Earth Day: Pogo and our responsibility

Explore how Walt Kelly's beloved character Pogo highlights environmental responsibility and pollution awareness in the spirit of Earth Day

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Leonardo, a comics genius

Léonard by Turk & De Groot is a particularly long-lived humorous series: after having made its debut in 1975 on the pages of Achille Talon magazine, it was subsequently serialized starting from March 1977 in a series of volumes, now in its 51st edition. June 2020. Now the first two volumes are also available in english thanks to the digital edition of Europe Comics (volume 1 and volume 2).
Originally Bob De Groot, the screenwriter, had imagined an inventor named Methuselah as the long-lived biblical character, but later opted to focus on Leonardo da Vinci. On the other hand, this initial idea leaves traces in the drawings of Philippe Liégeois, known as Turk: Leonardo, in fact, is outlined with a white bum constantly in motion.
The two authors focus above all on Leonardo the inventor, a choice that allows them to show the scientist's variety of interests and his brilliant and multifaceted mind. With an irreverent spirit, the two belgian cartoonists create a series of gags, some of a purely visual page, others developed over a dozen pages, in which one laughs not only with, but also about Leonardo.
A heartfelt tribute to one of the greatest geniuses in the history of Italy and the world.

Travelling on Sputnik 2

The Mysterious Traveler was a multimedia project as it could only be before the advent of the world wide web: it was a radio program, which started on the 5th december, 1943 and went on, with mixed fortunes, until the 16th september, 1952; an anthological magazine (on which Ray Bradbury among others wrote short stories), published between 1951 and 1952; and a comic book, also anthological, of which 13 issues were released every two months between august 1956 and june 1959 (not counting the two volumes of 1985). Published by Charlton, it had Steve Ditko as its leading artist (he was not the only one, anyway) and, like the other two products that preceded it, contained fantasy and science fiction stories with a hint of crime.
The protagonist of Tales of the Mysterious Traveler (this is the name of the comic book) is a... mysterious traveler in a raincoat and with a wide-brimmed hat pulled over his eyes. The mysterious traveler moved from the most disparate corners of the universe and there was no barrier capable stopping him, neither the boiling heart of a planet, nor the cold and dark desolation of outer space.
On #12, the mysterious traveler is sent (perhaps) by Joe Gill and Bill Molno aboard Sputnik 2. This was the second object launched by the Soviets into space, and the first to bring a living being on board, the dog Laika.

Beneficio

Evaluating Beneficio is by no means trivial. The narrative is all concentrated around a woman in search of herself, remembering her missing grandmother.
There is not only this, however. The protagonist's journey takes her to Beneficio, a valley near the Spanish village of Orgiva where there is a community that lives in contact with nature in self-built tents, tepees and shelters.
In this environment the woman begins to reflect on her life and then passes, without any solution of continuity, to the universe and the divine, mixing fantastic, almost religious ideas, with the great scientific questions still unanswered. All within a valley surrounded by large mountains, wild and peaceful.
The narrative itself fits the theme: the story is diluted and rarefied, the pages with the minimum number of vignettes (rarely more than three or four), while the drawings now look like travel sketches, at other times particularly detailed.
Overall, both from a narrative and an aesthetic point of view, Beneficio by Michał Kalicki and Krzysztof Gawronkiewicz is almost a land version of Daisuke Igarashi's Children of the sea.

The flying Batman

Comics' authors, and more generally those who write about fiction (but not only them), are the modern Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights. This comparison is very fitting for Detective Comics #1027 which celebrates at the same time #27, where Bob Kane and Bill Finger's Batman made his debut, and the 1001th issue of the magazine dedicated to the Caped Crusader, so you understand the initial comparison.
I'm not here, though, to write you why Detective Comics's 1001 releases with Batman (if you want to, follow note⁽¹⁾), but to seize the opportunity and talk about Batman's physics.

Robot stories

The comic transposition of Isaac Asimov's I, robot created by Raul Cuadrado is reminiscent of the first flash animations of a decade ago, a bit like the style of Carlos Meglia, famous in particular for Cybersix. Made on a horizontal rather than vertical page structure reminiscent of newspaper strip stories, the comic book I, robot is a quick and intelligent reading, with a slightly retro style thanks to the duotone, true to Asimov's spirit.

Human: the man of the future

500,000 years and more in the future. Disused satellites and space debris orbit around the Earth. Among these there is a structure that resembles a space station. Suddenly a module detaches and crashes onto the planet. After the explosion, we follow an animal that, from the top of a cliff, spreads its wings and flies to the impact site. From the relatively distant readers' point of view, the flying shadow could be a pterodactyl and the Earth we see, in reality, that of prehistory: even the vegetation and the gigantism of the environment would seem to suggest it. Instead, when we get closer to the impact site, the figure becomes more defined: it is a kind of monkey with wings.
The guides in the exploration of this regressed world of the future are Diego Agrimbau and Lucas Varela and they use a robot, Alpha, as their guide. His job is to assist the terrestrial scientist Robert who, together with his wife June, devised a complex plan to repopulate the Earth with homo sapiens. Robert, in fact, predicting the fate of extinction of human beings, has decided to freeze himself and his wife while waiting for the planet to recover from the ecological disasters left on its surface by the passage of the human race.

A journey to Proxima Centauri

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Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf located approximately 4.2 light years from us, in the area of ​​sky covered by the Centaur constellation. Thanks to ESO's telescopes, in particular to the HARPS spectrograph, and using the Doppler (or radial velocity) method, in 2016 it was anounced the discovery of a planet around this star, Proxima Centauri b.
Given the proximity, one might think that the world of comics has devoted much attention in recent years to the star and its planet. In fact, to have a comic set around this star, you have to wait until the second half of 2018 when Image Comics publishes the six-issue miniseries Proxima Centauri by Farel Dalrymple.
The work, subsequently collected in volume in January 2019, is halfway between science fiction and fantasy. The main character is Sherwood Breadcoat, a teenage magician trapped on an artificial spheroid called Proxima Centauri, evidently put in orbit around the homonymous star. Of course, this information is not very clear, but overall the whole Dalrymple comic is rather lack of information, closed in a hermetic narration with an open ending that allows the author keep some subplots open, like the relationship between Sherwood and the scientist, that sometimes seems help the teen, other times usi it for his purposes; or as one of Sherwood's opponents, which is actually a sort of virtual, but also physical manifestation of a character hidden somewhere on the spheroid and who seems to be a videogame player, given that he explicitly states that he wants to repeat the vlash with Sherwood, although it ended badly more than once.
In all this, although science would seem to play a fundamental role, at least according to some lines of Breadcoat, a character who believes only in science and magic (?), it is a simple narrative accessory, a way to not deepen the technology used or to hide all the magical aspects of the story, only apparently sci-fi.
In any case, Dalrymple's comic is good to remember that, quite recently, a team of Italian astronomers, studying the data coming from Proxima Centauri with more accuracy, has supposed the existence of a second planet around the star, roughly six times more massive than Earth. We will see if it will be confirmed or not.

Feynman in comics

with @estuan about #Feynman #Ottaviani #Myrick #comics #physics

Italian version written with Maria-Angela Silleni.

Feynman by Ottaviani and Myrick, reported by Maria Popova as one of the top 11 scientific popular books of 2012, is a splendid example of how to make interesting science. Even with the comics.

Telling a man’s life is always an arduous and difficult task. So it is necessary to make choices, often focusing on successes and leaving aside failures, especially if you talk about a physicist who has been interested in the most disparate fields within his specialization.
This is the some idea that Lawrence Krauss has dealt with the life of Richard Feynman in Quantum Man and the same spirit seems to animate Feynman, the graphic novel by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick.

Introducing Feynman?

After the series of Introducing, a hybrid of illustrated and comic books about science, one of the most effective comics dedicated to science, brings the signature of Ottaviani, which, on the pages of Suspended In Language, with the contribution of the comic artist Leland Purvis, told the life of Niels Bohr, the master of the Copenhagen School, whose interpretation of quantum mechanics dominated during the first steps of this new approach of physics to nature.
Ottaviani knows very well the risks in comic book science genre: in particular, falling into teaching and slamming the reader into boredom is always around the corner; so thanks to an episode narrative (which is also a limit, as we shall see below), accompanied by synthetic drawings, the volume reaches the disclosure purpose without betraying the aspect of entertainment.
A great role in the success of the graphic novel is dued by the subject: Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, was an eccentric character with a strong sense of humor and impatient with social conventions. Thanks to these features he often found himself in embarrassing situations with unexpected consequences. A passionate bongo player and amateur sketcher of naked women, picked up his two-volume adventures, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, which wrote to seem not overly serious: and most of the episodes narrated in the comic are getting from his autobiographical stories.

Annihilator: Hollywood, the galaxy and everything

by @ulaulaman a review of #Annihilator, a #cosmic #comics by Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving

Rabbits are animals extremely prolific, almost legendary in their rate of reproduction, so that Leonardo Fibonacci, thanks to these cute rodents, discovered (or re-discovered) the series that bears his name: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 and so on, and where each number is the sum of the previous two.
However, it is astonishing to note how pervasive within nature this series of numbers is: we can find it, for example, in the arrangement of seeds of sunflowers⁽¹⁾, in the structure of shells of turtles, in the spirals of seashells. Or, again, in the spiral galaxies⁽²⁾.

M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) - source: reddit, NASA

Journey through the universe

The galactic matter, in fact, revolves around the center of every galaxy often making spiraling structures, arms of solid and gaseous matter that we can describe with the Fibonacci series as they fall toward the center, slowly swallowed up by an object apparently absurd but absolutely real: the supermassive black hole. So, within each spiral galaxy there is a black hole^{(3, 4)}, which at the same time is the reason for the existence⁽⁵⁾ and the ultimate fate of galaxies like our Milky Way, the center of which lies Sagittarius A*⁽⁶⁾.
Almost nothing escapes from the event horizon of this cosmic monster: let you imagine the matter while, piece by piece, falls within it, decomposed into its fundamental constituents, and the only trace of this meal is a simple, small radiation X⁽⁷⁾, a slight heat that escapes, evidence of a millennial digestion. It is in this border area that is brought Max Nomax, adventurer and genius, looking for "a cure for death", a way to be reunited with his beloved in life, the protagonist of a classic cosmic science fiction story written by the equally genial Ray Spass, Hollywood screenwriter in creative crisis and tormented by his manager, who presses him to get the script for a new film series, Annihilator.
With this latest work Grant Morrison, mixing the classic kirbyan superhero inspiration with real insights arrived from his Hollywood's patronage, builds a story that is a bit of an existential drama, a bit of a parody of the world of cinema, a bit of a great science fiction story. The comparison between creature and creator, here achieved simply with the description of their respective alternate adventures, brings near the two main characters, both anti-heroes, and from another point of view move them away for motivation and potential, creative or destructive according to their motivation.

Experiments with inertia

a coulpe of home experiments about #inertia

from Science Comics #2

The Universe in a glass of wine

by @ulaulaman about #RichardFeynman #physics #universe #wine

Once upon a time, Richard Feynman telled a story about the universe and a glass of wine:

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he said that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look in glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe.
There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it!
If in our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let us give one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

You can find the text and the audio on the site of Efthymios Kallos, but... The Universe in a glass of wine is also an artist exposition: see, for example, the Life cycle of a star by Natalie Kay Thatcher. And it is interesting that Natalie realized two comics about Feynman: How to start a Feynman (preview), and the Feynman zine (review by Pete Willis) about the universe and the glass of wine:

Turmoil in the heavens

This one-page comic story published on Race to the Moon #2, that is now in public domain, is referred to an old theory proposed by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers, a german astronomer:

His bold hypothesis of their origin by the disruption of a primitive large planet, although now discarded, received countenance from the finding of Juno by Harding, and of Vesta by himself, in the precise regions of Cetus and Virgo where the nodes of such supposed planetary fragments should be situated.

The hypothetical planet, instead of Polis like suggested in the comic, was named Phaeton by Yevgeny Leonidovich Krinov. Olbers' model is today substituted by the accretion model.

The electric science of Captain Swing

posted by @ulaulaman about @warrenellis comics #electromagnetism #Faraday #diamagnetism

Later that year [1830], there was a spate of riots by farm workers in the south of England who were reduced to starvation by the introduction of machinery that could do their jobs cheply and tirelessly. They destroyed threshers, burned workhouses and sent manifestos of fiery intent to the landlords and magistrates.
These letters were signed: "Captain Swing".

In this way Warren Ellis tells us the main inspiration for his story, Captain Swing and the Electrical Pirates of Cindery Island, drawned by Raulo Caceres: the protests by farmers against the introduction of machinery in country work. But Ellis' graphic novel is not an historical novel, but, first of all, a teslatopia (or a teslapunk novel) or an electrical romance of a pirate utopia thwarted, following Ellis' definition. If you want, from a more simple point of view, the Electric Pirates is a steampunk novel, but it is also a scientific comics. The fil rouge of the novel is, indeed, the electromagnetism research, and the diary of Captain Swing is a source of precious information that the reader could study in deep as soon as the closing of the book.
For example the reader could say himself if a ship could fly thanks to the electromagnetic force, or if the instruments illustrated in the pages of Captain's diary are true or not (in this last case the main source is probably Joseph Priestley's books, see for example The History and Present State of Electricity). Or we could ask if Ellis/Swing is lieing when he writes, for example, the following passage:

Ionic air propulsion⁽¹⁾. Electrostatic levitation⁽²⁾. Electrogravitics. The Biefeld-Brown Effect and the electro-fluid-dynamics⁽³⁾. Nothing here is invented. It simply appears to be uchronic, counterfactual, sitting in the break of a time out of joint.

In fact, many of the questions mentioned by Ellis are really studied by physics and electromagnetism.

Electromagnetism is the branch of physics that deals with the study of electric and magnetic fields. As demonstrated by James Clerck Maxwell, the two fields, electric and magnetic, are very closely related to each other and only in a static situation can, with good approximation, be considered separately.
In fact, however, the two concepts of electricity and magnetism were initially separated, and in particular the first observations about electricity date back to the Ancient Greece:

Thales first transcribed the induction of static electricity in 600 BC.

Only about one thousand of years we have a significative progress in the field:

Otto von Guericke built friction-machines for the accumulation of static electrical charge around 1650 AD.

Guericke, a prussian phisicist, is known primarily for his experiments on the air, which actually dates back to 1650 (according to the Britannica). In particular, he realized a famous experiment with a hollow sphere inside which was a vacuum: the horses tied to the two spherical caps that made the ball could not to separate them, thus demonstrating the tremendous pressure exerted by the air on the objects.
The invention cited by Warren Ellis come from 1663, which is the first electric generator in history.
The real high jump, however, comes with 1800s:

Upon thye founding date of the Metropolitan Police, Francesco Zantedeschi discovered electromagnetic induction (although, in this slow world, Michael Faraday would have been unaware of this when he published his more famous discovery of same, a year from now).

A simple experiment of electric induction (in this case electrostatic) is rub a pen on a knitted wool and then see his effects on some pieces of paper. Or you can try to do the same thing with a ball and a rod, using different materials to determine which of these is able to attract the ball after a suitable scrubbing:

Science education and comics

posted by @ulaulaman about #science #physics #comics #UncleScrooge

In 2002 F. Javier Perales-Palacios and José M. Vílchez-González studied the impact of comics and cartoons in the study of physics. They arrived at the following conclusions:

1. Teaching physics by showing cartoons constituted a clear incentive in the students' attitude towards the subject.⁽¹⁾
2. Students' misconceptions to a certain degree parallel the incorrect physics in the cartoons. It is quite possible that the cartoons have reinforced these misconceptions from an early age.⁽¹⁾
3. Use of TV in the classroom to present real images (for instance, the behaviour of bodies orbiting the Earth, the movement of passengers in a bus, and so on) and contrast the real and the fictitious planes facilitates conceptual change.⁽¹⁾
4. This type of strategy can bring physics teaching closer to the communications media that most interest the students, and therefore reduce the barrier between School Science and everyday knowledge.⁽¹⁾
5. The image of science and scientists presented in the cartoons was typical and students who participated in the experiment also held this stereotyped image.⁽¹⁾
6. There was a great diversity in the results between individuals and between groups. (...) The student group clearly surpassed the teachers in the number of phenomena identified.⁽¹⁾

In particular the points 2. (the incorrect physics in cartoon) and 5. (the stereotypes about science and scientists) are deepen in a recent paper by the same two authors:

We have been able to ascertain that cartoons do distort the image of science and its environment. Very often it is presented as something distant and far-removed from everyday life, thus hiding its basic objectives (explaining the world that surrounds us) under meaningless headings that make use of 'strange' (often mistaken) terms or huge and meaningless mathematical expressions. This occurs even for those familiar with the subject matter (thereby strengthening the elitist image of science), and sometimes even directly presenting some of the preconceived ideas that the bibliography acknowledges as being characteristic of adolescents. Comics also offer a distorted image of these questions, similar to the one that is presented in cartoons 'if they were silent'.⁽²⁾

The two researchers are warry about the influence of these two media, but I think that they forgot (read, for example, the point 1. of the 2002's paper) the theacher's key role in the education. Comics, indeed, are a great opportunity to introduce in a very simple way physics in classroom:

(...) educators should not underestimate the importance of learners’ interests. These interests can work for us in two ways. They can provide hooks, and they offer context. To most physics teachers, physics is clearly a subject that explores the most fundamental aspects of nature, which encompasses the smallest and largest scales we can envisage, and which deals with the most fascinating questions and phenomena. Some of our students feel the same, and come to classes with an enthusiasm to learn more. Unfortunately, however, many students do not initially share our enthusiasms.
It is so much easier to learn when we are interested in the subject matter. Learning is most effective when we are motivated to learn, and engaged by the learning process.⁽³⁾

Bucky passes through Flatland

Copyright: Rob Nance | Source: Popinga

Don Rosa's scientific wisdom

written by Piero Patteri and @ulaulaman about #DonRosa #physics #science #disney #comics

I finally met again Piero Patteri at Comunicare Fisica, a workshop about the comunication of physics, and Piero gave to me a book that the italian Disney's fun site Papersera.net realized for Don Rosa in 2011. Because I will be to Lucca Comics in order to speak about comics and science, I decided to publish here the english version of the article that I written with Piero for the book "Don Rosa: A little something special".

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The physical law of the real world are enforced in a very loose way in the comic book world. Bouncing, smashing, hitting in harmless crashes are common events in the strips, at least since the brick thrown by Ignatz against Crazy Cat, actually continuing the paroxysm of comic actions in the mute movie era. Therefore is really surprising, and amazing from a physicist point of view, to find a comics artist showing a constant effort of supporting the humoristic side embedding his plots in a rather coherent physical frame.
Here we account for our feelings when exploring the features of the Rosa's physics both in the voyager in the micro world, in The Incredible Shrinking Tightwad, both in the outer space in Solar System in Attack Of The Hideous Space Monsters, each of them a must subject in the work of sci-fi writer. After reviewing the most amusing gag offered by teletransport in On a Silver Platter we eventually land in the realm of the Extraordinary Physics acting in On stolen time, and A Matter Of Some Gravity

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In the micro world
The reducing machine appearing in The Incredible Shrinking Tightwad is an explicit citation of the Carl Barks' machine in Billions in the Hole, but the device found by ducks in the garret of Uncle Scrooge is defective, and once the squeezing has been started, the process proceeds indefinetely. So, beside the discovery of new dangerous features in an increasingly small world, the out-of-control evolution in the Rosa's tale enhance the thrilling plate after plate. In Barks' tale the size reduction causes a sudden flipping of hunter/prey role between ducks and ants, and just the timely rescue by Gyro Gearloose save their lives. Here Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck fight at every stage, jumping on the coins in the bin like on pebbles in a stream, until these become the slippery walls of huge crack, or chasing away a ugly louse in the hair which soon becomes a monster; in the end in the dirty pocket of a Beagle Boy, the germs resembling mithological monsters Medusa or One-hundred-eyed Argo are on the point of overcoming them and only a deus-ex-machina intervention seems to be able to rescue them.

On the other hand, by the exploration of the new environment looking for an escape they discover realistic details, such as the grease on a hair, or the wood yarn embedded on the surface of a sticky plum; one could say they had nothing to the plot, but just their 'useless' presence conveys the feeling that ducks are really falling in an extraordinary, but extremely realistic world. So the way out jumping on the spikes of shaven beard is not a sudden trickery but the logical opportunity built all along the tale.
The hastening of events sometime reminds Hitchcock's hunting/escaping sequences, such as in North by Northwest or Vertigo, and like in the movies by the Master of suspence, the choching solution bursts into the stage, with Uncle Scrooge becoming again full size in the hand of a Beagle Boy

In the outer space
Again the foolish switch-on of a misterious device affects the physical property of the Uncle Scrooge bin. This time it looses its wheight, and the ducks must pursue it in the space, hoping to success in reversing the operation of the device.
The comment in the italian edition on Zio Paperone #132 emphasizes the tribute to classic sci-fi movies. Although this is true as far as the dive in a space-time tunnel is concerning, quoting the Star Trek and Star War sagas, we think that most of details in the tale are an humorous tribute to Paperino e il razzo interplanetario. The space-ship travel among the asteroid belt and the encounter with a family of precious mineral digger match the corresponding sequences by Luciano Bottaro.

The parodistic side of the tribute is not only in the personality and aspect of the aliens, but also in minor characters, as the chichen, mistaken for the chief of ducks, owing to a red crest which recall the Rebo crest. The interrogation of the chicken in the last cartoon is quoting the same probing of Donal Duck by Juppiter officers.

While these points are in the realm of the 'classical sci-fi physics', Rosa adds an additional concept to his Extraordinary Physics, to be discussed later in deeper insight, to explain the operation of the antigravity device: it cancels the inertia, so that the sudden hit on the Moon does not destroy the asteroid and the bin on it. Besides recalling these amazing points, we cannot forget that in Don Rosa's drawings there is a astonishing anticipation of the dynamics of the dramatic events of 9/11.

This is water

posted by @ulaulaman thanks to @archivioDFW

This comics watercolor is drawned by Davide Osenda, a computer engineer and cartoonists. His first comics is about mathematics, the italian graphic novel L'ultima lezione a Gottinga (The last lesson in Gottinga), about Cantor and the mathematics of transfinite numbers. Now it seems that he's working to a comics inspired by This is water, a speech by David Foster Wallace. So I propose you the audio of that speech:

The science behind tears

posted by @ulaulaman about #chemistry #comics #tears

From the collaboration between the National Cartoonists' Society and the Center for Cartoon Studies, it is born the first issue of the first volume of the on-line magazine The Cartoon Crier. The tabloid is a collection of the saddest strips and cartoons from a lot of great cartoonists. In particular there is also a science comics, Lacrimal studies 101 by Jon Chad, from the Fizzmont institute of rad science⁽¹⁾.

The structure of the comic is like the series of stories named A Goofy Look At... and Goofy as a famous hystoric persons drawned in particular by Hector Adolfo de Urtiága, one of the cartoonists of the Jaime Diaz's studios.
But stop to write about comics and start with science, in particular about the three type of tears that our eyes can produce: basal, reflex and emotional.

Basal tears are produced by our eyes constantly to keep them moist. These tears contain glucose, mucin, lysozyme, lactoferrin, lipocaln, potassium and sodium

Reflex tears are produced when an irritant either physical (a poke in the eye) or chemical (onion fumes) agitates an eye!!

About the emotional tears⁽²⁾ I find, instead, an interesting paper published last year on Science⁽³⁾. First of all there is the composition:

Tears are drops of liquid produced by the lacrimal, accessory lacrimal, and Meibomian glands, which contain proteins, enzymes, lipids, metabolites, electrolytes, and traces of drugs. In mice, tears contain a chemosignal or pheromone. Because the chemical makeup of human emotional tears differs from that of reflexive eye-protective tears, we hypothesized that human tears may similarly convey a chemosignal.

The research team, in order to test their hypothesis, choses a group of women between 30 and 31 years and has occurred the effect of their tears on various groups of men. For various types of emotions and tears were used different groups of donors (each group had an average age 30 years old) and after the samples are submitted to the attention of different groups of men (mean ages of groups were between 28 and 29 years old). First of all, we must note that the first test has been necessary to understand if the tears had some odor able to distinguish them than, for example, a saline solution. After determining that the tears do not have characteristic odors, they went ahead quietly with the actual experiment that aimed to test one of the two hypotheses under consideration, i.e. either that tears contain chemical signals related to the context of sadness in which they were produced, or that human tears, such as those of the mice, are capable of signaling information related to the behavior sociosexual.
We can summarize the results with the following paragraph from the abstract:

We found that merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women's faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women's tears selectively reduced activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men.

The results, of course, carry with them a series of questions, such as which are the substances inside the tears responsible for this type of response, or if such signals is restricted to emotional tears, or if we can still find the same effect even in the tears of men than women.
It's also interesting to note what is not said in the paper, namely that this kind of research can provide the best information to more effectively convey a certain kind of commercial messages. Discover something about ourselves, like in this case, presents a downside: it can trivially be used against us. However I think that the beauty of the world around us is equal to similar risks, especially if certain findings are not closed to the rooms of the researchers and donors.

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(1) A fake institute where we talk about REAL science!
(2) About emotional tears, I translate you a breaf quote from an italian pdf about tears:

This last type of tears [the emotional tears] contains very high percentages of manganese and some hormones including prolactin

(3) Gelstein, S., Yeshurun, Y., Rozenkrantz, L., Shushan, S., Frumin, I., Roth, Y., & Sobel, N. (2011). Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal Science, 331 (6014), 226-230 DOI: 10.1126/science.1198331 (4) Other links about research: Christine Dell'Amore for National Geographic and Janelle Weaver for Scientific American

Laika: a comics about a hero

Laika was the first living being to go in space. Its adventure was written by Rick Abadzis in a beautiful graphic novel, that I read two years ago.
The story began with Sputnik 1, the first russian space mission launched in space on October 4, 1957, in order to send a signal to Earth. The next mission, Sputnik 2, launched on November 3, 1957 with the first living thing on board, a dog, Laika. This second mission, however, arose under pressure from the government, which would celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the October revolution with a new, great success of the spatial plan of the Soviet Union. So the mission was prepared in haste, designing a less sophisticated satellite than Sputnik 1 that was not expected it would be back on the planet: a death sentence beyond a reasonable doubt for his passenger. Laika's death, however, was very early: the mission was designed to last a week or less, but the dog died long before, in 5-7 hours:

The fact, that pressure in the cabin was not reduced, proved its reliable tightness. It was very important, as the satellite passed through areas of meteoric flows. Normalization of parameters of breath and blood circulation of Layka during orbital flight has allowed to make a conclusion, that the long weightlessness does not cause essential changes in a status of animal organisms. During flight the gradual increase of temperature and humidity in the cabin was registered via telemetric channels. Approximately in 5 - 7 hours of flight there was a failure of telemetry system. It was not possible to detect a status of the dog since the fourth circuit. During the ground simulation of this flight's conditions, the conclusion was made, that Layka should be lost because of overheating on 3d or 4-th circuit of flight.⁽¹⁾

So, the hypothesis of silence imposed from above on the health conditions of Laika, or more than anything else on the impossibility to monitor them, told by Abadzis are not so far-fetched: we must consider, in fact, that the animal (in the government vision) would had to stay alive in time to celebrate the forty years of the October Revolution!
And the British cartoonist tells not only the historical background of Laika's story, but also the simple story of a dog that goes in space from the street and the story of the people who shared their life and love with the little dog.
A graphic novel, made with the classic bd style, that you can not miss in your collection.

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(1) Dmitrij Malashenkov, Some Unknown Pages of the Living Organisms' First Orbital Flight