Color vision created demand for colorful animals; observing black hole light echoes; deadlines!

This week, researchers hypothesized that human culture is distinguished from cultures of other species like whales by unique open-endedness—the ability to communicate and understand an infinite number of possibilities. An ancient unicellular organism provided evidence that embryonic development evolved before actual animals. And researchers reported that the Earth experienced a massive, rapid melting period following the last ice age. Additionally, we reported on the sociological implications of blowing deadlines, a method to calculate the mass and spin of a black hole, and the evolution of species coloration.

Work faster, not better

I was playing some Fallout 4 this week, and while I was passing by a farmstead, a settler said, “If you work, you eat. It’s as simple as that.” I hear you loud and clear, post-apocalyptic non-player character with a tenuous relationship to collision surfaces. We might not live in a society where soda bottle caps are currency, but we do live in a capitalist society where we complete tasks in exchange for money, and a lot of those tasks are time sensitive. What happens when you miss a deadline?

According to a study by researchers at the University of Toronto, missing a deadline often causes others to view you as less competent, in turn impacting their perception of the quality of the work you turned in.

They surveyed thousands of people in the U.S. and the U.K., including managers, human resources personnel and people whose jobs entailed evaluating others. In the field experiment, respondents were presented with examples of work and asked to rate it. Before their evaluations, the researchers told them whether the work was submitted early, on time or late.

Respondents who were told that the work was turned in late evaluated the work as qualitatively worse than in the other two conditions. “Everyone saw the exact same art contest entry, school submission or business proposal, but they couldn’t help but use their knowledge of when it came in to guide their evaluation of how good it was,” says Sam Maglio, professor of marketing in the department of management at U of T Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.

For the record, I submitted this blog post one day before my deadline.

Wavelengths perceived

A new statistical analysis by researchers at the University of Arizona suggests that color vision evolved in animals around 500 million years ago, long before the evolution of colorful fruits and flowers, which started sprouting 200 to 350 million years ago. The researchers focused on what they term “conspicuous colors”—basically, the ones kids are likeliest to select in a 16 pack of Crayolas—red, orange, yellow, blue and purple.

Around 150 million years ago, presumably to capitalize on the well-established prevalence of color vision, species began evolving warning coloration. And 50 million years later, there was an evolutionary explosion of both warning and sexual coloration. Although the reasons behind this evolutionary burst are still unclear, the researchers identified three warning signal animal vectors behind it: ray-finned fishes, birds and lizards.

Additionally, warning coloration is much more widespread among species than sexual coloration, likely because colorful animals do not themselves need to have color vision to signal the danger they pose to other, color-sensitive species. Sexual color signals, on the other hand, are confined to vertebrate and arthropod species that have well-developed color vision.

Simulated wavelengths perceived

Black holes have basically three characteristics: mass, spin and charge. So distinguishing them from one another in a police lineup would be difficult, even after resolving all of the obvious practical issues of getting them into the precinct. But calculating the mass and spin of a black hole out in space is fraught for a number of reasons.

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters proposes a method to observe light bent by the gravitational influence of a black hole. The researchers were interested in finding black hole light echoes, a theoretical phenomenon in which gravitational lensing bends the path of a photon and allows the light to take multiple paths from a source back to an observer on Earth. The effect is that the light from the original source arrives at different times, resulting in an echo. Observing echoes could provide measurements of the mass and spin of the black hole.

The technique captures faint echo signatures that are otherwise drowned out by stronger direct light. The researchers tested the method with computer simulations, taking thousands of snapshots of light traveling around a supermassive black hole and toward earth, and could directly infer the echo delay period in the simulated data. The results suggest that astronomers could detect echoes in the future using two telescopes, one in orbit and one ground based, together performing very long baseline interferometry.

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