmic monsoon in a young person s social life and that s high school graduation so long hometown chumps hello dorms when scientists used cell phone records to track the social networks of people graduating from high school and starting the next phase of their lives they saw a huge turnover in friends and acquaintances remarkably though the overall structure of each person s network stayed the same we wanted to see what happens to social networks when there is a big disruption says jari saramäki a professor at aalto university in finland he leads a research group studying complex networks in 2007 saramäki and his coauthors gave cell phones to 24 soon to graduate high schoolers in a large city in the united kingdom the phones came with an 18 month contract and a guarantee that all their call data during that time would be collected by researchers after graduating a quarter of the subjects stayed in their home city and got jobs the rest went off to universities nearby or in other cities at three points during the study the young people filled out questionnaires about their phone use they listed all the friends acquaintances and family members for whom they had contact information and rated the closeness of their relationships with each person the researchers combined this information with the call records to piece together each person s network who were they calling how often and how close were they to the people they called researchers didn t calculate the absolute numbers of people in each subject s social network saramäki explains because a graph of anyone s call frequencies shows a long tail of numbers dialed just once or twice are these doctor s office receptionists school administrators does a virtual stranger count as a member of someone s network instead saramäki says they focused on the top of the graph each subject s acquaintances were ranked by the number of phone calls they got then graphed according to the fraction of total calls this was here s an example ego is the person we re interested in and a j are the people he or she called the most the graph on the right is this person s social signature there were some patterns among subjects for example an average of 20 to 25 percent of calls went to each person s top ranked acquaintance and nearly half of calls to their top three acquaintances nevertheless each subject s social signature had a distinct shape over time the graduating students had huge turnover in their networks within all top 20 contacts 42 percent were people added in the middle section of the study yet statistical analysis showed that for the most part the shapes of these social networks stayed the same i would have expected that when the participants begin their first university year there is some dramatic temporary effect on their network shapes saramäki says what was really surprising is that network structures do not change much even when this turnover is there of course phone calls don t give a complete picture of a person s social activity there are also text messages for one thing but saramäki says texts can be problematic not everyone s parents text for example and some interactions might be completed in one message while others take a dozen back and forth volleys we do have data on text messages for this study and are working on it saramäki says but judging from what we have seen so far it looks like the text message data tells pretty much the same story even when people overhaul nearly all their friends at once they seem to just slot the new acquaintances into the old social structure the researchers point out that people have a limited amount of time to spend on their friends and the brain may have a finite capacity for keeping track of others so it s possible that people allot those resources in a consistent way no matter which friends they currently have it seems you can t shake your social network wherever you go there you and they are jari saramäki e a leicht eduardo lópez sam g b roberts felix reed tsochas robin i m dunbar 2013 persistence of social signatures in human communication pnas 10 1073 pnas 1308540110 image mine all mine this post has been edited from an earlier version 2 comments labels education language math snoozing bats tune out traffic noise email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest by elizabeth preston on friday january 03 2014 for an easily crushed animal that rests during the day a highway seems like maybe the worst possible home yet some bats pick roosts that are under bridges or in other spots booming with human noise why subject themselves to that for bats of at least one species the sound of traffic is easy to doze through and the more they hear it the more they ignore it the greater mouse eared bat myotis myotis often turns up under bridges in europe jinhong luo a phd student at the max planck institute for ornithology wanted to know how they can tolerate the noise he and his colleagues trapped male bats from a cave in bulgaria and brought them back to the laboratory for a hearing test which was really a sleeping test well not sleeping exactly like many other bat species the greater mouse eared bat goes into torpor during the day which is like a mini hibernation its metabolism and body temperature drop sharply letting the animal conserve energy in the evening the bats start to stir after waking up gradually they head out from their caves or under bridge roosts to hunt the researchers created several different sound recordings that they would play to roosting bats to try to wake them up there was a recording of the bats own colony another of local bird sounds and one of trees rustling in the wind the authors also created recordings that mimicked highway traffic passing 25 meters 50 meters and 100 meters away each bat was housed by itself for the sound tests over the course of two roosting days the bats heard each recording twice for five minutes by monitoring temperature sensors on the animals skin the scientists could see whether bats started to wake up that is warm themselves after hearing each sound luo and the others tested a dozen bats they started with 15 but two weren t snoozing deeply enough to run all the tests and one somehow pulled the temperature logger off the middle of its back the bats were most likely to wake up after hearing the recording of their colony or the sound of rustling trees but traffic sounds were least likely to wake them bats responded more strongly to all sounds later in the day as it got closer to their normal waking time it s not too surprising that bats respond to the squeaks and shuffles of their own colony which might hold useful information but why the windblown trees a likely answer is that myotis myotis doesn t hunt by echolocation instead it listens for the sounds of beetles walking through the grass since the bats are already attuned to the noise of swishing vegetation it may make a good alarm clock as for the sound of cars passing luo points out that most rumbling traffic is at a lower frequency than the sounds of a bat colony or rustling leaves since bats hear better at higher frequencies this means traffic noise is basically out of the best hearing frequencies for nearly all bat species however luo is quick to add we would never claim that traffic noise is not disturbing to roosting bats or even to torpid bats the bats in his study did respond slightly to traffic noise raising their body temperatures compared to when there was silence and bats might react differently to highway sounds when they re awake or when they re roosting but not in a state of torpor whatever sound they heard bats responded less on the second playback or when it was played continuously for an hour they were especially quick to adjust to traffic sounds like a teenager sleeping through an alarm clock bats can tune out a familiar noise more easily but that doesn t mean they re immune to harm from their noisy human neighbors we just don t know all the ways that living with our roads and other rackets might influence them to be honest we are in the very beginning of understanding the potential effects luo says answers are not always straightforward image usfws ann froschauer luo j clarin bm borissov im siemers bm 2013 are torpid bats immune to anthropogenic noise the journal of experimental biology pmid 24311817 1 comments labels bats clocks environment sound actual top ten animals of 2013 email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest by elizabeth preston on monday december 30 2013 not so much a popularity contest as an altitude contest 10 himalayan jumping spider the fuzzy and springy euophrys omnisuperstes lives on the world s highest mountains it s been found 6 700 meters a little over four miles high on mount everest some birds can fly at higher altitudes but the spider lives there full time apparently subsisting on unlucky insects carried up to it by the wind 9 8 iranian space monkeys twice this year iran announced that it had successfully sent a monkey on a sub orbital rocket flight the trips allegedly happened in january and december both reaching heights of 120 kilometers 75 miles before safely returning their rhesus macaque nauts to earth but the associ...