Birth Order Impacts: Real or Imagined? A Review of Literature Past and Present

The effect of birth order on a child’s development have long been the subject of research, with psychologists and biologists alike taking sides as to whether position in a family has real implications later in life. Studies have examined the consequences that birth order can have on everything from personality and intelligence, to job earning potential. In the recent years, researchers have taken cues from studies dating as far back as the 1960’s and re-examining how birth order plays a role in the development of human personality, educational achievement, and behaviors

Investigating the influence of music training on verbal memory

Previous research has shown that musical training is associated with enhanced verbal memory. The current study investigated the generality of this association by presenting undergraduates who had received musical training (n = 20) and undergraduates with no formal music training (n = 20) with four types of word list; high visual imagery, high auditory imagery, high tactile imagery, and abstract. Those who had received music training showed enhanced memory for all word lists, suggesting that music training leads to a general enhancement in verbal memory that is not restricted to specific types of words (e.g., those invoking auditory imagery). The findings support previous research in showing that music training enhances cognitive skills beyond those that are specific to the domain of music. The possible cognitive and neural factors underpinning this effect are discussed

The size and shape of the oblong dwarf planet Haumea

We use thermal radiometry and visible photometry to constrain the size, shape, and albedo of the large Kuiper belt object Haumea. The correlation between the visible and thermal photometry demonstrates that Haumea's high amplitude and quickly varying optical light curve is indeed due to Haumea's extreme shape, rather than large scale albedo variations. However, the well-sampled high precision visible data we present does require longitudinal surface heterogeneity to account for the shape of lightcurve. The thermal emission from Haumea is consistent with the expected Jacobi ellipsoid shape of a rapidly rotating body in hydrostatic equilibrium. The best Jacobi ellipsoid fit to the visible photometry implies a triaxial ellipsoid with axes of length 1920 x 1540 x 990 km and density 2.6 g cm^-3$, as found by Lellouch et al(2010). While the thermal and visible data cannot uniquely constrain the full non-spherical shape of Haumea, the match between the predicted and measured thermal flux for a dense Jacobi ellipsoid suggests that Haumea is indeed one of the densest objects in the Kuiper belt.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables -- Accepted for publication in Earth, Moon and Planet

Pulsation Period Change & Classical Cepheids: Probing the Details of Stellar Evolution

Measurements of secular period change probe real-time stellar evolution of classical Cepheids making these measurements powerful constraints for stellar evolution models, especially when coupled with interferometric measurements. In this work, we present stellar evolution models and measured rates of period change for two Galactic Cepheids: Polaris and l Carinae, both important Cepheids for anchoring the Cepheid Leavitt law (period-luminosity relation). The combination of previously-measured parallaxes, interferometric angular diameters and rates of period change allows for predictions of Cepheid mass loss and stellar mass. Using the stellar evolution models, We find that l Car has a mass of about 9 $M_\odot$ consistent with stellar pulsation models, but is not undergoing enhanced stellar mass loss. Conversely, the rate of period change for Polaris requires including enhanced mass-loss rates. We discuss what these different results imply for Cepheid evolution and the mass-loss mechanism on the Cepheid instability strip.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure, Poster presented at IAU307: New windows on massive stars: asteroseismology, interferometry, and spectropolarimetry, Editors: G. Meynet, C. Georgy, J.H. Groh & Ph. Ste

Biases in the Experimental Annotations of Protein Function and their Effect on Our Understanding of Protein Function Space

The ongoing functional annotation of proteins relies upon the work of curators to capture experimental findings from scientific literature and apply them to protein sequence and structure data. However, with the increasing use of high-throughput experimental assays, a small number of experimental studies dominate the functional protein annotations collected in databases. Here we investigate just how prevalent is the "few articles -- many proteins" phenomenon. We examine the experimentally validated annotation of proteins provided by several groups in the GO Consortium, and show that the distribution of proteins per published study is exponential, with 0.14% of articles providing the source of annotations for 25% of the proteins in the UniProt-GOA compilation. Since each of the dominant articles describes the use of an assay that can find only one function or a small group of functions, this leads to substantial biases in what we know about the function of many proteins. Mass-spectrometry, microscopy and RNAi experiments dominate high throughput experiments. Consequently, the functional information derived from these experiments is mostly of the subcellular location of proteins, and of the participation of proteins in embryonic developmental pathways. For some organisms, the information provided by different studies overlap by a large amount. We also show that the information provided by high throughput experiments is less specific than those provided by low throughput experiments. Given the experimental techniques available, certain biases in protein function annotation due to high-throughput experiments are unavoidable. Knowing that these biases exist and understanding their characteristics and extent is important for database curators, developers of function annotation programs, and anyone who uses protein function annotation data to plan experiments.Comment: Accepted to PLoS Computational Biology. Press embargo applies. v4: text corrected for style and supplementary material inserte