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03/04/2009

Getting Together

In my previous column, trying to con myself into believing I understand them, I wrote about black holes and naked singularities. This week I was tempted to talk about an even weirder topic after reading an article by David Albert and Rivka Galchen in the March issue Scientific American. The article, "A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity", talked about "entanglement", the quantum effect that they say "violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world."

Entanglement embodies such outlandish things as the famed "Schrödinger’s cat", which we’ve discussed earlier. The cat is in a box under conditions such that we don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive unless we open the box. So, without opening the box, we can’t know what the state of the cat is. Hence, the cat is both dead and alive! The states of being dead and alive are "entangled". Similarly, we might have two particles, one of which spins one way and the other spins the opposite way; they’re entangled. As with the cat, we don’t know the states of either particle until we measure the spin of one of them.

The weird thing is that, if we measure one of them, we know the spin of the other one, even if it’s at the other side of the universe, wherever that is. Einstein wasn’t at all happy with this and called it "spooky". For one thing it would seem to violate his fundamental finding that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. If we measure a particle spin here on earth, how can the entangled particle zillions of miles away know immediately that it has to spin the opposite way? A naive person like myself might think, hey, that’s simple; the particle we measure had the spin we measured all along and, of course, the other particle has the opposite spin. No big deal. Wrong, apparently. However, I’m happy to conclude after reading the Scientific American article that very bright theoreticians are still concerned about this problem and don’t seem to have come to a conclusive answer.

Then I went back to my January 30 issue of Science and found an article titled "Sudden Death of Entanglement" by Ting Yu and J. H. Eberly of Columbia University. I couldn’t understand the article but the main point for me was that particles can become disentangled. I was on board when they started talking about cats sleeping or not sleeping but then they brought in matrices and something called concurrence. At that point I decided to write about something my feeble brain could comprehend, another brief item about death in the same issue of Science. The item is headlined "Fatal Attraction" and the victims of this attraction are cicadas.

In a case of "aggressive mimicry" in Australia, the aggressor is the Spotted Predatory Katydid, which likes to chow down on amorous male cicadas. In work by David Marshall and Kathy Hill of the University of Connecticut published in the online Public Library of Science [PLoS ONE 4, e4185 (2009)], the Australian katydid was found to trick male cicadas bent on dallying with willing female cicadas.

The katydid is a grasshopperish looking critter that, judging from the photos in the PLoS ONE article, is substantially larger than the cicada, which seems to me considerably less foreboding than our New Jersey 17-year "locusts", which are actually cicadas. What the katydid does is to listen carefully to the response of the female cicada to the "singing" of the male cicada. (I don’t know if the Australian cicadas "sing" anything like our 17-year variety but the sound can be quite loud, and irritating, if enough get together.) The female cicada responds with a "wing-flick", which generates a sound that can be heard at a substantial distance. In order to attract the male, the female cicada has to time her wing-flicks to fit in very closely with the gaps in the male’s song. If the female doesn’t time it just right, the male will be wary and will not approach the female.

Marshall and Hill were studying the courtship process in the cicadas, of which there are many species in Australia, when they first noticed that two female cicadas were responding to one male’s song. However, closer inspection showed that one of the females was actually a male katydid, mimicking the female cicada’s response quite closely. The researchers collected a bunch of cicadas and katydids and found that the katydids could mimic quite closely the responses of female cicadas of various species, even species which were not ones that the katydids normally encounter in the wild.

Except for one lone species, the male cicadas were typically attracted to the male katydid’s mimicking of the female cicada’s response. The male cicada would either fly or walk towards the wing-flicking katydid. When it got close enough, the katydid would grab the poor cicada, bite off its head and eat everything but its wings. If you go online to read the PLoS ONE paper, there are photos and videos of the katydids capturing and eating the cicadas.

Not only do the katydids mimic the audio response of the female cicada, they also give their body a little shake or jerk that resembles the female cicada’s own body movement during the wing-flick. This just adds to the deception for those male cicadas relying more on visual cues to guide them to the ladies.

I mentioned that our 17-year "locusts" are really cicadas. The same issue of Science also contains a paper that looks into the behavior of real locusts, the desert locust, which is essentially a grasshopper. You may have seen media reports on this paper, which deals with the explanation of the origin of those swarms of locusts that can devastate fields of crops, with dire consequences for those dependent on the crops for nourishment and/or income. The article, by Michael Ansley and co-workers, takes a look at the greenish "solitarious" locust, a loner that avoids contact with other locusts, and its transformation into a yellowish "gregarious" locust that gives up its antisocial life to join with throngs of other locusts to swarm.

Normally, the locust population in a desert area is low, maybe a handful or less locusts spread over a thousand square feet. These green locusts avoid each other and fly all by themselves at night. However, once in a while the climate conditions become such that lots of locusts are born and flourish. In contrast to their former lonely existence, they find themselves crowded together and that’s when the transformation occurs. They turn color from green to yellow and become quite sociable. Carry this to the extreme and off they fly, the swarm darkening the sky, and eating everything edible in their path.

What causes the gregarious behavior? Ansley et al have found the answer - serotonin. Serotonin is very important in us humans, where it serves as a neurotransmitter and, if we have either too much or too little, it’s serious. Too little and we get depressed, maybe even suicidal. Too much and we have Serotonin Syndrome and we can die! In desert locusts, the researchers have found a direct correlation between the serotonin level in the locusts and the degree of "gregariousness". Furthermore they’ve found the conditions that generate the increase of serotonin in certain glands in the locust.

To increase the serotonin level, the researchers found they had choices. One way is simply to crowd the locusts in a confined space with other locusts. The researchers found they could also increase the serotonin level by stimulating the critter’s hind leg mechanically or by stimulating a hind leg nerve electrically. Simply exposing the locust to the sight and smell of other locusts also increases the serotonin level. If the scientists introduced substances known to inhibit serotonin formation, these various methods of promoting gregariousness did not work and the locusts remained on the solitary side.

Hopefully, knowing the role of serotonin in producing swarm behavior, there might be some progress made towards finding a way to thwart the formation of swarms and avoid the destruction of badly needed crops. However, that probably remains for the distant future.

It occurred to me that perhaps we could find a way to so thoroughly socialize these critters that they would entangle themselves together to form one big ball and not be able to get off the ground! That would be one form of entanglement I could understand!

Next column on or before March 19.

Allen F. Bortrum

 



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Dr. Bortrum

03/04/2009

Getting Together

In my previous column, trying to con myself into believing I understand them, I wrote about black holes and naked singularities. This week I was tempted to talk about an even weirder topic after reading an article by David Albert and Rivka Galchen in the March issue Scientific American. The article, "A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity", talked about "entanglement", the quantum effect that they say "violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world."

Entanglement embodies such outlandish things as the famed "Schrödinger’s cat", which we’ve discussed earlier. The cat is in a box under conditions such that we don’t know whether the cat is dead or alive unless we open the box. So, without opening the box, we can’t know what the state of the cat is. Hence, the cat is both dead and alive! The states of being dead and alive are "entangled". Similarly, we might have two particles, one of which spins one way and the other spins the opposite way; they’re entangled. As with the cat, we don’t know the states of either particle until we measure the spin of one of them.

The weird thing is that, if we measure one of them, we know the spin of the other one, even if it’s at the other side of the universe, wherever that is. Einstein wasn’t at all happy with this and called it "spooky". For one thing it would seem to violate his fundamental finding that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. If we measure a particle spin here on earth, how can the entangled particle zillions of miles away know immediately that it has to spin the opposite way? A naive person like myself might think, hey, that’s simple; the particle we measure had the spin we measured all along and, of course, the other particle has the opposite spin. No big deal. Wrong, apparently. However, I’m happy to conclude after reading the Scientific American article that very bright theoreticians are still concerned about this problem and don’t seem to have come to a conclusive answer.

Then I went back to my January 30 issue of Science and found an article titled "Sudden Death of Entanglement" by Ting Yu and J. H. Eberly of Columbia University. I couldn’t understand the article but the main point for me was that particles can become disentangled. I was on board when they started talking about cats sleeping or not sleeping but then they brought in matrices and something called concurrence. At that point I decided to write about something my feeble brain could comprehend, another brief item about death in the same issue of Science. The item is headlined "Fatal Attraction" and the victims of this attraction are cicadas.

In a case of "aggressive mimicry" in Australia, the aggressor is the Spotted Predatory Katydid, which likes to chow down on amorous male cicadas. In work by David Marshall and Kathy Hill of the University of Connecticut published in the online Public Library of Science [PLoS ONE 4, e4185 (2009)], the Australian katydid was found to trick male cicadas bent on dallying with willing female cicadas.

The katydid is a grasshopperish looking critter that, judging from the photos in the PLoS ONE article, is substantially larger than the cicada, which seems to me considerably less foreboding than our New Jersey 17-year "locusts", which are actually cicadas. What the katydid does is to listen carefully to the response of the female cicada to the "singing" of the male cicada. (I don’t know if the Australian cicadas "sing" anything like our 17-year variety but the sound can be quite loud, and irritating, if enough get together.) The female cicada responds with a "wing-flick", which generates a sound that can be heard at a substantial distance. In order to attract the male, the female cicada has to time her wing-flicks to fit in very closely with the gaps in the male’s song. If the female doesn’t time it just right, the male will be wary and will not approach the female.

Marshall and Hill were studying the courtship process in the cicadas, of which there are many species in Australia, when they first noticed that two female cicadas were responding to one male’s song. However, closer inspection showed that one of the females was actually a male katydid, mimicking the female cicada’s response quite closely. The researchers collected a bunch of cicadas and katydids and found that the katydids could mimic quite closely the responses of female cicadas of various species, even species which were not ones that the katydids normally encounter in the wild.

Except for one lone species, the male cicadas were typically attracted to the male katydid’s mimicking of the female cicada’s response. The male cicada would either fly or walk towards the wing-flicking katydid. When it got close enough, the katydid would grab the poor cicada, bite off its head and eat everything but its wings. If you go online to read the PLoS ONE paper, there are photos and videos of the katydids capturing and eating the cicadas.

Not only do the katydids mimic the audio response of the female cicada, they also give their body a little shake or jerk that resembles the female cicada’s own body movement during the wing-flick. This just adds to the deception for those male cicadas relying more on visual cues to guide them to the ladies.

I mentioned that our 17-year "locusts" are really cicadas. The same issue of Science also contains a paper that looks into the behavior of real locusts, the desert locust, which is essentially a grasshopper. You may have seen media reports on this paper, which deals with the explanation of the origin of those swarms of locusts that can devastate fields of crops, with dire consequences for those dependent on the crops for nourishment and/or income. The article, by Michael Ansley and co-workers, takes a look at the greenish "solitarious" locust, a loner that avoids contact with other locusts, and its transformation into a yellowish "gregarious" locust that gives up its antisocial life to join with throngs of other locusts to swarm.

Normally, the locust population in a desert area is low, maybe a handful or less locusts spread over a thousand square feet. These green locusts avoid each other and fly all by themselves at night. However, once in a while the climate conditions become such that lots of locusts are born and flourish. In contrast to their former lonely existence, they find themselves crowded together and that’s when the transformation occurs. They turn color from green to yellow and become quite sociable. Carry this to the extreme and off they fly, the swarm darkening the sky, and eating everything edible in their path.

What causes the gregarious behavior? Ansley et al have found the answer - serotonin. Serotonin is very important in us humans, where it serves as a neurotransmitter and, if we have either too much or too little, it’s serious. Too little and we get depressed, maybe even suicidal. Too much and we have Serotonin Syndrome and we can die! In desert locusts, the researchers have found a direct correlation between the serotonin level in the locusts and the degree of "gregariousness". Furthermore they’ve found the conditions that generate the increase of serotonin in certain glands in the locust.

To increase the serotonin level, the researchers found they had choices. One way is simply to crowd the locusts in a confined space with other locusts. The researchers found they could also increase the serotonin level by stimulating the critter’s hind leg mechanically or by stimulating a hind leg nerve electrically. Simply exposing the locust to the sight and smell of other locusts also increases the serotonin level. If the scientists introduced substances known to inhibit serotonin formation, these various methods of promoting gregariousness did not work and the locusts remained on the solitary side.

Hopefully, knowing the role of serotonin in producing swarm behavior, there might be some progress made towards finding a way to thwart the formation of swarms and avoid the destruction of badly needed crops. However, that probably remains for the distant future.

It occurred to me that perhaps we could find a way to so thoroughly socialize these critters that they would entangle themselves together to form one big ball and not be able to get off the ground! That would be one form of entanglement I could understand!

Next column on or before March 19.

Allen F. Bortrum