Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

arXiv: 1312.7128 [physics.pop-ph]
(Submitted on 26 Dec 2013)

Robert J Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson

Department of Physics, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931

Abstract

Time travel has captured the public imagination for much of the past century, but little has been done to actually search for time travelers. Here, three implementations of Internet searches for time travelers are described, all seeking a prescient mention of information not previously available. The first search covered prescient content placed on the Internet, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific terms in tweets on Twitter. The second search examined prescient inquiries submitted to a search engine, highlighted by a comprehensive search for specific search terms submitted to a popular astronomy web site. The third search involved a request for a direct Internet communication, either by email or tweet, pre-dating to the time of the inquiry. Given practical verifiability concerns, only time travelers from the future were investigated. No time travelers were discovered. Although these negative results do not disprove time travel, given the great reach of the Internet, this search is perhaps the most comprehensive to date.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7128

The Morning Morality Effect - The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior

Psychological Science
January 2014 vol. 25 no. 1 95-102
October 28, 2013
doi: 10.1177/0956797613498099

Maryam Kouchaki [1], Isaac H. Smith [2]

1 Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, 124 Mount Auburn St., Suite 520N, Cambridge, MA
2 Department of Management, University of Utah

Abstract

Are people more moral in the morning than in the afternoon? We propose that the normal, unremarkable experiences associated with everyday living can deplete one’s capacity to resist moral temptations. In a series of four experiments, both undergraduate students and a sample of U.S. adults engaged in less unethical behavior (e.g., less lying and cheating) on tasks performed in the morning than on the same tasks performed in the afternoon. This morning morality effect was mediated by decreases in moral awareness and self-control in the afternoon. Furthermore, the effect of time of day on unethical behavior was found to be stronger for people with a lower propensity to morally disengage. These findings highlight a simple yet pervasive factor (i.e., the time of day) that has important implications for moral behavior.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/1/95

Mice Genetically Deficient in Vasopressin V1a and V1b Receptors Are Resistant to Jet Lag

Science 4 October 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6154 pp. 85-90
DOI: 10.1126/science.1238599

Received for publication 1 April 2013

Yoshiaki Yamaguchi [1], Toru Suzuki [1], Yasutaka Mizoro [1], Hiroshi Kori [2,3], Kazuki Okada [1], Yulin Chen [1], Jean-Michel Fustin [1], Fumiyoshi Yamazaki [1], Naoki Mizuguchi [1], Jing Zhang [4], Xin Dong [4], Gozoh Tsujimoto [5], Yasushi Okuno [6], Masao Doi [1], Hitoshi Okamura [1,4]

[1] Department of Systems Biology, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.
[2] Department of Information Sciences, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112-8620, Japan.
[3] CREST, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan.
[4] Division of Molecular Brain Science, Department of Brain Science, Kobe University Graduate School of Medicine, Chuo-ku, Kobe 650-0017, Japan.
[5] Department of Genomic Drug Discovery Science, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.
[6] Department of Systems Biosciences for Drug Discovery, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.

Jet-lag symptoms arise from temporal misalignment between the internal circadian clock and external solar time. We found that circadian rhythms of behavior (locomotor activity), clock gene expression, and body temperature immediately reentrained to phase-shifted light-dark cycles in mice lacking vasopressin receptors V1a and V1b (V1a–/–V1b–/–). Nevertheless, the behavior of V1a–/–V1b–/– mice was still coupled to the internal clock, which oscillated normally under standard conditions. Experiments with suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) slices in culture suggested that interneuronal communication mediated by V1a and V1b confers on the SCN an intrinsic resistance to external perturbation. Pharmacological blockade of V1a and V1b in the SCN of wild-type mice resulted in accelerated recovery from jet lag, which highlights the potential of vasopressin signaling as a therapeutic target for management of circadian rhythm misalignment, such as jet lag and shift work.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/85.abstract

Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother's

arXiv: 1204.4346 [cs.DL]
April 20, 2012

James Cook, UC Berkeley
Atish Das Sarma, eBay Research Labs
Alex Fabrikant, Google Research
Andrew Tomkins, Google Research

Abstract

Did celebrity last longer in 1929, 1992 or 2009? We investigate the phenomenon of fame by mining a collection of news articles that spans the twentieth century, and also perform a side study on a collection of blog posts from the last 10 years. By analyzing mentions of personal names, we measure each person's time in the spotlight, using two simple metrics that evaluate, roughly, the duration of a single news story about a person, and the overall duration of public interest in a person. We watched the distribution evolve from 1895 to 2010, expecting to find significantly shortening fame durations, per the much popularly bemoaned shortening of society's attention spans and quickening of media's news cycles. Instead, we conclusively demonstrate that, through many decades of rapid technological and societal change, through the appearance of Twitter, communication satellites, and the Internet, fame durations did not decrease, neither for the typical case nor for the extremely famous, with the last statistically significant fame duration decreases coming in the early 20th century, perhaps from the spread of telegraphy and telephony. Furthermore, while median fame durations stayed persistently constant, for the most famous of the famous, as measured by either volume or duration of media attention, fame durations have actually trended gently upward since the 1940s, with statistically significant increases on 40-year timescales. Similar studies have been done with much shorter timescales specifically in the context of information spreading on Twitter and similar social networking sites. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first massive scale study of this nature that spans over a century of archived data, thereby allowing us to track changes across decades.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4346

Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time

PLoS One. 2009; 4(10): e7595.
Published online Oct 28, 2009. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007595

Min Tan [1,3], Gareth Jones [2], Guangjian Zhu [1], Jianping Ye [1,3], Tiyu Hong [1,3], Shanyi Zhou [3], Shuyi Zhang [4], and Libiao Zhang [1]

[1] Guangdong Entomological Institute, Guangzhou, China
[2] School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
[3] College of Life Sciences, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China
[4] School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate's penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007595