This Week in Science

Emotion maps, rock tree-rings, and more

Author

Neil Baugh
September 11, 2024

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Happy Wednesday morning! Thanks for joining in for another week. Check out some cool science and let me know what you think by taking the polls at the bottom and/or sending me an email with your thoughts.

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An old but interesting paper taking a look at where on the body we feel different emotions.

“Bodily topography of basic (Upper) and nonbasic (Lower) emotions associated with words. The body maps show regions whose activation increased (warm colors) or decreased (cool colors) when feeling each emotion. (P < 0.05 FDR corrected; t > 1.94). The colorbar indicates the t-statistic range.“ - the authors (Figure 2, Credit: Nummenmaa and Hietanen et al, PNAS, 2013).

Apparently some volcanic rocks have rings like trees, and scientists are learning to use them to predict volcanic eruptions. The rings can tell us how long magma stays underground before erupting.

Based on the rings from a specific volcanoes rocks, scientists think they can estimate the length of time from a volcano waking up and actually erupting. However, the actual duration of this waiting period and how reproducible the rings-based predictions are is quite a contentious subject among the experts.

Being facially expressive is socially advantageous - Scientific Reports

Individuals vary in how they move their faces in everyday social interactions. In a first large-scale study, we measured variation in dynamic facial behaviour during social interaction and examined dyadic outcomes and impression formation…. Findings suggest that facial behaviour is a stable individual difference that proffers social advantages, pointing towards an affiliative, adaptive function.

www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62902-6

Explained well by the others in the summary above. They found that people who were more facially expressive were “more well-liked, agreeable, and successful at negotiating.”

The clockwork of champions: Influence of circadian biology on exercise performance

Exercise physiology and circadian biology are distinct and long-standing fields. Recently they have seen increased integration, largely due to the dis…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891584924006075?via%3Dihub

A nice review article discussing the impacts of circadian rhythms on exercise performance. They note that performance typically peaks in the afternoon and is worse in the morning, something I know happens to me at least.

Ice sheets make up a large chunk of the Earth’s poles. Large chunks of ice break off from these sheets, becoming icebergs. As global warming continues to erode the global ice sheets, it’s important to know how these large chunks of ice will break off in order to accurately predict their impact on sea level rise.

Previous work pointed towards the ice cliffs failing due to their own weight, resulting in large chunks breaking off. They predicted this would cause a positive feedback loop leading to an accelerating loss of ice. This model informed many of the “worst case scenario” sea level rise predictions of the last few years.

The linked article goes through some opposing views on the topic and gives details on some new theories of glacial failure that aren’t quite so drastic.

See you next week for more science,

Neil

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