Search results from Google are a bit too godless for some. That’s why intrepid, religious entrepreneurs started Koogle, a search engine designed to adhere to Jewish law. The name is a play on the delicious and traditionally Jewish casserole, kugel. Explicit material, including scantily clad women, will be filtered out of the search results, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Results will also exclude televisions, which are verboten in orthodox homes, and will prohibit shopping during Shabbat.

(Thanks, The Blingdom of God.)

Source: Koogle

While many archaeologists dig for clues to antiquity, a California state archaeologist has collected and catalogued the remains of a much more recent but equally curious civilization: a 1960s hippie commune. E. Breck Parkman is in charge of a collection from the wreckage of the Olompali commune in northern California that includes “melted sneakers, scorched fabric, broken plates, a tube of 40-year-old face cream [and] red Monopoly hotels,” Archaeology magazine reports in its July-August issue. Which doesn’t sound as exciting as, say, purple velvet bell bottoms, lava lamps, and skull bongs, but hey, they’re still sorting through it all.

Known to most as the Ranch because it was located on a 680-acre horse ranch, Olompali was at the epicenter of 1960s hippiedom, with folks like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and the Grateful Dead hanging out and 60 young hippies rooming at the property’s 22-room mansion. (The Dead even were pictured at the Ranch in an iconic photograph on the back of their 1969 album Aoxomoxoa, accompanied by a 6-year-old flower child named Courtney Love.) The party started in 1967 and was over by the end of ’69 as members fell into infighting and the mansion burned down. (Bummer, man.)

Now part of a state historic park, the old haunts have been picked over by Parkman, who has long bucked resistance to his scholarly approach toward sorting through “hippie trash,” as some have called it. As far back as 1981, he drew laughter at a public hearing for suggesting that the hippie era was one of the important periods in the park’s history. Now, in order to save precious state budget money, he has enlisted several museum curators and two former commune residents to help him winnow down the collection.

Despite the hedonistic nature of their subject, Parkman and his helpers have done their archaeologists’ work diligently and soberly, packing up the remnants of the whole long, strange trip into neatly labeled office boxes. Among the keepers: about 30 pieces of butchered cow and pig bones that might be from the mansion’s final communal feast.

Asks Parkman: “Where else do you have the last supper of a hippie commune?”

Source: Archaeology (full article not available online), California State Parks

Image courtesy of California State Parks. 

Hard science can back up the religious tenet of forgiveness, even in the most extreme settings. “Forgiveness is not just a state of mind,” Jina Moore writes for Search magazine, “it’s a physiological reality. And, scientifically speaking, it’s good for us.” Researchers have found that grief, anger, and anxiety can all be mitigated through forgiveness, and can the act lead to better health for both the forgiver and the forgiven.

The benefits can be found even in a place like Rwanda, the site of one of the most horrific genocides in recent memory. There, forgiveness is more than religious, it’s also a matter of public policy. The country has set up outdoor confessional courts called gacacas, where perpetrators of genocide confess their crimes and ask for forgiveness. Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame recently touted the system in a blog on the Huffington Post.

The courts may grant forgiveness and leniency, but they are far from perfect, Philip Gourevitch reports for the New Yorker. Rwanda has become a beacon of security and prosperity in the region, but the calm that has settled over the country is an uneasy one. One survivor of the genocide criticized the reconciliation saying, “This is all theater. It doesn’t mean anything. A killer is a killer, and you have to abandon them…. They only asked pardon because of the gacaca. Why didn’t they ask for forgiveness before the gacaca?”

The President of Rwanda and supporters of the reconciliation are urging patience, saying that the gacacas are giving the country a basis on which they can build a better country. Gourevitch makes it clear that Rwanda has a long way to go before the reconciliation can be considered a success.

“Forgiveness and reconciliation are work,” writes Moore. The person forgiving needs to both empathize and decide—consciously or unconsciously—that the person asking for pardon is deserving of forgiveness. In fact, in terms of the health benefits , Moore writes the science shows “it is as important why you forgive as that you forgive at all.”

Image by Dylan Walters, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: Search, Huffington Post, the New Yorker

Statistics Day is right around the corner! No, seriously. Over at American Prospect, Paul Waldman ponders this Japanese holiday (with its slogan: “Statistical Surveys Owe You and You Owe Statistical Data”) and dreams of a day when Americans might revere responsibly parsed data so much that we have our own national celebration that “speaks of a culture that values precision and holds numbers in high esteem”:

We ought to be in a golden age of data. We have more data than we have ever had before, more computing capacity to analyze it, and an information delivery system—the Internet—we couldn't have dreamed of 20 years ago. With a few clicks, you can have at your fingertips the mountains of U.S. Census data. You can access the 36 years worth of data gathered by the General Social Survey or the 60 years of data collected by the National Election Studies. You can get oodles of numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or the CIA's World Factbook. I could go on—almost forever...Why is it that misleading or manipulative uses of numbers are no less likely to carry the day for their dishonesty?

...The lesson isn't that one shouldn't listen to people who know a lot about numbers. It's that one has to know which questions can be answered by data and which can't. Too often, too many of us can't tell the difference.

Let’s make Paul Waldman proud and make this the best Statistics Day ever. I’ll bring the hats.

Now go crunch some numbers!

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Source: American Prospect 

Image by  ArtemFinland . Licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Do you have depression? Achy face? Do you see the world in black and white? You may be stuck inside a prescription drug commercial. Current TV’s Sarah Haskins takes viewers on a cynical tour of the drug ads in the latest episode of Target Women. Warning: Side effects may include laughter and projectile vomiting.

Source:  Current TV  

On the vaunted social networking site Twitter, users—both male and female—are more likely to follow men than women, according to a study from Harvard Business Publishing. On average, men have 15 percent more followers than women, even though they follow roughly the same number of people.

According to the study:
We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.

Twitter’s gender divide stands in stark contrast to most social networking sites, according to the study, where “most of the activity is focused around women.” The lack of photos and detailed biographies are offered as possible reasons for the discrepancy.

(Thanks, Marginal Revolution.)

Source: Harvard Business Publishing

The United States may have invented the internet, but today it lags abysmally far behind countries like South Korea and Japan. As President-Elect, Barack Obama said, “It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption.”

The problem is “a total lack of competition,” Nicolas Thompson writes for the Washington Monthly. Telecom companies have successfully neutered legislative attempts to force competition, giving near-monopolies on home internet service to phone and cable companies. Some hope that the new stimulus package could help, but the money devoted to bringing new broadband to the United States will likely be dwarfed by the $3.4 billion South Korea is putting into Green IT. GigaOM reports that by 2012, South Koreans may enjoy internet speeds that are 200 times faster than the typical DSL line in the United States.

There are a few possible solutions. Thompson suggests that the US government should create a public entity like the post office to provide internet to Americans. “Private companies would compete,” Thompson writes, “just as UPS and FedEx compete with the postal service.” The competition could force telecom companies to clean up their acts and give globally competitive service to customers.

“America built the world’s first computers, and then along came Microsoft. America pioneered the Internet, and along came Google,” Thompson writes. Without drastic changes to the United States broadband infrastructure, “It’s hard, however, to imagine that the technologies of the future will be hatched here.”

Image by Jay Cuthrell, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source:  Washington Monthly ,  GigaOM  

Science and spirituality don’t always get along. A few scientists are trying to change that through a new, peer-reviewed journal called “Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.” The journal’s editor, Dr. Ralph Piedmont, sat down with Interfaith Voices to talk about how scientists can explore big issues, including the meaning of life, while retaining scientific integrity.

Source: Interfaith Voices

The wisdom of the masses has proven helpful creating encyclopedias (Wikipedia), digitizing books (reCaptcha), and founding a religion. When it comes to book writing and editing, however, that wisdom looks pretty dumb. Tech guru Lawrence Lessig tried updating his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, by releasing it as a wiki. After the project was over, he told the ABA Journal:

“I don’t think I’ll ever write a book that way again,” he confesses. “It’s very, very hard. It’s much harder to write a book with collaborative editing than it is just to write the book.”

Source: ABA Journal 

Money can’t buy happiness. In fact, it can make you less happy. According to ScienCentral, researchers followed recent college graduates for two years after graduation and found that attaining intrinsic goals, like rewarding relationships and contributing to the community, increased psychological health and well-being. On the other hand, psychology professor Edward Deci said that achieving extrinsic goals, like money and prestige, “actually contributes to their greater ill-being, which is to say more anxiety and depressive symptoms.”

The study’s authors defined extrinsic goals like money and happiness as “American Dream” goals. According to a recent documentary by American RadioWorks, the American dream is often defined as: “you are what you acquire, like a home, a car or two, or a large-screen TV.” It wasn’t always that way, however. The documentary tracks the evolution of the phrase, from its idealistic roots to its more consumerist meaning. Years ago, the American dream was closer to “the chance to better your circumstances no matter what your family name or what your station was.”

Sources: ScienCentral, American RadioWorks

Marketers from some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have begun hyping their drugs on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Pfizer, the company behind Viagra, already has 1,239 fans on Facebook, and AstraZeneca, makers of Prilosec, has 822 followers on Twitter. Kerry Grens of the Scientist dropped in on a conference designed to help big-pharma marketers understand the benefits and pitfalls of social media. 

The pharmaceutical information being spread on the internet has begun to push the bounds of legality. “Currently,” Grens writes, “the FDA has no guidelines explicitly addressing adverse event reports on networking sites like Facebook.” If a commenter complains of an unintended side effect, for example, drug makers might not know whether they’re legally obliged to look into the case. And, if enough people complain of “black tongue” or “anal leakage,” Facebook might not look like such a great marketing tool after all.

Source:  The Scientist  

The vast array of sex science available since the 1950s has demystified sex. Many Americans can now talk about it with their doctors and Bob Dole can speak freely about “erectile dysfunction” on television. Researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson “helped clear away much of the shame and myth that had perpetuated a communal ignorance about human sexuality,” Drake Bennett wrote for the Boston Globe. Today, that research has lost touch with its humanity, according to many researchers, promoting the "medicalization" of sex.

Bennett writes:
At its worst, they warn, [sex science] is pushing us into a sort of sexual arms race as people engage in sex acts that hold little interest for them, partake of a growing pharmacopeia of sex drugs, even get formerly unheard-of cosmetic surgeries to measure up to a fictional sexual ideal.

Researchers often reduce sex down to its most basic, physical elements, viewing intercourse in terms of function and dysfunction, rather than idiosyncratic preferences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the marketing of Viagra. Many people swear by the drug’s regenerative properties, but Bennett writes, “the benefits of Viagra and similar pills have to be balanced against the fact that they have made our sex lives seem like something that can - and should - be fixed with a drug.”

The media hype surrounding Viagra promotes the all-too-common view that “sex is a zero-sum game, a win-lose athletic performance, measured entirely by the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the arousal-intercourse-orgasm sequence,” Michael Metz and Barry McCarthy wrote in the Jan-Feb issue of Utne Reader. A more healthy view of sex is one that changes depending on the couple. “The challenge,” Metz and McCarthy write, “is to stop clinging to the ‘perfect intercourse’ model and replace it with positive, realistic expectations of oneself, one’s partner, and one’s relationship.”

The overly medicalized science isn’t just misguided, it also prevents helpful work from being done. Bennett quotes Amy Allina, program director at National Women's Health Network, saying, “We don't really know - and this is a timely one - how unemployment affects a couple's sex life.”

Scientists are now proposing a new, more “humanistic” model of sex, according to Bennett, that respects the idiosyncrasies of people and their relationships. Looking beyond the physiological, sex science could promote a more healthy view of sex as it functions inside of relationships.

The sex science so far may be promote a sterile, medicalized view of sex, but “it sure is entertaining,” according to Mary Roach, the author of Bonk. In a talk to TED, Roach explains some of the most interesting observation in the history of sex science, including this one by Alfred Kinsey:

Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male.

You can watch that video below:

 Source: Boston Globe, Utne Reader, TED 

The baby translator WhyCry was invented to help confused parents decipher their children’s cries. It may end up doing more harm than good. The $100.00 device analyzes pitch, rhythm, and volume of cries to help parents figure out the child’s needs with a reported 98 percent accuracy. It shows one of five icons, corresponding to one of the five reasons why babies cry: They’re usually either stressed, sleepy, annoyed, bored, or hungry.

When a parent figures out what the child needs, a bond is created between parent and child. WhyCry may be able solve the problem, but it could hurt the parent-child bond. According to Psychotherapy Networker, “a parent’s voice is critical in establishing an empathetic bond between parent and baby,” and the WhyCry device could take that parent’s voice out of the equation. “WhyCry may tell parents what their baby needs,” according to the article, “it may also interfere with their instinctively empathetic vocal response.”

Source: Psychotherapy Networker 

Digital technology has lowered the cost of production to the point where giving things away for free has become a legitimate business model. “Once a marketing gimmick,” writes Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, “free has emerged as a full-fledged economy.”

The problem with this “freeconomy,” Andrew Orlowski writes for the New Statesman, is that eventually, someone is going to have to pick up the bill. Anderson and Wired are both pushing a techno-utopianism, according to Orlowski, that mixes “manifest destiny and opportunistic hucksterism.” For many years, and two economic busts, the message worked. Now, Anderson’s new book Free isn’t meeting with rave reviews, and Wired (like many magazines) is struggling to survive. Orlowski writes:

“So, perhaps the Wired era is over, departing like a snake-oil salesman at a medicine show who—having poisoned the town—can’t leave quickly enough”

Sources: Wired, New Statesman

What is the point of babies? They’re almost entirely dependent on other people for survival, so much so that they appear to be an evolutionary hindrance, rather than a benefit. Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby, thinks she may have found the answer. In an interview with Seed magazine, Gopnik explains that “children are like the R&D department of the human species.”

There may be a tradeoff in the human mind between learning something and applying it, according to Gopnik. Adults are better able to apply knowledge, but babies are better suited for learning and imaging.

Watching children play in imaginary worlds, many scientists have assumed that babies are not as intelligent as adults. In fact, “Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities,” according to Gopnik. “It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both.”

Image by Mia Mae, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source:  Seed  

On their own, ants are pretty dumb. It’s not their fault: Their tiny brains don’t allow for a lot of intelligence. Taken together, however, ants are some of the most evolutionarily successful animals on the planet. They account for an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the biomass of all the land animals on earth. And they didn’t get that big by making a lot of mistakes.

“Individually they’re totally incompetent,” ant expert Debra Gordon told Radio Lab, “but as colonies they do great things.”

Scientists are questioning how such an individually unintelligent animal could make so many correct decisions collectively. Though ants have a queen, the queen doesn’t order around her subjects. In reality, they exhibit an amazing ability for nonhierarchical, collective decision making.

They way ants, bees, and some fish naturally make decisions, according to Susan Milius writing for Science News, is “all about quorum.” The animals will often send off little scouts, acting individually, who report back to influence the groups as a whole. Some ants have been observed throwing other ants over their shoulders and dragging their fellow ants off to build consensus for ideas. Eventually, with individual persistence, collective decisions are made.

How those decisions are made represents one of the biggest mysteries in science, mathematician Steve Strogatz told Radio Lab. In nature, order can simply materialize from disorder. Strogatz points out that scientists (and Creationists) grapple with the question of how this happens, but still don’t understand.

The collective decision making occurs in humans, too, in ways that are little understood. “Human groups deciding as a whole have scored spooky triumphs,” Milius writes. In one test, people were asked to guess the weight of an ox. Individually, every guess was way off. Together, the median of the guesses was within 10 pounds of the correct weight of 1,198 pounds

If humans are able to exhibit such accurate collective decision making, how could the stock market and the real estate crisis go so horribly wrong? The problem, according to Stephen Pratt of Arizona State, is that ants don’t have a stock market. “If they did,” he says, “we could rely on them to have figured the whole thing out.” 

Image by Dino, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources:  Radio Lab ,  Science News  

When Netflix offered $1 million to anyone who could help them suggest movies better, thousands of teams from hundreds of countries signed up for the challenge. Netflix uses a program called Cinematch that recommends movies to its customers, designed to keep the customers renting movies and paying money. If people could create a program that would suggest movies 10 percent better than Cinematch, that team would win $1 million from Netflix.

One team at AT&T Labs came particularly close to that goal and wrote about the competition for the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum. The team members combined a number of different search methods to create a program that was 8.43 percent better than Netflix’s. That’s wasn’t enough to win the $1 million dollar prize, but Netflix was also offering a $50,000 prize to the team that came the closest.

Programs like these are capable of “finding something out about us that we ourselves can't even figure out,” writer Clive Thomas told the WNYC show On the Media. They also run the chance of perpetuating narrow-mindedness by suggesting only media that people are sure to like, without any of the mind-expanding media that people might aren’t sure to enjoy. People’s friends, rather than computers, are still better able to suggest media that might not be as enjoyable, but is still important.

Computers may be able to explore the “impenetrable mystery at the heart of our predilections,” according to On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone, but they aren’t able to change those predilections without the help of a few friends.

You can listen to that interview below:

Image by Urthstripe, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources: IEEE Spectrum, On the Media

Modern society actively bombards the human consciousness, allowing the most primitive and consumption-oriented parts of the brain to take over, John Naish writes for the Ecologist. People are tricked on a base level into “feeling beset by famine and poverty, despite the abundant sufficiencies around us.” These feelings of need push people into buying, eating, and using resources, often without thinking rationally. 

Beyond foods and cars, the human brain is wired for conceptual consumption, too. The quest for more experiences can lead people into choosing more unique or interesting experiences over more pleasurable ones, according to PsyBlog. When faced with a choice between a consistently pleasurable ice cream flavor (say, chocolate) or a more interesting but clearly less tasty one (say, bacon), many people will choose the bacon-flavored ice cream, knowing it won’t be as good. A similar theory is employed to explain why people prefer horror movies over a good comedy.

The problem is that marketers and advertisers know how to stimulate the primitive parts of the human brain to prod people into more consumption. That drive is having a devastating effect on the environment, according to Naish, as people irresponsibly consume natural resources in a Sisyphean effort to quiet the irrational parts of the brain.

There are, however, plenty of exercises that people can use to stimulate the higher-functioning, more rational  parts of the brain. Naish suggests that society tap into the psychological need for social belonging to nudge people toward more responsible consumption. Some solutions are far more simple than that, too. Naish cites research showing that “pausing between deciding to buy something and taking it to the check-out dramatically increases the chance of a no-sale.” Simply taking a breath or walking around the block before making a purchase can help bypass the more irrational part of the brain and encourage more responsible and conscious consumption.

Image by  Simon Shek , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: The Ecologist, PsyBlog 

Scientific studies have shown that religion makes people happier and less anxious. It would be easy to infer that atheists would be more depressed and nervous, but that’s not exactly the case. The Boston Globe highlights a few studies showing that adamant atheists and pious Christians both tend to be less depressed. The unconvinced people in the middle are often the ones who have the problems.

Source: Boston Globe

Pseudoscience runs rampant throughout the claims of many nutrition experts who extol the virtues of vitamin supplements, Reynold Spector writes for the Skeptical Inquirer. “There is no rigorous scientific evidence for the utility of dietary supplements,” according to Spector, and there’s some evidence that pumping large amounts of vitamins E, C, or A into people’s bodies may actually increase mortality.

The multibillion dollar industry that hawks vitamin supplements may be one of the driving forces behind the proliferation of bad science, according to Spector. And he accuses established journals including the New England Journal of Medicine of proliferating the erroneous research.

It is true, Spector admits, that vitamin supplements can be helpful for certain people, including pregnant women and the elderly. He does, however, encourage moderation.

Image by Ragesoss, licensed under Creative Commons.

When parents talk about the birds and the bees, it’s usually a metaphor. When scientists talk about the sex lives of animals, the conversation tends to get interesting.

Researchers recently discovered that male chimpanzees give pieces of meat to females in exchange for sex, the BBC reports. For some time, scientists hypothesized about food-for-sex deals, but previous studies tended to look for short-term, payment-on-delivery exchanges. The researchers form the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany found that such exchanges can take place over time. Researcher Cristina Gomes told the BBC that males “might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later.”

The researchers found that male chimpanzees who shared food with females were able to mate twice as often as the more selfish apes. Gomes thinks the findings could give clues into human evolution, and may provide a link between “good hunting skills and reproductive success.”

Similar food-for-sex exchanges have also been observed in flies. In fact, according to National Geographic, male flies have been known to cheat the system by presenting females with worthless gifts—wrapped up to look like food—to fool females into copulation. The strategy may work in the short-term, but the National Geographic reports: “the female dance flies that received the largest nutritious gifts copulated for a significantly longer amount of time than when given either a small nutritious gift or a larger worthless one.”

Though the strategies are similar, flies tend to be more indiscriminate about their sex lives than the chimpanzees. In Green Porno, Isabella Rossellini said flies “have sex several times a day: any opportunity, any female.”

To see Rossellini’s exploration into the sexual lives of flies, watch the video.

If there can be such a thing as an artisan octopus killer, Jack Whitten is it. In an essay for the quarterly Art Lies, he starts with a lesson in evolution: 

“Millions of years ago the octopus had a shell, but they lost it. Since then, the octopus is always looking for a home. They occupy the abandoned shells of other sea creatures, cans and car tires or make their own houses, which I call ‘octopus architecture.’”

From there it’s an experts guide to hunting the “Houdini of the sea” where it hides: “They are addicted to the color white, like a bull is to red,” explains Whitten. “They can’t control themselves. Thus, I always keep a white handkerchief tucked into my wetsuit, which I use to seduce them from their lair.”

Once he’s done that, well, you really ought to just read Whitten’s essay. Here are the crib notes: stab or bite the nerve between the eyes; don’t lose your cool in the cloud of squid ink; and beat your catch at least 100 times against a rock to tenderize the flesh.

Whitten is ruthless. He closes out his piece with this chest-beater of a boast: “I remember once finding two octopuses locked in mortal combat. They were literally eating each other. I caught and ate them both.”

Source: Art Lies

Image by Stuart Horodner. 

Schools across the country are cutting back on arts funding. Many have focused resources on standardized test taking, and with the current budget crisis looming, the trend away from the arts shows no sign of changing direction.

To make the case for more arts funding, some experts argue that music, dance, theater, and visual arts can help out in other academic areas. They cite studies like the “Mozart Effect” saying that listening to classical music can boost people’s intelligence.

This is the wrong tactic, according to experts quoted in Greater Good magazine. If the results of these studies are called into question, as they were in the case of the “Mozart Effect,” the argument for arts funding is diminished. Even if scientists question whether or not the arts improve other academic achievement, that doesn’t make the arts any less important.

Leave the science to the scientists, say the critics. Instead of citing studies, the case for the arts is strongest in areas that are hardest to quantify. Ideally, the arts allow students to connect with emotions and to look at something they produce as a piece of art (no small achievement). The arts also provide a chance at connecting with children who aren’t engaged by other areas of academia. None of that, however, is likely to show up in test results from a lab.

Image by Beth Kanter, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: Greater Good 

If terms like “robotics” and “genetic engineering” seem too good to have been made up by scientists, it’s because they weren’t. Isaac Asimov invented the word “robotics” and the adjective “robotic” in his science fiction story Liar! and Jack Williamson coined the term “genetic engineering” in his novel Dragon's Island. The Oxford University Press blog compiled these and seven other scientific terms that actually came from science fiction, including “zero-gravity” and computer “virus.”

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily.)

Dogs, with their highly attuned senses of smell, have been trained to find hidden drugs, bombs, and now endangered species. The Scientist reports that conservationists are training dogs to track down rare species of plants, some of which can be extremely hard for humans to find. Greg Fitzpatrick of the Nature Conservancy is exploring the possibility of using dogs to sniff out the Kincaid’s lupine, an endangered plant that is the one place where the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly lays its pin-sized eggs. He plans on submitting the results to conservation biology journals shortly.

You can watch a video of a dog searching out the rare Kincaid's lupine plant below:

Image by  Mark Hanna , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: The Scientist 

Questions of morality and free will are often relegated to the smoky libraries of philosophers. A new school of thought, known as the x-phi, is trying to change that by integrating brain-scanning technology, questionnaires, and field experiments to figure out the fundamental questions of human existence. Writing for Prospect, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton of the delightfully cerebral podcast Philosophy Bites, explore this emerging trend that straddles the line between philosophy and neurology.

Adherents of x-phi, or experimental philosophy, are trying to “to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre,” Edmonds and Warburton write. Instead of relying on traditional philosophical assertions like “we all know…” or “ we can all agree that…” the x-phi adherents rely on evidence to test assumptions about the human mind.

The experiments are yielding thought-provoking results. Edmonds and Warburton explain in depth how x-phi experimentation suggests surprising (though complicated) answers to fundamental questions of free will, responsibility in a world where free will may not exist, and the role that emotions play in clouding human judgments.

A recent finding that could be considered x-phi was published in Science a GoGo, contending that “specific brain circuits and pathways might be responsible for wisdom.” The researchers found that common areas of the brain are involved in moral decision making, conflict detection, and other traits associated with wisdom. New York Times columnist David Brooks has touched on similar ideas, most recently writing about an evolutionary approach to morality.

The popularization of x-phi also attracted plenty of detractors. Many question x-phi’s reliance on technology like brain scans. Current MRI technology is too crude to yield meaningful results, according to philosopher and medical scientist Raymond Tallis quoted in the Prospect piece. If an MRIs can’t differentiate between physical pain and social rejection, which both light up the same areas of the brain, they can scarcely be relied upon for meaningful real-world philosophical insights.

Criticism aside, the school of thought continues to gain adherents. There are now x-phi blogs, books, a logo (of an armchair on fire), and even an anthem posted on YouTube. Edmonds and Warburton write, “If philosophy can ever be, x-phi is trendy.”

Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Jason Marsh of Greater Good magazine . We asked him for five links. Here's what happened:

Over here at Greater Good magazine, we spend our days reporting on “the science of a meaningful life.” What makes people do good? What makes them happy? What makes them get along well with others?

Of course, we can’t help but ask these same questions of ourselves—and wonder how we stack up against the rest of humanity. Fortunately, the web is home to several scientific tests—well, at least tests designed or inspired by scientists—that can help us (and you) determine just how good we are. They’re short (most take just a few minutes), fun, and illuminating. Here are five we like best.

How moral are you? University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and colleagues are the brains behind YourMorals.org. Questionnaires on the site provide a window into your morals and where they come from. Check out their “Moral Foundations Questionnaire,” which reveals your core moral beliefs and how they inform your political views.

How prejudiced? Researchers at Project Implicit have created a series of fascinating tests that help you detect your unconscious biases (along the lines of race, religion, sexual orientation, and much more). They’ve found, for example, that most Americans have an automatic, unconscious bias for white faces over black ones. Do you?

How empathic? Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen has devised the “Mind in the Eyes” test to measure how well people can decipher the emotional states of others, just by looking at their eyes.

How socially intelligent? This experiment created by the BBC, based on the work of legendary psychologist Paul Ekman, tests how well you can tell the difference between a fake smile and a real one.

How compassionate? This test, developed by sociologist Sue Sprecher and psychologist Beverly Fehr, measures how much “compassionate love” you feel for others, including strangers and even all of humankind. To take it, you’ve got to register through the University of Pennsylvania’s “Authentic Happiness” program, which features lots of other questionnaires you can take to gauge your levels of happiness, gratitude, and more.

BIO: Jason Marsh is the editor in chief of Greater Good magazine and an editor of The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness, an anthology of Greater Good articles forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co. His article on why sadness makes us want to buy things appears in the March/April issue of Utne Reader.

Previous Alt Wire Guests: David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel , Anne Elizabeth Moore 

The year 2009 looked very different when seen from the 1950s. Nuclear powered cars roamed the streets and people feasted on meal pills for dinner. Matt Novak sifts through these past visions of the future and compiles them on his blog Paleo-Future.

For the latest episode of the UtneCast, senior editor Jeff Severns Guntzel and assistant web editor Bennett Gordon sit down with Novak to talk about what these paleo-futuristic visions mean to our culture, and what the future might look like. Other topics covered in the episode include the greatest hits of corporate jargon and a guide to war photography.

There are plenty of memory games, crossword puzzles, and sodoku websites that promise a workout for your brain, even if the science behind the claim is a bit shaky. Discover magazine offers six websites—most of them free—that promise to keep your brain stimulated, and maybe make you smarter. Whether or not the science behind them is true, the games are still pretty fun.

Americans need to get away from their computers and get some sun. Three out of every four American teens and adults aren’t getting enough vitamin D, the nutrient you can get from standing in the sunshine. And the problem is getting worse, according to research published in Archives of Internal Medicine and reported by Scientific American: From 1988 to 1994, 45 percent of people tested had sufficient vitamin D. One decade later, that number had dropped to 23 percent. Among African Americans, 12 percent had sufficient vitamin D a decade ago, while just 3 percent of people had the recommended levels more recently.

Vitamin D deficiencies, “are increasingly blamed for everything from cancer and heart disease to diabetes,” according to the Scientific American. The study’s co-author Adit Ginde blames the lack of vitamin D in part on the proliferation of sunscreen and other efforts to prevent skin cancer. A lack of vitamins in regular diets also may play a role.

Some of the study’s critics claim the results inflate the problem, but still admit that vitamin D deficiencies are hugely prevalent and problematic.

Image by  Brian Moore , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Source: Scientific American 

The internet spreads information around the world, but freedom is more difficult. Believers in a coming tech-utopia have plenty of evidence to show the web’s democratizing force: The Orange Revolution in Ukraine was facilitated in part by new-media technologies, and blogging platforms have given a voice to dissenters in Burma, Iran, China, and many other places. The problem is, Evgeny Morozov writes for the Boston Review, “no dictators have been toppled via Second Life, and no real elections have been won there either; otherwise, Ron Paul would be President.”

Reports of China’s growing internet dissent can make for compelling reads in mainstream media outlets, but Morozov writes that they’re often overblown. YouTube users recently tweaked censors with videos about a “grass-mud horse,” the name of which, in Chinese, sounds a lot like a dirty sex pun. The New York Times said the videos “raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet.”

More recently, when China blocked access to YouTube, allegedly over videos showing Chinese police beating Tibetan protestors, many assumed this would backfire on the government. Writing for Time, Austin Ramzy said that blocking YouTube gives the impression that the Chinese government is afraid of the internet and that a “ shift in how people cover the Internet in China may be lost on the government.”

In fact, draconian blocking of websites is just one part of a two-pronged strategy for Chinese information control. The Chinese government is also trying to use the internet as a tool to forward their agenda. The government has trained an estimated 280,000 people to “neutralize undesirable public opinion by pushing pro-Party views” David Bandurski reports for the Far Eastern Economic Review. This group—known as the 50 Cent Party, because of the money they are rumored to be paid for each pro-government message—posts to chat rooms and web forums, and also reports dissident content.

“The goal of the government is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out progressive and diverse voices on China’s internet,” Chinese web entrepreneur Isaac Mao told Bandurski.

Even if political information is allowed to flow, assuming that information will lead to democracy and freedom is not necessarily true. Western journalists often focus on the blogs written in English, which tend to be more progressive and pro-Western. In other languages, the political landscape is much different. Morozov writes that “investing in new media infrastructure might also embolden the conservatives, nationalists, and extremists, posing an even greater challenge to democratization.”

Another threat may lie in the structure of the internet itself. The web may actually serve in polarizing political atmospheres, according to Cass Sunstein, both in the United States and abroad. A recent article for Harvard Magazine explores Sunstein’s idea that personalized news services like Google News, and Time Magazine’s new “Mine” service are blocking out ideas diverse opinions, allowing people to read about what they want and filter out the rest. Without an “architecture of serendipity,” where people can happen upon diverse opinions and news, the internet could lead to extremism.

None of this disregards the web’s potential for good. Sunstein calls new technologies “more opportunity than threat,” but serious work will need to be done to promote progressive voices and politics. It also means acknowledging that the techno-utopia envisioned in a free internet may not be worth the paper its printed on.

Image adapted from photo by  Nic McPhee , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Sources: Boston Review, Time, New York Times, Far Eastern Economic Review, Harvard Magazine

“Is it knowledge, ownership or curiosity that drives us to collect?” asks photographer Justine Cooper. “Are we by nature obsessive, preservationist, or sentimental?”

The subjects of Cooper’s Saved By Science photographs, shot in the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History, include a 100-year-old locker filled with elephant feet; a bone from the middle finger of a T-Rex relative wrapped in a century-old newspaper; and Lord Walter Rothschild’s stuffed birds, which he sold off when a former mistress blackmailed him. SEED Magazine has posted a mesmerizing slideshow with smart commentary from the photographer.

Source: SEED Magazine 

Imposing a distance on wealth, by calling money “stocks” or “derivatives” or “mortgage-backed securities” makes it easier for people to cheat, behavioral economist Dan Ariely told the TED conference. Ariely’s research has also found a social factor in cheating, where people feel more comfortable lying when they know that others in their social group are lying, too. The distance factor and the social factor have converged in the stock market, and in places like Enron, where money doesn’t seem like real money and cheating runs rampant. You can watch the whole talk below:

Musicians are able to identify emotions more quickly and accurately than non-musicians, according to research reported in LiveScience. For the experiment, participants watched a subtitled nature film and listened to a 250 millisecond clip of a baby crying. Using brain scans, the researchers found that musicians were more sensitive to the emotional content than non-musicians.

The test samples were quite small—only 30 people—but scientists hope the information could lead to innovative treatments for people with dyslexia or autism, who often have trouble processing the emotional content in sounds. Neuroscientist Nina Kraus told LiveScience, “It would not be a leap to suggest that children with language processing disorders may benefit from musical experience.”

Other brain scan tests have revealed that musicians’ brains actually sync up when they play music together, according to Science a GoGo. Researchers from the Max Plank Institute recorded the electrical activity in the brains of pairs of guitarists, and found that the brainwave patterns synchronized when the musicians played together. The tests aren’t done yet, however. The results don’t show whether the synchronization happens from watching and listening to the other person play music, or if the brainwaves sync first, and then facilitate the coordinated action.

Image by Tom Marcello, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources: LiveScience, Science a GoGo

Recording college lectures gives students the opportunity to learn beyond the restraints of a brick-and-mortar schoolhouse. The audio and video recordings also give professors the opportunities for disaster. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that one professor was placed on administrative leave after appearing in a video called “apparently baked professor” that was posted on YouTube. Another recording pushed the lines of legality after a private conversation between a professor and a student about grades—a subject protected by federal statutes—was recorded and almost posted online. 

The new recordings may threaten “the traditional freewheeling spirit of the classroom” according to the Chronicle, if professors are scared of saying the wrong thing on camera. Colleges are working to curb this tendency by making it easier on faculty to edit the recordings at will. With camera phones sitting in the pockets of nearly every student in college, however, the editing software may not offer much protection.

Image by Emily Walker, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

For gamblers, a near miss at a payoff can trigger the same neurological reaction as winning, according to Science News. Even if the subjects lose money, having two cherries line up in a slot machine, with a third one close by, can activate the same areas of the brain as a win. After a near-miss, the subjects reported that they wanted to gamble more, which could explain some of the allure of gambling. 

Casinos likely know this fact, on some level, and are able to exploit it for profit. Some casinos have come up with advanced techniques to exploit people’s neurological biases and keep them losing money. WNYC’s Radio Lab profiled the efforts of Harrah’s Casino, which uses “loyalty cards” to great success in the casino business. Loyalty card users get a few extra dollars to gamble with, and, in exchange, Harrah’s computers monitor the gambler’s every move, figuring out their innate gambling tendencies. 

The computers are able to deduce the breaking points of individual gamblers. For example, a person might tend to leave the casino after losing $85. Using that knowledge, Harrah’s will send attendants to distract that person with a free meal or tickets to a show after that person loses $72. This tactic eases the pain of loss, and keeps people gambling.

Image by  Jeff Kubina , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: Science News, Radio Lab 

As the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to rise, robots are looking like an increasingly attractive alternative to human soldiers. Sending robots into battle is politically easy, because it ostensibly avoids some of the human cost of war. There is, however, a hidden, paradoxical cost of waging war with robots, P. W. Singer writes in the Wilson Quarterly: “By appearing to lower the human costs of war, they may seduce us into more ­wars.” 

Technological advancements now allow everyone to watch combat footage from anywhere, and sometimes to be a part of it. Soldiers may be able to drive to work, launch some missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and then drive home in time for dinner. Singer, the author of the book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, connects that to the popularization of “war porn” videos, some of which show UAVs launching missiles at people. The footage allows viewers to “watch more but experience less,” according to Singer, which “widens the gap between our perceptions and war’s realities.”

Even supporters of the robotic soldiers concede that the technology can lead to overconfidence. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb is quoted by Singer saying, “Leaders without experience tend to forget about the other side, that it can adapt. They tend to think of the other side as static and fall into a technology trap.”

Excessive optimism is already a psychological bias that leads countries into war, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon wrote for Foreign Policy in 2007. One doesn’t need to look beyond the predictions of a “cakewalk” in Iraq to know the problems of overconfidence in the lead up to a conflict. The distance allowed by military robots could exacerbate this psychological bias.

The hidden costs of these robotic warriors doesn’t mean the military should abandon technological advances, according to Singer. In an excerpt from the New Atlantis, Singer writes, “High technology is not a silver bullet solution to insurgencies, but that doesn’t mean that technology doesn’t matter in these fights.”

Psychologists have found that people who are too cautious or deliberate can be perceived as racist, according to the We’re Only Human blog of the Association for Psychological Sciences. For the experiment, researchers from Tufts University tried to sap white volunteers of the cognitive abilities needed for self-discipline through a series of mental exercises. Then, the participants sat down to talk about race with black men who served as judges. According to the blog:

Those who were mentally depleted—that is, those lacking discipline and self-control—found talking about race with a black man much more enjoyable than did those with their self-control intact. That’s presumably because they weren’t working so hard at monitoring and curbing what they said. What’s more, independent black observers found that the powerless volunteers were much more direct and authentic in conversation. And perhaps most striking, blacks saw the less inhibited whites as less prejudiced against blacks. In other words, relinquishing power over oneself appears to thwart over-thinking and “liberate” people for more authentic relationships.

Harold R. Garner didn’t set out to uncover plagiarists. He and his team of researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas wanted to develop software to help researchers find papers that covered congruent topic areas. The idea was to point out similar research, and hopefully to uncover new directions for study. What they found, according to Science News, was widespread un-credited copying in scientific journals.

Some reactions to Garner’s findings have been posted by The Scientist. One author who may have been plagiarized told the magazine, “We were very sorry and somewhat surprised when we found their article. I don't want to accept them as scientists.”

One accused plagiarist’s defense was predictably scientific:

There are probably only 'x' amount of word combinations that could lead to 'y' amount of statements.... I have no idea why the pieces are similar, except that I am sure I do not have a good enough memory—and it is certainly not photographic—to have allowed me to have 'copied' his piece.

For years, studies have shown that people can derive significant health benefits from writing about their thoughts and feelings for 15 minutes each day. In today’s overly scheduled world, researchers from the University of Missouri tried to figure out what’s the minimum time commitment that people need to benefit from writing (pdf). They found that people were healthier after just two minutes of writing for two days, a total of just four minutes.

(Thanks, Very Short List.)

Among the mantras by artist Kevin Bewersdorf on Maximumsorrow.com lies this gem:

Rejoice:

Everything in the marketplace is a product!
I am in the marketplace!
I am a product!
Everything is in the product!
I am a product and everything is in me!

Bewersdorf’s art is “on the Internet and about the Internet,” he told the Rumpus, and straddles a line between religious incantation and corporate jargon, illuminating aspects of both worlds. The website offers a unique view of the mediocrity and information overload endemic in the internet. One of many Mediocrity Awareness Experiments offered on the site asks participants to stare at a chaotic image of bands while repeating the phrase “how many bands are there” over and over again. Another repeats the phrase “time to buy more shampoo.” The website is strange, and often confusing, but worth the time to visit.

Sources: MaximumSorrow.com, The Rumpus 

Mapping the universe is a vast and overwhelming job that scientists can’t do on their own. The website Galaxy Zoo has asked everyone on the internet for help identifying galaxies across the universe.

Visitors to the site are asked a series of simple questions about images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, mostly having to do with shapes. “This is a job that humans are much better at than computers,” according to the Galaxy Zoo website, “so most of the questions should be fairly easy.

The task seems like a simple game, but the effort has resulted in serious science. Four papers have already been published based on the project’s findings and at least four more are on the way.

Source: Galaxy Zoo 

Promoting more women in the workplace isn’t just equitable, it’s profitable. Researchers have found that Fortune 500 companies that aggressively promote women to high levels consistently outperform their industry peers, Roy Douglas Adler writes for Miller-McCune. Adler and his colleagues at Pepperdine University used data from a study on the glass ceiling and found that the companies best at promoting women outperformed the industry median on various measures of profitability.

Adler stresses that the correlation between hiring women and profitability doesn’t show a causation, but he does come up with a possible explanation:

Firms exhibit higher profitability when their top executives make smart decisions. One of the smart decisions those executives have consistently made at successful Fortune 500 firms is to include women in the executive suite—so that regardless of gender, the best brains are available to continue making smart, and profitable, decisions.

Source: Miller-McCune 

The use of the word effect to describe far-reaching phenomena has gone mainstream. What started as a way to describe scientific principles—think Doppler effect, butterfly effect, greenhouse effect—the word has branched out like a debutante whose time has come. In this month’s IEEE Spectrum, Paul McFedries breaks down the ripple effect of effect, including:

1) the much-discussed Bradley effect (and its alter ego, the reverse Bradley effect), in which white voters choose white candidates in spite of claiming otherwise in polls
2) the lipstick effect, in which consumers make small, comforting purchases during a recession rather than big ticket items
3) the iPod halo effect, in which all Apple products benefit from the popularity of iPods
4) the CSI effect, in which jurors expect smoking gun-type forensic evidence from prosecutors, based on their viewing of the popular TV shows
5) the NASCAR effect, in which copious amounts of advertising appear on anything from Websites to clothing

Source: IEEE Spectrum

Barack Obama’s election is hailed as a step forward in American race relations. Now, researchers are trying to quantify the “Obama Effect” to figure out how it’s changing American culture. One study, reported by the New York Times, found that a test-taking achievement gap between black people and white people disappeared after Obama’s election. In other words, before Obama’s election, white people tended to do better on this test than black people. Now, that gap has disappeared, at least for this test.

The reason why that gap existed in the first place, Jonah Lehrer writes for the Frontal Cortex blog, may be due to a “stereotype threat.” Stereotypes can creep into the minds of test takers, making them perform worse on tests because of the threat, rather than any difference in intelligence.

An inspiring politician isn’t needed to erase that achievement gap, according to the WNYC show Radio Lab. All that’s needed is a simple change in language: When a test is referred to as an “intelligence test,” the gap remains. But if researchers refer to the exact same test as a “puzzle,” or some other word that is less loaded than “test,” the difference goes away.

“The real subtle power of a stereotype isn’t that it prevents you from the thing you want to do,” Radio Lab’s Jad Abumrad says, “it distracts you for just a beat from the thing you want to do. And that may be all the difference.”

Obama’s election could be lowering racism coming from white people, too. Tom Jacobs reports for Miller McCune that biases against black people registered significantly lower after Obama’s election in certain research. Researchers from Florida State University used Implicit Association Tests and found that the participants, 80 percent of which were white, showed no biases against black people, while previous studies showed a preference for white people. The researchers described this as a “fundamental change” in American race relations.  

The post-election test results aren’t all positive, however. Other studies have shown that white people who expressed a preference for Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, also expressed a preference for hiring white people over black people. That same preference didn’t come up when the participants expressed a preference for John Kerry.

“The researchers conclude that endorsing Obama helps people establish their ‘moral credentials’ as non-prejudiced people,” Jacobs writes, “and thus makes them more comfortable expressing opinions that could be regarded by some as racist.”

Sources: Miller McCune, Radio Lab, Frontal Cotex, New York Times

Image by hyperscholar, licensed under Creative Commons.

Most childhood dreams of flying to the moon go unfulfilled. It turns out that becoming an astronaut is really hard. But nowadays, if you’re lucky enough to have a spare $20 million dollars or so lying around, you can go into orbit without landing a plumb gig at NASA. Technology Review spent six months interviewing five of the six space tourists that have, so far, made the trip to the International Space Station. The result is the “first oral history of space tourism,” published in the February 2009 issue as a collection of excerpts from the interviews that together tell the story “of what a space vacation is really like.” Here’s a taste of some mundane details from the interviews that bring the experience to life:

Anousheh Ansari on the conditions of Star City, the military base turned astronaut campus in Russia where the “private cosmonauts”—one of the terms Richard Garriott prefers to “space tourist”—train for at least three months:

Everything is on the verge of falling down. … The first day I came, there was no hot water. The next day, there was no hot water. I was going to the gym and taking showers over there. Finally I went down, and it’s like, “Do you know when the hot water will come back?” They said, “Yeah, in about a month.”

On Russian launch day customs, of which there are apparently many:

Greg Olsen: A lot of traditions come from Yuri Gagarin [the first human in space]. When he was going out to the launch, he had to take a leak. They just didn’t make any provisions for it. He said, “Stop the bus.” He got off the bus and peed on the rear tire, and ever since then, that’s mandatory.

More on peeing:

Richard Garriott: I did wear and need a diaper during launch. You’re psychologically motivated not to need it, but you quickly learn to get over your difficulty and use the device as designed.

Greg Olsen: It didn’t smell. Those diapers are well made.

Details of a 3-D lifestyle:

Richard Garriott: The galley table is covered with spoons that are standing up like trees, because they put double-sided tape on the table. You can just tap the bottom end of your spoon handle on the table and it sticks there. That’s one of the first lessons, the three-dimensional use of space.

There are many more interesting tidbits in the 12-page spread, and you can also listen to excerpts of the interviews online.

Sources: Technology Review, Anousheh Ansari Space Blog, Space Tourism, RichardinSpace.com

The big dogs of the internet, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo, are stocking up in an arms race to power the future of information, according to the new issue of IEEE Spectrum. The companies are building gargantuan data centers, or “warehouse-sized computers,” that will theoretically create the backbone for the future of the information economy.

The data centers are designed to facilitate “cloud computing” where people will be able to store much of their private information remotely, rather than on a physical hard drive. Gmail or online banking are manifestations of this idea. In the future, people may be able to store much more.

Housing the servers that will store these massive troves of information is proving to be a challenge for electrical engineers. Microsoft’s datacenter in Quincy, Washington, for example is nearly 43,600 square meters in size, and consumes enough energy to power 40,000 homes. The article profiles some of the (rather complicated) steps that these companies are taking to control their energy usage, and cut down a bit on their carbon footprints.

Image by Paul Hammond, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources:
IEEE Spectrum 

People can do their own taxes, control their spending, contribute to retirement funds, and psychologists will still think they’re irrational about money. And more than likely, they're are right.

In many situations, people think more about the size of numbers than what they represent, according to an article in Science Daily. Using studies on risk aversion, psychologists at Ohio State University showed that people think of 300 cents as greater than $3, even though they hold the same value.

People also think of money “in terms of percentages, not in terms of absolute numbers,” behavioral economist Dan Ariely told Marketplace. He gave an example: If a person found out that they could save $7 on a $15 pen by walking five blocks, many people would do it. If they were told they could save  $7 on a suit that cost $1,015, most people wouldn’t bother.

Both examples show how people can be entirely irrational, even when working with small numbers. When it comes to $700 billion bail out plans, I shudder to think.

Meth dealers and addicts have found a destructive way to get money for drugs: by looting artifacts and selling them on the black market. The March-April issue of Archaeology Magazine explores this nexus of antiquities and drugs and finds that “twiggers,” a combination of “diggers” and meth addicted “tweakers,” are fueling "a new epidemic of looting” especially in the American southwest.

The compulsive effects of methamphetamine make it an ideal drug for the repetitive and tedious work of artifact hunting, according to the article (not available online). Since the meth addicts generally have little knowledge of the artifacts, the process of digging them up can be particularly destructive. And since the artifacts are seldom traceable, convictions are extremely hard to come by.

Phil Young, a former agent with the National Parks Service, described one operation saying, “it was a very destructive process to the cultural resource, and of course to the individuals as well.”

The Iranian government recently announced that it launched its first domestically produced satellite from an undisclosed location, the New York Times reports. Political implications aside, the launch adds one more to the more than 900 satellites currently orbiting the earth. The Union of Concerned Scientists has compiled a searchable and free database of who owns those satellites, what they’re used for, and where they are in orbit. Iran was already on the list of countries that either owned a satellite outright or in a partnership, as was the Philippines, the Czech Republic, and tiny Luxembourg. The database gives a little more context to the space junk that’s filling up the sky.

“The problem with Super Bowl snacks,” Brandon Keim writes for Wired, “is that they're boring.” So instead of popping open a bag of Chex Mix and calling it a party this Sunday, take a culinary cue from a few molecular gastronomists Keim consulted. His suggested list of adventurous treats for the big game includes recipes for pizza pebbles, puffed sauerkraut, bratwurst puree, and beer ice cream in a pretzel crust.

Technology is currently crying out for your attention. Twitter wants to know, “What are you doing?” Facebook is asking, “What are you doing right now?” There’s a good chance that your personal, work, and spam email accounts all have new messages waiting for you, friends or acquaintances may be inviting you to LinkedIn or Friendfeed, or maybe your cell phone is ringing. “Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely,” William Deresiewicz writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “now it’s impossible to be alone.”

The technology demands constant attention, because that’s what people want. The “contemporary self,” according to Deresiewicz, “wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible.” The websites offer visibility at no monetary cost, but users end up sacrificing their solitude, privacy, and, in some ways, the ability to be alone.

The technology has a spiritual cost, too. “Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism,” Deresiewicz writes, “a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom.” This kind of self-reflection is nearly impossible if people don’t quit tweeting, texting, and calling every once in a while.

The costs of constant contact become more extreme as technology improves. New applications for the iPhone and Google’s new G1 (which I bought 3 weeks ago), allow people to connect with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of location-aware applications at all times. Programs like WhosHere, Whrrl, and the dubiously named LifeAware give near-constant GPS-based updates to friends or strangers of where people are and how to connect.

Some of these location-aware applications go too far, even for tech enthusiasts. Mathew Honan, the man behind BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle, explored the labyrinthine world of the GPS-based applications for Wired and found paradoxically, “I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place.”

The flood of tweets, updates, and friend request can quickly become indistinguishable from real life (aka RL). The din can easily stand in the way of deeper thoughts and self-reflection. “In effect,” according to the Winter 2007 issue of n+1, “this mode of constant self-report can be summed up in a single phrase: “I am on the phone. I am on the phone. I am on the phone.’”

Image by Juhan Sonin, licensed under Creative Commons.

Hollywood heroes have an uncanny ability to outrun bombs. For the rest of us, it’d be helpful to know how far away we’d have to get from a nuclear blast to really be safe. The Ground Zero web application uses Google Maps to show the size of the damage caused by different nuclear bombs. Just search the map, hit the button that says, “nuke it,” and figure out how far you have to run. Or, if you’re like Indiana Jones, you could just hide in a fridge.

(Thanks, Very Short List.)

Bottled-up aggression sometimes needs an outlet. Sarah Lavely tries to provide a healthy one in her Smash Shack located in downtown San Diego. According to Psychology Today (article not available online), the company rents out concrete rooms, where clients can smash plates, glasses, or once-cherished mementos from relationships they want to forget. People can also buy plates and borrow Sharpie pens, to write out names or personal messages before they smash them. Some say that unleashed anger simply leads to more aggression, but Lavely points out that “Research has also shown that it’s absolutely critical to express emotions and anger, as opposed to shoving it down.”

Image by  BitBoy , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

A new report from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine finds that the U.S. Military’s use of animals for medical training violates the Department of Defense animal welfare regulation.

“For the soldiers of the 25th Infantry Division, it must have been a gruesome experience,” the report begins. “Earlier this year, instructors with the division’s 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team shot a group of pigs at Hawaii’s Schofield Barracks. They then instructed soldiers to practice treating the animals’ wounds. In other combat trauma training courses, pigs are set on fire while still alive. The trainees’ task is to keep the wounded pigs alive for as long as possible.”

 Read the entire report here.

A new form of censorship has quietly crept over the internet. Though governments continue to pursue old-school forms of prior restraint, technology is quickly making the blackened-ink style of censorship obsolete. The new ways to restrict free speech don’t require killing information entirely, governments and private companies simply inconvenience and frustrate people away from information they want to keep under wraps.

The internet was meant to foster communication, and it still creates opportunities for vibrant free speech. At the same time, computer science professor Harry Lewis writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education that the internet’s “rapid and ubiquitous adoption has created a flexible and effective mechanism for thought control.” As people increasingly rely on the internet for their news and information, banishing something from the web means effectively striking it from the public consciousness.

Governments have already begun to influence internet usage inside of their countries to enforce social and political norms. Lewis writes that on the internet, there is already “no sex in Saudi Arabia, no Holocaust denials in Australia, no shocking images of war dead in Germany, no insults to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey.”

China sits at the vanguard of this new form of censorship. The country’s famed “Great Firewall” is one of the most advanced information blocking tools in the world. Every savvy netizen, however, knows of proxy servers, encryption services, and other ways to skirt the firewall and find information that China doesn’t want its citizens to see. “The Great Firewall of China isn't impenetrable, “Jacqui Cheng reported for Ars Technica in 2007, “it just takes a little elbow grease and high Internet traffic to squeeze a few banned terms through.” That requirement of elbow grease constitutes the cornerstone of the new censorship.

Governments don’t have to censor all the information that comes into their country anymore, either. Censorship increasingly relies on one information bottleneck: Google. Jeffrey Rosen wrote for the New York Times that Google and its subsidiaries, including YouTube, “arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.” Governments and businesses now realize that banning information from Google means effectively censoring it from a massive audience of people, and they are developing strategies accordingly.

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” technology expert Tim Wu told the New York Times. After the Turkish government successfully lobbied YouTube to take down videos inside of Turkey that were deemed offensive, the Government tried to ban the videos worldwide to protect Turks living outside the country. These videos would all be available on websites other than YouTube, but with one website eclipsing all others for web videos, really, who would know?

In the United States, copyright laws are often invoked to frighten people into censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the McCain-Palin campaign, an unlikely advocate for internet freedom, claimed that YouTube “silenced political speech” after it took down campaign ads due to copyright violation claims.

YouTube general council Zahavah Levine responded saying, “YouTube does not possess the requisite information about the content in user-uploaded videos to make a determination as to whether a particular takedown notice includes a valid claim of infringement.” Because of that lack of information, the site often takes down videos first and examines the validity of copyright claims later. By the time videos are restored, especially in a fast-moving political campaign setting, the damage has already been done.

The website Chilling Effects documents many of these cease-and-desist letters in an attempt to combat some of the unnecessary censorship. The site was created in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of universities to help people understand their First Amendment rights and protect legal online speech. But with governments and businesses exchanging and learning from each other’s censorship tactics, the strategies to restrict free speech will likely grow more sophisticated.

Drinking too much coffee could make people hear voices or sense things that aren’t there, the BBC reports. The research doesn’t prove a “causal link” between coffee and hearing voices, but the study found that people who drink more than seven cups of instant coffee per day were three times more likely to experience hallucinations.

(Thanks, Neatorama.)

Burger King has inadvertently set a price on Facebook through their new “Whopper Sacrifice” application, according to Jason Kottke. Facebook users now can cash in on their virtual friendships by deleting 10 friends in exchange for a free Whopper. If the burger costs $2.40, that means each friendship is effectively worth $0.24.

That simple equation puts a number on a question that has plagued tech experts: How much is Facebook worth? There are 150 million users on Facebook, with an average of 100 friends. According to Kottke’s math, this places the overall value of Facebook at $1.8 billion, far lower than the $15 billon assumed when Microsoft invested in the company, but still a fair chunk of change. (For all the work, visit Kottke's blog post.)

The question of how much a Facebook friendship is worth, and who owns those friendships, could define the future of the social networking industry. The July-August issue of Technology Review profiled some of the innovative efforts to place value on social networking sites, and how some of those sites are leveraging social connections to actually make money. Though many assume Facebook to be one of the most successful companies on the internet, according to writer Bryant Urstadt, the company still hasn’t figured out how to use all their attention and social connections to create a real business.

Philosophers, poets, and writers have long known the dangers of city life. Now scientists know why. Neuroscience writer extraordinaire Jonah Lehrer writes for the Boston Globe that the simple act of being in a city “impairs our basic mental processes.”

Human minds struggle to keep up with the mental over-stimulation that’s ubiquitous in most cities. This can lead to mental and emotional fatigue in city dwellers.

The solution, according to Lehrer, is to spend more time in nature. Forests and sunsets don’t require the same neurological effort as the busy concrete jungle of cities. Spending time in nature, having an apartment that overlooks green spaces, or even looking at photographs of natural settings have all been found to have neurological benefits.

“Imagine a therapy that had no known side effects, was readily available, and could improve your cognitive functions at zero cost,” Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan wrote for Psychological Science. Spending time in nature has all these benefits, according to the study’s authors. The theory is called attention restoration theory, or ART, stating that mentally exhausted people can actually be rejuvenated by spending time in nature.

And if nature’s not readily available, you can try out the advice from Common Ground on beating “urban angst,” that Utne blogger Rachel Levitt pointed to.

(Thanks, MindHacks.)

Image by  Eric Chan , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Hollywood’s romantic comedies aren’t just innocuous cinematic tripe. They’re actually warping children’s minds (pdf), according to new research from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. The films, including Notting Hill and You’ve Got Mail are skewed portrayals of relationships with “both highly idealistic and undesirable qualities,” the researchers write, where romantic problems or transgressions “have no real negative long-term impact on relationship functioning.” The films tend to focus on the early stages of relationships, but the characters displayed emotions that generally develop over time, including deep feelings of love and emotional support. Adolescents sometimes use these films as models for their own relationships, which could lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment. 

In the book and film High Fidelity, the main character  asks, “What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?” For romantic comedy films, researchers may now have an answer. 

(Thanks, Miller-McCune.)

Image from the film Notting Hill.

The media’s rocky relationship with science didn’t improve in 2008. The British newspaper Telegraph reported that red wine causes breast cancer, and then reported that red wine prevents breast cancer just two months later. A few news sources reported that a “pixie dust” could help people regrow their fingers, which isn't very likely. Ben Goldacre takes the hacks to task in his Bad Science blog, and he’s compiled some of the worst science offenders in a special, year-end post.

Goldacre also takes on the obfuscating drug and PR companies, and the incompetence of governments and regulators. “It’s only when you line these jokers up side by side,” Goldacre writes, “that you realise what a vast and unwinnable fight we face.”

Groups are thought to be strong: United we stand, divided we fall. E pluribus unum. In reality, though, just one negative person can ruin an entire group, according to research by Will Felps highlighted on This American Life. Felps identified three personality types that can ruin a group: jerks, slackers, and depressive pessimists. One person who fits any of those personality types can make an otherwise productive group 30 to 40 percent worse. “What was sort of eerily surprising,” Felps said of his research, “was how these team members would start to sort of take on” the characteristic of the bad apple. Groups with a jerk in them started being mean to each other. Groups with a depressive pessimist often acted more depressed.

Group dynamics can also give way to group think. Too often, Jake Mohan writes for the Jan-Feb issue of Utne Reader, “Fruitful dissent evaporates, self-defeating tendencies surge, and corrosive emotions destroy the potential of group work.” 

There are strategies to overcome the problems in group dynamics. Mohan writes that “Team leaders can encourage constructive dissent by playing devil’s advocate and disagreeing with a unanimous decision, prompting a timid voice to pipe up.” In Felps’ research, there was one group that didn’t do worse, even with a bad apple. In that group, according to Felps, “There was just one guy who was a particularly good leader. And what he would do was he would ask questions and he would engage all the team members and diffuse conflicts.” The question that Felps is currently researching is whether a good leader can overcome the obstacles provided by all the jerks, slackers, and depressive pessimists just by asking questions. His previous research would suggest that it’s possible.

Image by  Lumaxart , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Some half a million people in the United States experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Symptoms of the condition, also known as winter-onset depression, include anxiety, fatigue, and irritability, and the problems may keep coming back every winter.

The disorder is thought to be caused by the lack of sunlight that some people experience during the winter. It also may be an evolutionary remnant of human hibernation, according to columnist Carol Venolia in Utne Reader’s sister publication, Natural Home magazine. As recently as the early 20^th century, Venolia writes that peasants in both Russia and France would shut themselves in for the cold months, huddling around the stove and barely moving until the spring thaw.

Venolia advocates giving into our hibernation tendencies, at least a little bit. If we did, “We’d sleep more and demand less from ourselves.  We’d be more inward and reflective.”

Image courtesy of OakleyOriginals, licensed under Creative Commons.

Millions of people came together online during the 2008 election, working to get Barack Obama elected president. They donated money, made phone calls from the internet database, organized meetings, and blogged on the candidate’s website. And now, Barack Obama knows about all of them.

Many gave up their information willingly, volunteering their emails to sign up for MyBarackObama.com’s cutting-edge web 2.0 functionality or yielding their cell phone numbers to receive text messages with the latest campaign updates. The campaign’s army of volunteers also took to the phones and to the streets, asking people for information on their political leanings and issues important to them. According to Technology Review, the Democratic National Committee acquired some 223 million pieces of data on potential voters in the final two months before the election.

That information isn’t going away when Obama moves into the White House. People used to joke that the Republican Party was so successful at “microtargeting,” and knowing about potential voters, that they knew what kind pizza that each voters liked. Now, “GOP's data-gathering efforts look like the work of amateurs,” James Grimmelmann writes for the New Republic.

Some have suggested that Obama could use his databases to lobby Congress on legislation and motivate people to contact their representatives. “ Just one problem,” Karl Rove wrote last month in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. “It's illegal. There are statutory prohibitions on the White House from using tax dollars to directly lobby Congress by unleashing emails, calls and visits.” 

The Obama administration could use its massive trove of information for other, more nefarious purposes. “It turns out that the Obama campaign's use of the data is almost completely unregulated,” Grimmelmann writes. MyBarackObama.com’s watery privacy policy states that the campaign can “make personal information available to organizations with similar political viewpoints and objectives, in furtherance of our own political objectives,” leaving the door open for information sharing between the campaign and the NSA, the FBI, or even marketing companies.  

The likelihood of the Obama administration selling its databases for money, or even sharing it with the NSA, seems slim. “The Obama campaign has the means and the opportunity to violate your privacy,” Grimmelmann writes, “but it doesn't have much of a motive.” The FBI and the NSA already have the necessary means to get that kind of information, and the Obama team wouldn’t want their databases compromised by outside influences.

The stronger likelihood, according to Gillian Reagan writing for the New York Observer, is that the Obama campaign will continue on its web 2.0 course. The President-elect has already started releasing videos over YouTube, and has added a “Join the Discussion” feature to their Change.gov website, allowing people to weigh in on issues important to them. According to Reagan, there’s been talk of creating automatically generated voter profiles, with information on people’s personal voting districts and allowing them to easily connect to their elected representatives.

Tech experts are hoping that “Mr. Obama can convince the public to channel the energy wasted on inconsequential Internet tendencies into getting involved in government,” Regan writes. They could leverage their existing information to facilitate a greater connection between the government and other citizens, as long as other issues, including health care, the economy, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, don’t get in the way first.

Image by Quinn Dombrowski, licensed under Creative Commons.

The majesty of the cosmos seems somewhat diminished when scientists refer to planets by alphanumeric designations. David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” would be less impressive were it named “Life on HD 11964 d.” And I doubt that a book called, “Men Are From Kappa CrB b, Women Are From TrES-1 b” would sell very well. We give proper, sometimes impressive names to planets in our solar system, and Christopher Cokinos asks in the American Scholar (article not available online), “Shouldn’t we extend the courtesy to planets that orbit other stars?”

Giving creative names to distant planets could restore a sense of wonder and a greater attachment to the celestial bodies, Cokinos writes. When planets are named after mythological characters, it gives them a back story that amateurs and laypeople can understand better. It also places our planet as “part of a cosmic family and place worth protecting.”

To emphasize the point, here’s David Bowie’s “Life On Mars?”:

In 2007, Japan installed an average of 4.1 robots every hour, according to IEEE Spectrum. And while Japan leads the way in robots per person, the magazine deemed Europe the “epicenter of global automation,” with an average of 50 robots in use for every 10,000 workers. Some $18 billion were spent on robots worldwide in 2007, and futurists don’t see humans stopping their push for automated helpers any time soon. 

In fact, the next 15 years may bring about a “mass hybridisation between humans and robots,” professor Antonio Lopez Pelaez of Spain's National Distance Learning University told the Guardian newspaper. Pelaez predicts a rise in artificial robotic body implants, and believes that humans will develop greater emotional attachments to the machines. “Just as you can see dog owners talking to their pets today,” according to Pelaez, “soon we will be talking to robots.”

Scientists may have figured out why some females eat their male suitors. According to Science News, researchers studying Mediterranean tarantulas have found that cannibalistic female spiders have more offspring and lay eggs earlier than ones who didn’t eat their suitors. The extra time allowed the children of cannibals to grow bigger and stronger than their non-cannibalistic relatives. Some researchers speculate that the eaten males provide “prenatal nutrition” to the offspring.

Image by  Kguirnela  licensed under  Creative Commons .

Simply by looking at a photo, most people are able to figure out if a person would be good in a monogamous relationship or if that person is more interested in casual sex, Mairi Macleod writes for the New Scientist. Men who look more “masculine” and women who are judged more “attractive” were not only thought to be more promiscuous, they actually were more inclined toward flings.

Scientists are trying to explain this phenomenon through biology and evolution. The ability to make accurate snap judgments of people’s sexual proclivities would provide an evolutionary advantage. What scientists continue to grapple with, however, is why people would have such wildly divergent sexual strategies to begin with.

Back in 1991, researchers developed a questionnaire to measure people's level of sexual unrestrictedness, a trait they called “sociosexuality.” Survey respondents were asked seven questions, including questions about their sexual history and if they agreed with statements like, “Sex without love is OK.” From their answers, researchers tried to determine how cavalier respondents were toward sex. You can view the questionnaire here.

From that questionnaire, evolutionary biologists identified differing motivations for infidelity between men and women. Since women run the risk of getting pregnant, men are thought to be evolutionarily wired for more sexual partners. This may be changing, however, according to new research profiled in the New York Times. Tara Parker-Pope writes that “women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men.”

That may be true in the United States, but many factors are at play that could influence the numbers. For example, in cultures with a high ratio of men to women, like China, Japan, and South Korea, “there is a relatively low level of interest in uncommitted casual sex,” according to Macleod. And Parker-Pope reports that social taboos may influence self-reporting of infidelity, where people are less apt to admit infidelity during in-person surveys.

In their quest for more accurate answers on enduring sexual questions, scientists continue to dream up stranger and stranger experiments. In her new book on sexual science, Bonk, author Mary Roach describes the act of having sex with her husband in a 4D ultrasound system, and some experiments even stranger than that. Although the science still leads to unreliable results, Roach told the website Neuronarrative, “we’ve come a long way, certainly.  That’s not to say that the work is done, though.”

Image by  Queereaster , licensed under  Creative Commons .

“With HIV, ignorance is not bliss,” said Dr. Veronica Miller, director of the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research, in a statement released during the organization’s national summit last week. Miller’s comments came after new research presented at the summit showed that routine HIV tests are not exactly routine.

Research found a mere 50 to 100 out of 5,000 emergency rooms across the country routinely screen for HIV, even though the percentage of ER visitors who test positive is much greater than the percentage of the general population that’s known to be infected. Another study found that only 4.9 percent of fully insured patients with “a serious illness suggestive of AIDS” got HIV tests, and yet another revealed that only 36 percent of insured patients who sought treatment for other sexually transmitted diseases were tested for HIV, according to the forum’s statement.

Scientific American notes that these findings come two years after the Centers for Disease Control recommended everyone ages 13 to 64 get an HIV test, but that “many doctors are reluctant to offer it because insurers don’t always pay for the screen,” which can cost anywhere from $15 to $120.

Image by Mark Coggins, licensed under Creative Commons.

For the on-the-go woman, tired of toting a facemask around in her purse, a team of intrepid inventors created the an anti-chemical warfare bra. According to the patent, “Each of the cup sections has a filter device, an inner portion positionable adjacent to the inner area of the user's chest, and an outer portion positionable adjacent to the outer area of the user's chest.” So in the event of a chemical attack, women could just take their clothes off.

The patent was issued in August of 2007, and rescued from obscurity by Improbable Research. I’m still trying to figure out why we haven’t seen this item mass marketed, yet.

Scientists think that human facial expressions have evolved over millions of years for better communication and empathy, Carl Zimmer writes for Discover. Babies instinctively mimic other people’s facial expressions, and some think this is helps them understand what grownups are thinking. Some go further, postulating that facial expressions actually create emotions. “When humans mimic others’ faces,” Zimmer writes, “we don’t just go through the motions. We also go through the emotions.”

It makes sense, then, that emotional exchanges would be irrevocably altered by drugs like Botox. Plastic surgeons use Botox to make people look younger, but the drug also paralyzes facial muscles and inhibits facial expressions. Neuroscientists have tested patients using Dysport, a Botox-like drug found in Europe, by showing them images of angry faces and asking them to mimic or observe the expressions. Using brain scans, the scientists found that Dysport patients had weaker activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that is key to experiencing emotions. This signals a change in the way that the Dysport patients experience emotions. Zimmer writes that through drugs like Botox and Dysport, “we’re tampering with the ancient lines of communication between face and brain that may change our minds in ways we don’t yet understand.”

Scientists believe they may have figured out a way to erase specific memories from animals’ brains, Science News reports. For the experiment, researchers subjected a mouse to a series of electric shocks while in a chamber and while playing a sound. The mouse naturally created a memory associating the sound and the chamber with the shocks. Using a protein known as alpha-CaMKII, the scientists were able to disassociate specific parts of the mouse’s memory, so the subject would become scared when placed in the chamber but not when the sound was made, or vice versa. This way, researchers believe they have discovered a way to target and block certain memories, leaving others in tact. 

The research may, in the future, lead to new ways to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, but Science a Go Go points out that a lot of work needs to be done before the scientists can start erasing specific memories in humans.

People don’t need alcohol to get drunk. The organizers of the “Expectancy Challenge” can prove it using groups of college students, a bar, and both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, Psychotherapy Networker reports. The key is that participants in the don’t know whether they’re being served the alcoholic or the non-alcoholic drinks. A few of the students inevitably end up drinking the non-alcoholic stuff, and still end up feeling drunk. Once they realize that they’ve been duped by their own brains, the program is able to teach them that you don’t need alcohol to have a good time.

Newly proposed rules for the U.S. Department of Agriculture could allow pharmaceuticals to invade the U.S. food supply, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The rules allow “pharma crops,” genetically modified plants designed to create pharmaceuticals or other industrial compounds, to be grown outdoors, instead of banning outdoor production, as the UCS recommended. The UCS released a statement saying that a rush to pass the rules before the end of the Bush administration could lead to the pharma crops contaminating other food-producing plants, and runs the possibility of putting drugs into people’s corn flakes.

Still reeling from the sting of voting irregularities in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, people are gearing up for a fight against voter suppression and disenfranchisement in the 2008 election. Technology is playing a big roll this year, getting out the word about voters’ rights and monitoring attempts to steal people’s votes.

Founded in response to the Florida debacle in 2000, the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition has stepped up its online efforts to disseminate the tools to fight voter suppression. It’s website, www.866ourvote.com, has an easy-to-use interface, allowing people to find out the specifics of how to vote in each state. A hotline (1-866-OUR-VOTE), an RSS feed, a Facebook group, a Twitter page, and a Spanish-language companion site help concerned citizens stay informed on news and receive updates about voter suppression. And according to the organization’s website, Election Protection has partnered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help coordinate information from some 10,000 volunteers monitoring voting irregularities around the country.

A newer effort to help protect the right to vote is the Voter Suppression Wiki, spearheaded by Baratunde Thurston of the blog JackandJillPolitics.com. Like a Wikipedia for voting irregularities, the website is designed to be a user-generated clearinghouse of information and action alerts on voter suppression around the country. There are discussion threads, an index of reported incidents, and an action center where concerned citizens can find out what to do next. A video introducing the site can be seen below.

Though raising awareness about voters' rights may be the key to a safe election, questions still remain over the security of e-voting machines around the country. One solution that’s gaining legitimacy is the idea of using open-source code in voting machines, Mark Anderson writes for IEEE Spectrum. Electronic voting machines currently in use are criticized as “buggy, easily subverted, and impossible to audit,” according to Anderson. Organizations like the Open Voting Consortium are trying to change that by opening the code to everyone, allowing ordinary citizens to test the software and look for possible vulnerabilities. Champions of the open source movement believe that sharing the code would make the voting machines more secure, and the process of voting more democratic.

 Image by  the B's , licensed under  Creative Commons .

John McCain and Barack Obama “represent distinct cognitive styles” and have “starkly different approaches to decision-making,” Jonah Lehrer writes for the Boston Globe. According to Lehrer, the contrast between the two candidates makes the 2008 election not just an assessment of who's right on the issues, but "a referendum on the best mode of thinking.” Lehrer cites psychological research on how good decisions are made to evaluate the strengths of McCain and Obama’s cognitive styles. Some studies imply that gut instincts, which McCain often relies on, are a great asset in complicated decision making. Others contend that good judgment is more likely to spring from active introspection, which is more Obama’s style.

Either approach, according to Lehrer, “is inherently flawed” as an absolute methodology. It’s important for decision makers to “constantly reflect on their own thought process” and to enlist advisers that will challenge their decisions. Psychologist Philip Tetlock tells Lehrer, “We should see self-awareness and even self-doubt as a sign of strength, not as a sign of weakness.” That may be true, but in a presidential campaign, self-doubt is often attacked as unpresidential.

“The ideal president,” Lehrer writes, “won't conform to the current cliches of presidential decision-making. He'll exude confidence in public, but behind the scenes he'll accept his fallibility and seek out those who disagree with him. He won't fixate on rational deliberation - or worship the power of his intuition. The brain is not a hammer, and not every problem is a nail.”

Though National Singles Week (September 21-27) has come to a close, Bella DePaulo assures singletons that not being in a committed relationship does not necessarily equate to loneliness or solitude. DePaulo, a psychology professor and author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Systematically Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, gives the lie to academic studies and conventional wisdom suggesting that married people are happier, and that a single life is an incomplete life.

DePaulo also targets discriminatory practices that favor married people, such as “the 1,136 federal benefits, protections, and privileges that are available only to people who are legally married” and the Family and Medical Leave Act. The 100 million unmarried American voters remain an untapped political demographic, DePaulo writes. And the media portrayal of marriage and couples’ culture is not doing people any favors.

“You are no more likely to live happily ever after if you get married than you were when you were single,” DePaulo writes. The statement could be reassuring or unsettling, demanding on your point of view.

Image by desdetasmania.blogspot.com, licensed by Creative Commons.

A group of UCLA geographers reached a surprising conclusion after analyzing the glow of Iraqi cities and neighborhoods at night: Ethnic cleansing may be the primary reason for the decreased violence in Iraq, not the much-touted “troop surge.”

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods,” said study co-author Thomas Gillespie, in a UCLA press release. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.” The researchers found that the amount of night light in mostly Sunni neighborhoods dropped before the surge and hasn’t bounced back.

The violence decreased in Baghdad, “because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” the study’s lead author John Agnew said in the press release.  “By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.”

(Thanks, Freakonomics.)

Modern science has shot monkeys into space, thrown Twinkies out of windows, and given hallucinogenic drugs to elephants. None of those experiments, however, were strange enough to make Reto Schneider’s list of the nine oddest experiments of all time for the New Scientist. Schneider chose to focus the list on international experiments, including one where Russian volunteers spent 370 days in bed to mimic the effects of weightlessness on the human body. That exercise ended up ruining the marriages of some of the volunteers involved. Schneider also points to a British government study where people were infected with the common cold. A film about the experiment can be seen below:

Biology may have a say in who gets your vote this November. A new study published in Science found a correlation between physiological responses to threats and people’s partisan leanings. Test subjects with firm conservative political views displayed stronger physical reactions to unexpected loud noises and threatening images than those with liberal persuasions. While researchers didn't want the study to be interpreted too broadly, Wired reports, "the results suggest that fear leads to political conservatism."

This isn't the first time researchers have tried to crack the political biological code. A 2005 study by Berkeley psychologist Jack Block looked at the personality traits of a group of toddlers and checked back in with them as politically opinionated adults. Block's conclusions were certainly colorful:

…the relatively Liberal young men, when in nursery school two decades earlier, impressed nursery school teachers as boys who were: resourceful and initializing, autonomous, proud of their blossoming accomplishments, confident and self-involving. The relatively Conservative young men, when young boys, were viewed in nursery school as: visibly deviant, feeling unworthy and therefore ready to feel guilty, easily offended, anxious when confronted by uncertainties, distrustful of others, ruminative, and rigidifying when under stress.

A 2003 study by New York University psychologist John Jost reached similar conclusions. According to Seed, “Jost said his study found that an adult displaying heightened needs to manage uncertainty and threat was associated with an attraction to conservative ideas, while openness to new experiences and cognitive complexity correlated with liberal ideas.”

Not surprisingly, the findings of these studies have invited ample criticism. Selwyn Duke, writing for the conservative American Thinker magazine, called the Block study “psycho-babble,” and came to the conclusion that “the social sciences today mainly serve to provide a specious scientific basis for liberalism.”

Members of the Royal Society, Great Britain's national academy of science, were thrown into a tizzy recently when, according to the New Scientist, the society's director of education Michael Reiss said, “creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view.” In an article for the Guardian, Reiss added that science teachers should be able to engage in serious and respectful discussion with students who have doubts about the theory of evolution.  

Though Reiss was not advocating that creationism be taught as science, some society fellows were furious that Reiss, an ordained priest, would suggest creationism be discussed in science classes. Nobel laureate Harry Kroto told the New Scientist that Reiss's comments, taken at face value, are not entirely problematic, but the messenger is. “There is no way that an ordained minister—for whom unverified dogma must represent a major, if not the major, pillar in their lives can present free-thinking, doubt-based scientific philosophy honestly or disinterestedly.” 

In a letter to the Royal Society calling for Reiss’s resignation (he has since stepped down), Kroto and fellow Nobel prize winners, Richard Roberts and John Sulston, emphasized the point that as a deeply religious man, Reiss never should have been appointed to his position in the first place: “Who on earth thought that he would be an appropriate Director of Education, who could be expected to answer questions about the differences between science and religion in a scientific, reasoned way?” 

Their comments raise a big philosophical question: Can a person represent both science and faith? Or are science and religion so fundamentally different that a person must choose one before the other? 

Many gardeners feel that digging in the dirt and planting seeds helps them relax. Now researchers have found that gardening can have real physical and psychological health benefits. According to an article in Psychology Today (article not available online), gardening exposes people to soil-borne microbes called Mycobacterium vaccae that can stimulate their immune systems. The same microbes also boost the levels serotonin in mice, much like prozac and other antidepressants. Some researchers think that depriving children from playing in the dirt may have led to the recent rise in immune disorders, including asthma. Daniel Marano writes for Psychology Today that “the components of the soil itself might be as critical to human heath as the finest fruits and veggies grown in it.”

Even the most intellectual of teenagers can be dumb sometimes. Neurologically, this makes sense. “It’s a paradoxical time of development,” Frances E. Jensen told Harvard Magazine. “These are people with very sharp brains, but they’re not quite sure what to do with them.” 

New research suggests that adolescent brains are only 80 percent developed. Some sections have high-learning potential while other parts are still unconnected. MRI scans suggest that brain development isn’t finished until people are in their late 20s, flying in the face of previously held beliefs. The researchers hope the results will help parents and children understand adolescents a little better.

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily.)

One of the legacies being left by the Bush administration is a combative and regressive relationship between science and the government. This falling out has led concerned citizens and members of the scientific community to demand a public debate on science and technology in the 2008 presidential race.

The people behind Sciencedebate2008.com are spearheading a petition to make this debate a reality. Signatories include Nobel Prize winners, university presidents, and a bi-partisan group of politicians. Their mission statement reads:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

(Thanks, Commonweal Institute.)

—Erik Helin

Although they’re usually hidden beneath white lab coats and pocket protectors, science geeks get body art, too. The blog Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium chronicles some of the coolest, dorkiest, and most obscure science tattoos on the net.

(Thanks, Columbia Journalism Review.)

—Bennett Gordon

Image by Richard.

One of most expansive science news sources around, the New Scientist, is up for sale, the International Herald Tribune reports. The weekly magazine has been covering every aspect of the scientific community since the 1950s. Now their parent company, Reed Elsevier, has decided to unload all of their publications, including Variety and Publisher’s Weekly. Anybody got a few extra million dollars lying around?

—Bennett Gordon

Like all science fairs, you could tell which projects had parental help and which ones didn’t at the 2008 Home School Science Fair. The blue-ribbon winning project on dinosaurs and people roaming the earth together, with the color photos and the perfectly cut lettering, probably had parental help. The one explaining how a broken motor disproves Darwin's theory of evolution, with the roughly cut pieces of paper and the penciled in chicken scratches, probably did not.

Every diorama in the Home School Science Fair, which took place inside a shopping mall in Roseville, Minnesota, had a biblical quote attached to it. A young woman whose project involved teaching her dog how to run circles between her legs decorated the words: “If you love me, you will obey what I command.” (John 14:15) in pink lace fabric. This quote got to the crux of the science fair, in my opinion: parental commandment. These parents pulled their children out of school, away from their peers, and said, “Now prove that Darwin was wrong.”

The projects all used classic high school science language: Start with a hypothesis, move on to testing, and then draw a conclusion. The problem was that much of the science was backwards. In good science, you start with a piece of evidence and try to find a truth. With creationist science, you start with a truth (the Bible), and try to find the evidence.

Before I arrived at the science fair, I planned to engage some of the children and parents. I wanted to ask them about creationism and education. Once I got there, however, I was overcome with a sense of pity for the children. They stood around the suburban mall, in the prime of the most awkward years of their life, being forced to preach blather. I didn’t want to exploit them for a cheap laugh while their parents and the company Answers in Genesis (whose literature was scattered throughout the event) were so clearly exploiting them to proselytize. The children’s gangly limbs and bad acne reminded me how vulnerable I was at their age and how easily someone could have brainwashed me.

I overheard one parent saying, “One thing is for sure, a lot of learning has gone on this week.” I would change that statement a bit: I’d say a lot of indoctrinating went on that week. Hopefully, a good college professor, and a few years of therapy, will help these children turn all that “learning” around.

—Bennett Gordon

Philosophers. Sort of.

Why? Because they haven’t equipped us with the kind of thinking that would help us wrap our minds around the problem and devise a way to stop it. That is to say, they haven't taught us how to change the way we live in the world.

To do that, we’d need a wholly different kind of academic inquiry, writes Nicholas Maxwell, author of the recently revised From Knowledge to Wisdom, in the latest issue of Philosophy Now (subscription required):

Global warming is the outcome of the way we live, and in order to arrest it we need to change the way we live... Having a kind of academic inquiry that gave intellectual priority to articulating, and working out how to tackle, problems of living, would have helped enormously with alerting the public to the problem of global warming, and to what needs to be done in response to it.

But we have not had, and still do not have, academic inquiry of this type—devoted to helping humanity learn how to tackle its problems in increasingly rationally cooperative ways. Instead we have science—this long tradition of inquiry devoted to improving knowledge and technological know-how.

Take that, science.

In fact, Maxwell isn’t railing against science per se, but rather “science without wisdom.” And this wisdom comes from a sense of purpose: Knowledge should not be an end in itself, but rather a means toward resolving a problem.

So what would this living-oriented academic inquiry look like? Maxwell elaborates in a short piece for the New Statesman:

Academic inquiry as a whole would become a kind of people’s civil service, doing openly for the public what actual civil services are supposed to do in secret for governments. Academia would actively seek to educate, rather than simply study, the public.

—Hannah Lobel 

Democracy relies on the media to make its citizens well-informed and meaningful participants in civic life. This, of course, doesn’t always happen, especially when you're relying on TV news.

That’s when the fact-checkers come in. In the November/December issue of Utne Reader, Eric Kelsey and I wrote an article on the "fifth estate": journalists who devote themselves to checking other journalists’ facts.

The Columbia Journalism Review, a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award nominee, jumped into this fray once again with two new offerings. The publication first relaunched the Campaign Desk, which looks at the presidential race. Here’s CJR on the mission of the Campaign Desk:

We’ll look at who's doing interesting, original reporting and who's being taken in by spin; we’ll focus on how and why the narratives that come to define a candidate get started and relentlessly repeated, and if they are off base, we’ll try to set them straight. We’re on the lookout for misleading statistics, partial truths and oversimplifications, glittering generalities, and other language crimes that can infect the coverage.

Campaign Desk writers have covered topics as diverse as journalists demanding coffee from John Edwards at an all-night campaign stop during the Iowa caucus to giving the full story behind a scuffle between an AP reporter and Mitt Romney.

The second offering by CJR is The Observatory, which of rakes through the not-always-peer-reviewed muck of science journalism. The Observatory opened with an article about how new, collaborative web-technology is affecting science writing. With all the spin, inaccuracies, and half-truths bandied about in the media, these CJR projects will have their work cut out for them.

—Brendan Mackie

Image by Justin Henry licensed under Creative Commons.

Poring over charts and graphs or peering into particle accelerators can be an essential part of science, but Jonah Lehrer, author of the book Proust Was A Neuroscientist, argues in Seed that scientists should be paying more attention to art. Artists, Lehrer argues, can describe complex ideas in new ways, making unexpected analogies between the mysterious and the tangible. This can help scientists of all stripes understand their world better. Lehrer imagines a world in which science and art don’t face each other with the awkward silence of girls and boys at the fifth grade dance. He wants the two cultures to merge into one, because in the end they have the same goal: to understand human experience.

Santa Clara University is doing its part to meld art and science through an innovative class led by a science professor and a dance teacher. The two have teamed up to teach a course explaining basic physics through dance. Writing for the January issue of Physics World [excerpt available online], the professors explain that the course gives students “both the scientific tools to measure and understand as well as the personal experience of forces and motion. The physics involved is simply the mechanics of a moving body under the influence of gravity; the goal is to understand the physical principles that govern the dancer’s motion.”

—Brendan Mackie

Last May I proudly received my college diploma and promptly forgot most of what I’d learned since high school. Six months later, my brain had atrophied to the point where all I had to show for my fancy education was a set of pretentious anecdotes to throw around at dinner parties. And I’m rarely invited to dinner parties.

I decided that I needed to exercise my mind before my diploma became a glorified paperweight. After minutes of thinking, I came up with a plan: I would listen to free university lectures online, plugging up the holes in my education. I thought the project could chart a path to self-discovery and the heights of genius.

The first days of my project were exciting. Prestigious universities from Yale to MIT offer recorded lectures online, and many lists of courses can be found through Google. The litany of subjects that I could study with just a few clicks stunned me. Would I choose to brush up on my long-neglected scientific knowledge? Or would I study the history of coffee?

My inaugural lecture was a course by Edmund Bertschinger and Edwin F. Taylor called Exploring Black Holes: General Relativity and Astrophysics from MIT’s iTunes U. That sounded like a challenge. Within minutes I was watching a pair of upper-level physicists explaining how upper-level physicists understand the nature of time and space by looking through black-holes. It was just like college: I understood what was going on, but just barely.

That night I went to a swanky party and amazed everyone by dropping cool phrases like “Hawking Radiation” and “Super Black Holes”—phrases I didn’t know existed that morning. I celebrated my success by devouring the host’s wide spread of hors d’oeuvres: the taste of wisdom.

The next morning, pushing through the grimy darkness of a post-party headache, I forced myself to subscribe to a multitude of new courses. I downloaded a Stanford talk that featured the Dalai Lama chatting with neuroscientists and a course on “the built environment.” In college I had heard of these ideas (I think I wrote a couple essays about them) but now I thought I’d actually learn about them.

Weeks later, I have come to admit defeat. As of today, I have failed to listen to a single course in its entirety, though my goal was to cram three semesters of academic work into three weeks. My visions of unscrambling the mysteries of the universe and impressing women have yet to be realized. I now admit a taint of over-ambition in my project. I have realized with gathering horror that the pressures of post-college life have robbed me of my idle time to learn.

One day I may return to my attempt at self-education. For now, though, I will try to accomplish the more manageable goals that escaped my ambition during my college tenure: eating three meals a day and getting semi-regular haircuts. That territory, for the time being, is uncharted enough.

—Brendan Mackie