Tag Archives: weird science

This is neat: Chip Art

If you take a pair of pliers to your laptop and crack open the plastic casing, you’ll find a greenish motherboard with all the guts of the computer attached to it.  One of these guts is the computer’s CPU, a little square computer chip that probably has the word “Intel” printed on it.  If you strip the epoxy coating off of the CPU and put it under a microscope, what you’ll see will look a lot like the downtown of a city from a helicopter.  Rectangles and rectangles and rectangles of transistors printed on a silicon wafer.

And this.

Source: Chipworks

When there’s extra space on a computer chip, sometimes the chip designers like to have fun with it.

The practice of putting little pictures on computer chips is called chip art.  Though the practice is discouraged, it’s hard to get caught doing it – you’d have to void the warranty on your computer and put it under a microscope to see that it’s even there.  There were even reports of “bill sux” inscribed on a Pentium chip, but it turned out to be a hoax.

Chipworks, a company that specializes in analyzing computer chip circuitry for copyright infringement, keeps a gallery of all the chip art they’ve bumped into over the years.

There he is!
Source: Chipworks

Face Blind

It feels like this sometimes

I remember the first day of high school vividly.  I was going to a school far away from my home district, so my family had arranged a carpool with three other girls from the area.  Their names were Sarah, Amber, and Stacey.  Early in the morning that September, I got dropped off at Sarah’s mom’s house, and the three of us hung around in the shade of the live oaks, bubbling with excitement.

Sarah’s mom drove us the 30 minutes to school, then we piled out of the car and went our separate ways to our lockers.

At homeroom, the teacher had us get into groups of 6 and introduce ourselves around in a circle. I noticed that a Latina girl was being awfully quiet – she hadn’t said her name.  I asked her what it was.

She gave me a very strange look.  “Sarah.”

I don’t usually make blunders as bad as that one, but for a long time I’ve suspected that I’m pretty stupid at recognizing people.  I couldn’t tell Merry apart from Pippin to save my life.  And I hate, hate romantic comedies.  Most of the characters are wearing street clothes and they all tend to be the same ethnicity.  What am I supposed to work with?

There’s a name for this problem.  Prosopagnosia, or face blindness.  It sound like a terrifying terminal condition, but it’s actually more common than you might think.  For a class on science writing I’m taking this semester, we read an article by Oliver Sachs, who cites statistics that as much as 2.5% of the population have severe prosopagnosia – they have trouble recognizing even their friends and loved ones.  For the rest of us, the ability to recognize faces is distributed on a bell curve, like IQ is.  Which puts me somewhere in the range of Forrest Gump.

If you’re curious, the Prosopagnosia Research Center at Harvard University has an online test you can use to gauge your own ability to recognize famous faces.  It’s real quick and dirty, but the results are interesting.*

*I thought Princess Diana was Tina Fey.  Just sayin’.

Tongue Rolling: Lies, I Tell You!

Yes, that's me, acting like a goofball.

I learned something neat the other day.

Think back to your high school biology class.  When you were studying genetics, your teacher probably told you that being able to roll your tongue is a dominant trait and not being able to roll it is recessive.  That’s not actually true.

There are pairs of identical twins out there where one twin can roll their tongue and the other can’t.

That by itself doesn’t mean that tongue-rolling isn’t genetic.  There are traits out there that are controlled partly by genes and partly by factors we don’t fully understand.  Schizophrenia, for example, is partly genetic.  Yet there are pairs of identical twins out there where one twin gets the disease and the other doesn’t.  Something about the environment triggers the disease in only one of the twins.

You’d expect, though, that if genetics has something to do with tongue rolling, then identical twins should be more likely to both be able (or unable) to roll their tongue than any other two people.  Scientists from the University of Adelaide in South Australia actually tested this way back in 1975.*  They surveyed 47 pairs of twins, some of whom were identical, about their ability to roll their tongue.  The result: the identical twins weren’t any more likely to both be able to roll their tongue than the fraternal twins.  The study didn’t find that genetics had anything to do with tongue rolling.

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*  If you want to read the study, look here: Martin, N.G.  No evidence for a genetic basis of tongue rolling or hand clasping.  J Hered (1975) 66(3): 179-180.