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Winning formula tells you when the game is in the bag
Layne Murdoch Jr/NBAE via Getty Images
in Brief Lazy ants are career nonworkers
Winning formula tells you when the game is in the bag IT’S quite the dilemma. Your team is winning with 10 minutes left in the game. You’re glued to the TV, but really should get back to work. Do you switch off, confident that the game is secure, or stay tuned just in case it isn’t? Now there’s a way to decide. Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues analysed more than a million encounters in basketball, hockey and American football. They found that much of the dynamics of these competitive team sports can be accurately captured by a simple model in which the score difference randomly moves up or down over time.
“It’s kind of remarkable,” said Clauset. “The emergent behaviour of these highly trained athletes in a wellregulated environment is basically equivalent to a random number generator.” The researchers used their model to work out the probability that a lead would be “safe” at any given time. For an NBA basketball game lasting 48 minutes, they calculated that a team with a lead of 18 points halfway through the match will win 90 per cent of the time. At other times, you can work out the lead that a team needs to be 90 per cent safe in a basketball game by multiplying the square root of the remaining seconds by 0.4602. This is stunningly accurate, says Clauset, considering the model knows almost nothing about the rules of the game (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/5zf).
Mystery plasma blobs lurk in deep space WE’RE honing in on the blobs from outer space. In the past three decades astronomers have seen dips in the radio signals from quasars and pulsars, seemingly caused by a dark object passing by. These events don’t all look the same, so it isn’t clear if they share a cause. Sometimes different radio frequencies are delayed by different amounts, while other times the radio signal twinkles. 16 | NewScientist | 11 July 2015
Now Bill Coles of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have seen both timedelays and twinkles from pulsars at the same time. That suggests the two phenomena may be coming from the same thing – violently turbulent clouds. “This is an interstellar cloud way out in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “It makes a person wonder – what the hell is that out there?”
The blobs would fill the distance between the Earth’s orbit and the sun, which sounds big but is small in interstellar terms. To affect radio signals as much as they do, the blobs must be filled with plasma that is at least a hundred times denser than normal interstellar space. Coles thinks they might form at pressure points when two regions of the thin dust and gas between stars brush up against each other (arxiv.org/abs/1506.07948).
SOME ants are workers in name only. We think of social insects as hard workers, but many have individuals that laze about. “It’s just the sort of a thing that anyone who’s ever worked on social insects has noticed: ‘Oh look, half of them are standing around doing nothing’,” says Daniel Charbonneau at the University of Arizona. But no one knew if the ants were consistently inactive or merely taking a break. His team studied 250 workers from five colonies of Temnothorax rugatulus and found almost half did no job (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, doi.org/5x9). Are they just freeloaders? Charbonneau hopes to find out. They could be backup workers or militia, live feed stations or information hubs, or perhaps simply the very young or old. “These hypotheses aren’t exclusive, so many things could be happening [at once],” he says.
Tetris blocks trauma flashbacks IT’S not just for fun. Tetris can help block flashbacks of traumatic events, even after the memory has fixed itself in your mind. A team based at the University of Oxford asked volunteers to watch distressing video footage. A day later, they showed the volunteers stills from the video to reactivate the memory. Half of the participants then played the video game Tetris. Over the following week, this group experienced half as many intrusive memories of the video as the group that hadn’t played Tetris. Together, the stills and game appear to reduce the impact of traumatic images, even after memories have been fixed by a night’s sleep (Psychological Science, doi.org/5zc).
in Brief Lazy ants are career nonworkers
Winning formula tells you when the game is in the bag IT’S quite the dilemma. Your team is winning with 10 minutes left in the game. You’re glued to the TV, but really should get back to work. Do you switch off, confident that the game is secure, or stay tuned just in case it isn’t? Now there’s a way to decide. Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his colleagues analysed more than a million encounters in basketball, hockey and American football. They found that much of the dynamics of these competitive team sports can be accurately captured by a simple model in which the score difference randomly moves up or down over time.
“It’s kind of remarkable,” said Clauset. “The emergent behaviour of these highly trained athletes in a wellregulated environment is basically equivalent to a random number generator.” The researchers used their model to work out the probability that a lead would be “safe” at any given time. For an NBA basketball game lasting 48 minutes, they calculated that a team with a lead of 18 points halfway through the match will win 90 per cent of the time. At other times, you can work out the lead that a team needs to be 90 per cent safe in a basketball game by multiplying the square root of the remaining seconds by 0.4602. This is stunningly accurate, says Clauset, considering the model knows almost nothing about the rules of the game (Physical Review Letters, doi.org/5zf).
Mystery plasma blobs lurk in deep space WE’RE honing in on the blobs from outer space. In the past three decades astronomers have seen dips in the radio signals from quasars and pulsars, seemingly caused by a dark object passing by. These events don’t all look the same, so it isn’t clear if they share a cause. Sometimes different radio frequencies are delayed by different amounts, while other times the radio signal twinkles. 16 | NewScientist | 11 July 2015
Now Bill Coles of the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have seen both timedelays and twinkles from pulsars at the same time. That suggests the two phenomena may be coming from the same thing – violently turbulent clouds. “This is an interstellar cloud way out in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “It makes a person wonder – what the hell is that out there?”
The blobs would fill the distance between the Earth’s orbit and the sun, which sounds big but is small in interstellar terms. To affect radio signals as much as they do, the blobs must be filled with plasma that is at least a hundred times denser than normal interstellar space. Coles thinks they might form at pressure points when two regions of the thin dust and gas between stars brush up against each other (arxiv.org/abs/1506.07948).
SOME ants are workers in name only. We think of social insects as hard workers, but many have individuals that laze about. “It’s just the sort of a thing that anyone who’s ever worked on social insects has noticed: ‘Oh look, half of them are standing around doing nothing’,” says Daniel Charbonneau at the University of Arizona. But no one knew if the ants were consistently inactive or merely taking a break. His team studied 250 workers from five colonies of Temnothorax rugatulus and found almost half did no job (Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, doi.org/5x9). Are they just freeloaders? Charbonneau hopes to find out. They could be backup workers or militia, live feed stations or information hubs, or perhaps simply the very young or old. “These hypotheses aren’t exclusive, so many things could be happening [at once],” he says.
Tetris blocks trauma flashbacks IT’S not just for fun. Tetris can help block flashbacks of traumatic events, even after the memory has fixed itself in your mind. A team based at the University of Oxford asked volunteers to watch distressing video footage. A day later, they showed the volunteers stills from the video to reactivate the memory. Half of the participants then played the video game Tetris. Over the following week, this group experienced half as many intrusive memories of the video as the group that hadn’t played Tetris. Together, the stills and game appear to reduce the impact of traumatic images, even after memories have been fixed by a night’s sleep (Psychological Science, doi.org/5zc).