The fast food giant KFC has started marketing “Kentucky Grilled Chicken” as a “better-for-you” alternative to their famous fried meals. The meals are billed as having fewer calories, fewer fat grams, and they also contain the cancer-causing chemical PhIP, according to Good Medicine magazine. In fact, all chicken and other meats will produce this chemical when cooked at high temperatures. That’s why the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the company that publishes Good Medicine, is suing KFC, McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Chili’s, Applebee’s, and others in an attempt to warn customers about the cancer-linked chemical. PCRM president Neal Barnard is quoted saying, “Grilled Chicken Contains carcinogens, and consumers deserve to know about it.”

Of course, PCRM isn’t too happy about the Double Down “sandwich”—which replaces bread with pieces of fried chicken—either.

Source: Good Medicine  

The millions of cameras currently keeping a silent watch over London have caused alarm among civil libertarians. The Orwellian police state or the unblinking panopticon of surveillance, however, has failed to materialized so far. There are currently 4.3 million cameras in the United Kingdom, but according to Jamie Malanowski in the Washington Monthly, “the practical effect on a person’s behavior is negligible.”

Rather than preventing crimes, the cameras have proven most helpful in catching perpetrators after crimes have already happened. The massive numbers of cameras are too disjointed, for now, to provide a measure of central control. Malanowski reports that police aren’t trying very hard to link them up, either. “Perhaps because bureaucracies in the UK are mighty forces for inefficiency and inaction, perhaps because abuses have been reined in by good English common sense,” Malanowski writes, “the cameras have been deployed in a largely benign way.”

One company is aiming change the disjointed nature of England’s massive surveillance infrastructure by putting crowds, rather than the government, in charge. Kris Kotarski, reports for the Calgary Herald that the British company Internet Eyes is allowing people to anonymously monitor some closed circuit televisions (CCTVs), and make money while doing it.

Internet Eyes turns surveillance into a game, where anonymous users try to spot shoplifting or vandalism on CCTVs, and then report the crimes for possible cash rewards. The company charges its viewers £20 per month and £1 per crime alert, and offers users a chance at £1,000 per month as a reward for reporting the most crime. It’s like “crowdsourcing” repressive surveillance of a country, or, as Kotarski calls it, a move toward “iPod fascism.”

Source:  Washington Monthly , Calgary Herald 

Image by JapanBlack, licensed under Creative Commons.

When a disputed Kenyan election turned violent in 2007, an organization called Ushahidi emerged to map the destruction and killings that broke out across the country. Ushahidi, which means ''testimony'' in Swahili, used text messages from eyewitnesses to create an easily understood graphic depiction of the violence taking place. Their software was later used in the Congo and by Al Jazeera to depict the war in Gaza that took place at the end of 2008.

Ushahidi is just one of many nonprofits, governmental agencies, and human rights lobbying agencies using maps for humanitarian work. Unfortunately, these organizations are notoriously bad at sharing data, according to Patrick Meier. To solve this problem, Meier recently started the International Network of Crisis Mappers (INCM), which aims to connect people and organizations using maps for good.

When a natural disaster strikes or violence breaks out in a country, a map can change the nature of that crisis. The simple act of getting people in front of a map and asking for input can build consensus between warring parties. Maps can also ensure that humanitarian resources are used more effectively and get to the people who need them more quickly.

Crisis mapping is more than simply mapping crises, according to Meier. New technology—including text messages, Twitter, and satellite imagery—is changing the way that data for maps are being collected. Anyone with a cell phone can now help update aid workers on natural disasters or violent altercations in real time. Designers are constantly coming up with new and interesting ways to create visualizations of that data to make it look more appealing. Researchers are then using the data from maps to look for patterns. The information and maps are then pushed out into the field to give support tools to the activists and the nonprofits trying to help the people caught in a crisis.

Organizations don't always want to spend time and resources sharing data in the midst of a crisis, but more collaboration is often needed. Meier’s INCM makes it easier and less time-consuming for organizations to collaborate with each other, so that everyone can start helping people more effectively. When typhoons recently rocked the Philippines, for example, INCM connected a half dozen groups, including Open Street Map, to share information that may have helped deploy humanitarian aid more effectively. Meier hopes this burgeoning movement will continue to connect different mapping projects and humanitarian agencies to make collaboration happen more quickly and easily.

Source: International Network of Crisis Mappers

Image from  Ushahidi .

To view examples of crisis maps, watch the slideshow below:

Prosthetics engineer and Utne visionary Jonathan Kuniholm was interviewed on NPR this week. Fresh Air sit-in host Dave Davies spoke to Kuniholm about his work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program. If you missed the episode live, you can still catch Kuniholm talking about open-source prostheses and his hopes for the future of the industry, or check out the previous coverage we’ve done on him, including this online exclusive, “The Hype and Hope of Prosthetics.”

Source: NPR

Just because people are intelligent doesn’t mean they’re smart. Though IQ tests do pretty well measuring intelligence, they don’t test for rational thought, according to the New Scientist. The magazine quotes cognitive psychologist Jonathan Evans saying, “IQ is only part of what it means to be smart.” 

Relying on IQ tests can be especially problematic in education. A new documentary from American RadioWorks details the way that the use of IQ tests reinforced racial inequalities in the United States during the 1950s. According to the show, preschools were developed to close that gap and raise IQ scores for young African Americans. People used the tests again to discredit preschools, after it was shown that the schools didn’t really help people’s IQs  in the long-term. Recent studies, however, have found that preschool has a long-term beneficial effect on people’s lives, even if it doesn’t raise their test scores.

For now, there’s no standard test for measuring people’s capacity for rational thought. The New Scientist highlights the work Keith Stanovich, author of the book What Intelligence Tests Miss, who believes that a test measuring “rationality-quotient (RQ)” could be helpful in measuring how smart people are. The magazine includes a few counter-intuitive questions that measure how smart you are, beyond your intelligence. Here’s an example:

If it takes five machines 5 minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?

Think about it… the answer might not be obvious.

Sources: New Scientist, American RadioWorks 

Image by  GIHE , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Will the world end on 2012? NASA says no. In fact, the NASA website has a page specifically dedicated to debunking the myths surrounding 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar. The website states unequivocally, “credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.” Anyone who says otherwise is propagating “an Internet hoax,” a “bait-and-shift,” or just bad information. NASA takes a shot at an upcoming film called 2012 stating: “Impressive movie special effects aside, Dec. 21, 2012, won't be the end of the world as we know.”

The story makes for a great trailer, though:

(Thanks, Marginal Revolution.)

Site: NASA 

In just four years, everyone on earth may be an author. When books were the dominant form of publishing, a small minority of the world’s population had their words published. Now, Twitter, Facebook, and social networking sites are making authors into the majority. From the year 1400 to 2000, according to Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in Seed, the number of published authors rose by tenfold every century. For the past decade, authorship has grown by tenfold every year. Eventually, the authors predict that everyone on earth will be published.

Near-universal authorship is changing society, Pelli and Bigelow write. People are “trading privacy for influence,” and businesses and governments are being forced to adapt to the power that individuals now wield. People who fret about illiteracy throughout the world may soon extend their concern to people who can’t publish.

That concern is misguided, Albert Jay Nock writes for the American Conservative. Universal literacy creates near-universal mediocrity in literature, according to Nock. Teaching the world to read creates a market for schlock that forces worthwhile literature out of the market. In the article, which is fittingly behind a paywall, Nock writies:

The average literate person being devoid of reflective power but capable of sensation, his literacy creates a demand for a large volume of printed matter addressed to sensation; and this form of literature, being the worst in circulation, fixes the value of all the rest and tends to drive it out.

Nock laments mass literacy for the bad writing it creates. He should prepare for mass authorship.

Source: Seed, American Conservative (subscription required)

Image by  Foxtongue , licensed under  Creative Commons .

UPDATE: We tried to reach Albert Jay Nock for a comment, but found the conversation a trifle one-sided. Indeed, Nock has been dead for more than half a century. We regret the error.

People aren’t all straight, gay, or bisexual. Scientists have begun taking notice of a significant number of people who identify as asexual. Writing for the Scientific American, Jesse Bering descries asexuality as, “the absence of desire and no sexual interest in males or females, only a complete and lifelong lacuna of sexual attraction toward any human being (or non-human being).”

An estimated 1 percent of British residents describe themselves as “never having a sexual attraction to anymore,” according to a 2004 study cited by Bering. That’s just slightly lower than the 3 percent of people who identified themselves as attracted to the same sex. An aversion to sex can stem from childhood trauma or chemical imbalances, but some research points to asexuality as being a true fourth sexual orientation that’s “due neither to genetic anomaly or environmental assault.”

One 18-year-old asexual described her feelings to the University of Michigan saying:

I just don’t feel sexual attraction to people. I love the human form and can regard individuals as works of art and find people aesthetically pleasing, but I don’t ever want to come into sexual contact with even the most beautiful of people.

Source: The Scientific American

Students who want to learn something should probably try failing first. According to new research highlighted in the Scientific American, “learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.” In other words, people who take a test that they are bound to fail before studying the material, actually end up learning better. People who fail first remember things better an longer than people who don’t. According to the article, this could have profound effects on educational programs that specifically try to avoid students making errors. The authors write: “Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning.”

Source: Scientific American 

Hershey’s chocolates, for the most part, aren’t really chocolate. They’re “the terrible bastard children of chocolate and corporate frugality,” according to Meg Favreau, writing for The Smart Set. Hershey’s, and other industrial chocolate makers, mix their real coco butter with other vegetable oils. This makes it cheaper, but it also makes it something other than chocolate. For now, the FDA requires Hershey’s to call its industrial byproducts “chocolate flavored” instead of real chocolate, according to Favreau, though the website refers to the candies as “chocolate bars” and “milk chocolate.” That may change, however, as industry groups lobby the FDA to relax its definition of “chocolate” to include other vegetable oils.

Source:  The Smart Set  

On Sunday, November 8, atheists will launch a coordinated prayer attack against God. Nonbelievers around the world will hurl a bevy of meaningless prayers at God, coordinated by Facebook, in an effort to inundate God’s prayer receptors and force them offline. The offensive is based on the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that have been staged against Iran, Georgia, and the Global Atheist Convention website.

In true nonbeliever fashion, athiest blogger PZ Myers responded, “I won't be able to join in, because whatever I have planned for that time, whatever it may be, will be far more interesting and productive than babbling to an invisible man.” A commenter on the Facebook page gave his RSVP as, “i'm probably gonna forget, but if i don't, sure.”

If any prayers go unanswered on November 8, this coordinated attack could be the reason why.

(Thanks, Net Effect.)

Source: Facebook 

Image by gruntzooki, licensed under Creative Commons.

Religions often have strict rules regarding treatment of the dead, which can be problematic when local authorities need to perform autopsies. Writing for The Tablet, Sarah Weinman points out that Orthodox Jews often object to autopsies, citing Jewish laws that say people must be buried within 24 hours of death, and that the body must not be disfigured in any way during that time. Autopsies, according to some, violate those rules.

 It’s not just Jews either. According to Weinman, “the Amish, Hmong, and many Muslims also try to avoid the procedure.” In response, forensic pathologists have been working hard to respect religious laws where possible and to come up with alternatives. Some pathologists now perform “virtual autopsies” that use CT scans and MRIs to get the information they need without the invasiveness of a traditional autopsy. The scans aren’t as comprehensive as a full autopsy, but they’re becoming increasingly accepted by religious communities, and they’re far less expensive, too.

Source: The Tablet

The people who gave the world email, the iPhone, and the text message now want to save the world from information overload. In the latest issue of the electronic engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, Nathan Zeldes explains how technologists are trying to save people from the constant interruptions, irritations, and maddening deluge of information that’s ubiquitous in daily life. Zeldes, a former productivity guru for Intel Corp, writes that the current situation resembles the “tragedy of the commons” scenario: “Everyone would prefer that there be fewer messages, but nobody can afford to be the first to cut back on sending them.”

Companies have sent out memos and instituted policies, but that’s not always enough. Engineers have taken matters into their own hands, coming up with software that would help people prioritize their incoming messages and shield their personal time. Zeldes points to Priorities, a prototype program released by Microsoft that analyzes incoming messages to predict their importance. It also is designed to monitor the recipient’s activity, to see if that person should be interrupted. There are also programs like ClearContext Professional that is designed to help people clean up their inboxes.

Before implementing those new programs or any new technologies, Zeldes writes, “we should figure out how best to use it in the cultural context it will inhabit.” That way people won’t be plagued with more technology that's designed to improve productivity but ends up just wasting itme.

Source: IEEE Spectrum 

Image by  Sammy0716 , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The wisdom of crowds has become a modern motif, a “cultural mantra” adopted with zeal across party and discipline lines, Jonathan V. Last observes for In Character. Conservatives clicked with its endorsement of the free market; liberals connected with its egalitarian appeal. “And nearly everyone associated with the Internet glommed on because they understood that it was, in large part, an exaltation of the new medium that placed the World Wide Web near the center of an entire world view,” he writes.

However many good things have come from crowd-sourcing, though, Last cautions that we devalue the wisdom of individuals at our own peril. Sometimes, for example, crowds are fooled: Enron’s stock was valued at over $40/share just months before the company declared bankruptcy, he notes, proffering the parallel tale of six Cornell business school students who, studying Enron for a research project in 1998, “concluded that the company was a house of cards.”

What appears to be crowd consensus can also be skewed by a handful of vociferous or aggressive members. Those rating systems on sites like Amazon.com? “New research confirms what some may already suspect: Those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users,” Kristina Grifantini reports for Technology Review.

For Last, the real loss is creativity: “Even if crowds can reach wise decisions, they don’t create,” he writes. “Genius and inspiration are the province of individuals.”

Sources: In Character, Technology Review

I have no idea what to do with this information about insults and anger from the New Scientist, and here it is:

If you really must offend someone, wait until they are lying down: people handle anger differently when they're lying on their backs, compared with sitting upright.

University students who heard personal insults while seated exhibited brain activity linked to so-called "approach motivation" – the desire to approach and explore something. This potential urge disappeared when students took their insults lying down, despite their anger remaining.

"In the upright or leaning forward state one might be more likely to attack," says Eddie Harmon-Jones, a cognitive scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the study. "Maybe in the reclining state you're more likely to brood."

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Source: New Scientist 

Nobody ever talks to the cadaver handler. Until now. Cadaver handler Chris Dolph spends his days readying corpses for Stanford’s Willed Whole Body Program, and he tells Stanford all about it. The university processes up to 70 cadavers a year to supply anatomy courses and medical training sessions, and it takes two days and a secret blend of solutions to embalm each body.

“A typical mortuary might use two to three gallons of fluids to preserve a body for a funeral,” Stanford reports, “but Dolph uses up to 25 gallons per body to ensure that each one arrives at the anatomy lab in top condition—even though a body can be held for two years or more before being dissected.” Dolph says he believes his cadavers would even remain unchanged for 300 years, if preserved that long.

Source: Stanford 

There’s a good reason that people say you should “sleep on it” when facing a tough problem—it helps! A new study suggests dreaming is beneficial for problem solving. Psychology Today reports, “In REM sleep, cortical activation spreads from whatever one’s been pondering to marshal associated ideas, thanks to changes in levels of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and acetylcholine.” Jasper Johns, Jack Nicklaus and many others have credited their dreams for successful ideas. A co-author of the study adds: “So many times, we already have the solution somewhere in our brain. It just needs an extra 'boost' before it can be accessed.”

Source: Psychology Today

If people knew how bad fast food is, they’d eat less, right? Not according to a new study highlighted by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. New York City recently enacted a law that forces chain restaurants to post the calorie counts on menus. Data published in Health Affairs journal found that about half of the people they interviewed hadn’t noticed the calorie counts (pdf), and only 15 percent took the labels into consideration when making choices. What’s worse, after inspecting the respondents food receipts, the researchers found that overall, people were actually buying more calories than before the law was put into place. Drum reports, “The results aren't statistically significant, though, so basically all the researchers can really say is that the law (so far) hasn't had any effect.” For advocates fighting obesity and fast food, the study seems to say activists should find different tack.

Source: Mother Jones 

For the past ten years Lockie Gary, a former U.S. ranch manager and livestock reproductive specialist has been living in countries like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Iraq, leading dairy training programs to help people establish local dairies in their war torn surroundings.

Supported by Minnesota-based Land O’Lakes, Inc. and protected by the U.S. Marines, Lockie is currently teaching Iraqi widows in Fallujah how to make their cows more comfortable in a war zone, and how to make a living by yielding higher quality milk, locally, writes Graeme Wood in the September issue of The Atlantic. He writes:

Somehow in a counterinsurgency where communicating with the civilian population has proved difficult, Gary’s cattle sounds and imitations of newborn calves, or calves in the late stages of Clostridial infection make immediate sense to his students. Gary squats a little when he pretends to be a calf with the scours (that’s calf diarrhea, for the uninitiated), and the veiled women of Fallujah nod in appreciation.

Image by eierea, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: The Atlantic

Psychologists are experimenting with mindfulness exercises to fight eating disorders, according to the Psychotherapy Networker. A treatment program known as the Enhancing Mindfulness for the Prevention of Weight Regain (empower) uses breathing and visualization exercises to help people better understand their thoughts, emotions, and associations with food.

“People who struggle with their emotions and thoughts often externalize their psychological battles,” according to the article, “by denying themselves nourishment to starve unwelcome feelings or overeating to smother them.” The exercises are designed to help people better understand those emotions and empower them to change their diets for the better.

Source: Psychotherapy Networker 

José Gómez-Márquez builds strange-looking medical equipment: pregnancy tests that look like Lego kits, inhalers inspired by plastic toy helicopters, and centrifuges made from toilet plungers. His inventions aren’t destined for high-tech hospitals——they’re headed to poor countries where electricity, high-tech medical materials, and health personnel are often scarce.

Gómez-Márquez’s innovative work earned him a spot in Technology Review’s TR35, the magazine’s annual list of innovators under 35: He’s their 2009 humanitarian of the year.

His designs are practical, functional, and innovative, and one of his new projects aims to spread that spirit around. “He is now creating development kits for medical technolog­y—sort of like Erector sets for medical professionals—which will initially be used in Nicaragua,” writes Technology Review. “The kits will enable doctors and medical students to devise diagnostics, drug delivery devices, microfluidic chips, and more.”

Read more about Gómez-Márquez’s incredible story, which involves lots of childhood visits to doctors’ offices in his home country of Honduras, and watch him demonstrate some of his inventions in this short video.

Source: Technology Review

People in need of a creative boost should take a long nap, according to new research highlighted by ScienCentral. The researchers found that naps increase people’s ability to solve problems creatively, but only if the nap includes REM, the deep sleep when dreams occur. REM sleep happens only after about an hour of sleeping, so a long nap is recommended. According to researcher Sara Mednick, “if you take a nap with REM sleep, you’re actually going to be boosting your ability to make these new associations in creative ways.” Mednick has tried to put her findings to good use by taking a nap at least three times each week.

You can watch a video of the study below:

Source: ScienCentral

Image by procsilas, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Obama administration has plans to use science as a kind of diplomacy, increasing scientific and technological collaboration with Muslim-majority countries. They’d better watch out, according to Sheila Jasanoff in Seed Magazine. There’s a minefield of misperceptions that America’s new science diplomats should avoid, Jasanoff writes, including the basic idea that “science diplomacy will promote cross-cultural understanding.” Science today is often too wrapped up in corporate interests to function as an effective diplomat. Jasanoff writes that people need to decide: “Which versions of science and technology will our expert ambassadors carry when they travel abroad: science for the people or science for profit and power?”

Source: Seed Magazine 

By age 32, nearly 3 out of every 5 people will have suffered from depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence, or marijuana dependence, according to a new study highlighted by the Science News. That’s almost double what previous studies estimated. And the numbers could get higher, the older people get.

Does the data show that more people are getting sick? Not necessarily. This study followed people over time, while most previous studies relied on self-reports. According to the article, some have suggested “many adults forget periods of depression, and even hospitalizations for depression, from earlier in their lives.”

The study also calls into question what people define as a “disorder,” according to the article. Some have suggested that the evidence is a call-to-action for more urgent care. Others, including New York University social work professor Jerome Wakefield, believes that defining “depression” too broadly risks “pathologizing the entire population and opening the way for increases in medicating our society.”

Depression sufferers could also try taking Progenitorivox (video below), but just be careful for the side effects.

(Thanks, MindHacks.)

Source: Science News, Prescription for Change 

The fact that college tuition costs thousands of dollars each year is accepted as fact in most of the United States. A new web service called StraighterLine, profiled by the Washington Monthly, wants to bring the price down to just $99 per month. For the cost of a nice dinner for two people, StraighterLine students get courses “designed and overseen by professors with PhDs,” and real live tutors “available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.”

The company is currently trying to take business away from the big introductory college classes, where hundreds of students pack into lecture halls, often taught by grad students or adjunct faculty. StraighterLine purports to be more responsive to the students’ needs at a fraction of the cost of big institutions, and even cheaper than most online universities. The problem, according to Washington Monthly, is that big schools often use the money from the big introductory classes to fund the “libraries, basketball teams, classical Chinese poetry experts, and everything else.”

A company like StraighterLine has the potential to disrupt the entire college business model and make things very uncomfortable for a lot of big-name universities. According to the article, StraighterLine, and other institutions like it will “seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.”

Source: Washington Monthly 

Image by  taberandrew , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

A frosty, cold beer can aid patients before and after surgery, according to the anecdotal evidence in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. The article details the many benefits that beer has over acetaminophen—like Tylenol—including helpful vitamins, minerals, and sleep-aid properties. Drinking beer also involves the physical activity of arm curls, which is largely absent in the administration of acetaminophen. Medicate responsibly.

Source:  Journal of Irreproducible Results (Article not available online.)

Family feuds can be deadly, especially when the two sides have armies. Research reported by Foreign Policy indicates that “countries are far more likely to go to war with other countries whose populations are genetically similar to their own.” The problem isn’t simply that genetically similar populations are close to each other. The trend holds true even when correcting for proximity by removing countries that border each other or are close together. Since genetically similar people tend to have more interaction, the research validates the old saw: Familiarity breeds contempt.

Source: Foreign Policy 

Thinking about love makes people better at creative problem solving, while sex is more shortsighted. That's according to research highlighted by Miller-McCune. The idea is that love “is dreamy, and dreams are linked to creativity. Sex, on the other hand, is about achieving an immediate goal.”

Source: Miller-McCune

Image by  JLStricklin , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Iranian bloggers who went online to protest the disputed election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad owe a debt of gratitude to the spiritual dissident group, the Falun Gong, according to Eli Lake in The New Republic.

Falun Gong practitioners working with the Global Internet Freedom Consortium were instrumental in developing an anti-censorship tool called Freegate, which was designed to hide internet activity from the watchful eye of the Chinese government. All mentions of the Falun Gong are heavily censored in China, because, Lake reports, “the Chinese government views the Falun Gong almost the way the United States views Al Qaeda.”

Iranian internet users were able to use the software for a short time to protest the disputed election results, until the tool’s popularity in Iran overwhelmed the group’s servers and they were forced to shut it down.

Freegate is not the only tool that dissidents use to skirt censorship on the web. Lake also mentions the software Tor, profiled in the September-October issue of Utne Reader, an anti-censorship program that is funded in part by the U.S. government. The Falun Gong has urged the United States to fund Freegate, too, but support has not been forthcoming.

As good as programs like Freegate and Tor are at stymieing government censorship, China, Iran, Russia, and other countries are working feverishly on technology to fight back. Lake writes, “the race to beat the Internet censors is a central battle in the global struggle for democracy—a cat-and-mouse game where the fate of regimes could rest in no small measure on the work of the Falun Gong and others who write programs to circumvent Web censorship.”

Source: The New Republic 

Image by  HappyInGeneral , licensed under  Creative Commons .

As of January 1 of 2009, the state of California has the right to take a DNA sample from everyone arrested in the state, analyze it, and stick the profile in a criminal database. This applies whether or not the person is ever convicted or even charged with a crime. According to Michael Risher in GeneWatch, the new law allows “a single law enforcement officer the power to place people under lifetime genetic surveillance. “

The new law could also magnify racial disparities in the criminal justice system. “Given the ubiquity of racial profiling” in this country, Risher writes, “people of color will largely populate the databanks.” This places people of color under increased scrutiny from the law for the rest of their lives. He writes, “a racially skewed databank will produce racially skewed results.”

Source:  GeneWatch  

Imagine a contact lens that could connect you to the internet, providing information about what you see in a format invisible to other people. Or a contact lens, powered by radio frequencies or solar power, that could monitor cholesterol or glucose levels for diabetics. Babak A. Parviz, writing for IEEE Spectrum, is already working on the technology, and has successfully tested early versions on live rabbits. Parviz envisions the contact lens turning into a platform like an iPhone, where developers create new applications and inventions to improve the human eye.

Source: IEEE Spectrum 

Having the option to order a salad makes people more likely to order the double bacon cheeseburger or the least healthy item on the menu. And the more self control people have, the more likely they’ll be influenced to eat unhealthily, according to Psychology Today. There are often two competing goals when people order off the menu: The long-term aspiration of eating healthy, and the short-term desire to indulge yourself. Just looking at a healthy option on the menu can be enough to vicariously satisfy the healthy-eating goal, making people more likely to run for the indulgent foods.

According to the study in Psychology Today, “Twice as many subjects tended to choose the least healthy item when the choices included a healthy option, compared to when one was not available.”

The salads at fast food restaurants serve as a “denying the denier” item, according to Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He writes, “These healthier menu items hand the child who wants to eat fast food a sharp tool with which to chip away at his parents objections. ‘But Mom, you can get the salad…’” The new research from Psychology Today shows that “just because consumers say they want to see healthy foods on a menu doesn’t mean they will order them.”

Source: Psychology Today (article not available online), The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Jeff Clark makes my brain hurt, but first he makes me laugh. He's been charting word density on Twitter at his blog Neoformix, and the resulting line graphs are fabulous. You must see his time of day word correlations, where he picks a "word of interest" (in the exaple above, it's "drunk") and shows two words with a positive correlation and two with a negative correlation—all organized by time of day.

Source: Neoformix

New York public schools are giving students cell phones and rewarding them for attendance and good behavior with free phone credits. The program, called the Million, was designed by the advertising agency Droga5, and has already been implemented in various Brooklyn public schools. Creative Review reports that the Million has won awards and praises in the advertising world, and may soon expand to the entire New York public school system. Some teachers have said that the cell phones provide unexpected benefits, including, at least one case, the first contact number they’ve ever had for some students.

Praise for the program hasn’t been universal, however. Critics have accused the Million of “replacing learning for its own sake with a market-driven system” according to Creative Review. Others have pointed out that the incentives could unfairly punish children with serious behavioral problems. Camila Batmanghelidjh, of the charity Kids Company, told the magazine, “it’s suggesting that all negative behaviour from these children is self-chosen, and actually the ones with the serious problems do not choose. And it’s unfair then, because they’ll never get there. It actually exaggerates the divide, rather than facilitates the solution.”

The Million could also provide an avenue for direct marketing to children, though Droga5 animatedly denies that accusation. The president and CEO of the agency, David Droga said, “It was always the agreement that eventually it would be able to subsidise itself by brands being able to support initiatives, so you might have brand x that is associated with fitness, not selling shoes, but sponsoring a programme or something. There always has to be an education link, it wasn’t going to be suddenly selling burgers. That would kill it straight away because it would undermine everything.”

Source:  Creative Review  

Image by GustavH, licensed under Creative Commons.

With nothing more than a first and last name, the Personas web application creates a picture of how the internet sees you. Eerie insights sometimes flash across the page, often followed by absurd non sequiturs. The website, created as part of an MIT art installation Metropath(ologies), is meant as a critique of data mining efforts by Google, Netflix, and the U.S. Government. In a statement on the project, the authors say:

We typically are never given the chance to see the decision making process that ranks some webpage in the fourth slot for a specific Google Query, and most certainly not when money is to be made in a competitive environment. Personas is meant to expose this black box process as controlled voodoo.

The visualizations don’t have any live links in them, and you can’t copy and paste from it, which gives the impression of a data interpretation process that the user is powerless to control.

(Thanks, Apples and Owls.)

Source: Personas

For the past two years, tech-geeks around the country have applied to the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest with new ideas to make government data useful. This year, the judges have narrowed the field down to three government-transparency boosting, accountability-promoting web applications. The finalists are:

GovPulse.us – This website makes the information from the Federal Registrar comprehensible. Users can track all the rules and notices from federal agencies and executive orders and presidential documents. The application breaks the information down by agency or place mentioned.

ThisWeKnow.org – Every city in the United States is made a little more transparent by this site. Users can type in a zip code and find information including demographic numbers, environmental pollutants, and employment statistics. The website also tracks how many bills were introduced about any given location, including what the bill was about and who introduced it.

DataMasher – When people make connections between seemingly disparate sources of information, the result can be illuminating. DataMasher lets people compare gun ownership numbers to high school graduation statistics or health care coverage to age demographics, and then it maps the results by state.

Users can now vote for their favorite application, and the winners will receive up to $10,000 as a prize.

Source: The Sunlight Foundation 

World governments may be militarizing biology and other life sciences to make strange and disturbing weapons. A 2007 report by the British Medical Association warned of a “slippery slope” in using drugs as weapons that could lead to “intentional manipulation of peoples' emotions, memories, immune responses or even fertility.”

Biologists are allowing this militarization to happen, according to Malcolm Dando in Nature, through an alarming lack of engagement. For example, research into the hormone oxytocin—which has been shown to increase people’s trust when taken in a nasal spray—could easily be co-opted by the military. Existing chemical weapons treaties are inadequate, according to Dando, and biologists need to step up and make sure their research isn’t used to harm.

Source: Nature 

There are two types of people in the world: people who are automatically honest and those who aren’t. An article in Seed magazine explains that researchers are using brain scans to determine which parts of the brain are involved when people lie. For some people, the decision to tell the truth takes no extra brain activity. For others, “both deciding to lie and deciding to tell the truth required extra activity in the areas of the brain associated with critical thinking and self-control.” The article refers to these two types of people as automatically “honest” and “dishonest,” but does not make any estimates of what percentage of people belong to which category.

(Thanks, 3QuarksDaily.)

Source: Seed

Image by  Dyanna , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Astronauts stuck in space need something to pass the time. Two years ago, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the website GovernmentAttic, NASA released a list of the books, movies, television shows, and music kept in the International Space Station.

The books on board include a standard canon of histories, science fiction, and action novels, but there are a few surprises. For example Michael Crichton’s anti-global warming novel State of Fear makes an appearance, and so does David Sedaris’s essay collection Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. The films include some great comedies, including Blazing Saddles, There’s Something About Mary, and National Lampoon’s Animal House, along side some truly terrible films like Rush Hour II, 50 First Dates, and the Ashton Kutcher thriller The Butterfly Effect.

In response to the list, the independent film organization The Shooting People complained to NASA, saying, “I felt that Caddyshack, Cheaper by the Dozen, and heaven forefend Beverly Hills Cop, might weaken the critical faculties of those on board, possibly even putting their lives and ours in danger.” The organization made some suggestions, including replacing Harold and Kumar with Harold and Maude and offering Man on Wire instead of Man on Fire.

NASA responded, thanking the organization for its input, and promising to pass the letter and the suggestions to the crew office “for further consideration.”

(Thanks, Scientific American.)

Source:  GovernmentAttic ,  The Shooting People ,  NASA  

On October 26, Yahoo will pull the plug on the online community web hosting site Geocities. Though it is mostly remembered as a hideous, antiquated, pre-internet boom startup, it was one of the most popular websites of the 1990s. The community-policed “cities” allowed users to create individualized web pages, and was, in some ways, a precursor to the more modern corporate-owned online communities like MySpace, Facebook, and Blogger. “The demise of GeoCities is not just the disappearance of a gif-riddled online ghost town,” Phoebe Connelly writes for the American Prospect, “it's the death of a pioneering online community.”

Now that the website is shutting down, groups like the Internet Archive are scrambling to preserve the information that GeoCities once held. The struggle reminds users, according to Connelly, “that just because something is published on the Internet doesn't mean it will last forever.” And when the information is published on a corporate-owned website, the choice isn’t really up to you.

Source:  The American Prospect

First let’s get this out of the way: Emperor penguin droppings are visible from space!

More amazingly, inventive researchers are using satellite images of the fecal stains to keep tabs on the notoriously elusive penguin colonies. In satellite images of the Antarctic ice, emperor penguin scat appears as “brown patches blazing against sheets of pure white,” Conservation reports. When researchers analyzed images of the entire Antartic coastline, they identified 38 emperor penguin colonies—10 of which were previously unknown.

“This sort of scatological spying is good news for penguins, a species vulnerable to rising global temperatures and melting ice,” Conservation observes. “Previously, scientists regularly monitored only a select few colonies because of difficulties gaining ground access. With the ability to map out penguin movements from afar, scientists will now be able to better track and hopefully conserve this iconic bird.”

Source: Conservation

Image by lin_padgham, licensed under Creative Commons.

An Israeli company has created blood and saliva samples that contain fake DNA evidence, and the modification is undetectable in standard lab tests, reports Technology Review. Tel Aviv-based Nucleix demonstrated that it can replicate DNA from samples or produce new DNA based on a person’s genome sequence. The phony DNA goes into donor blood or saliva, scientific magic happens, and voila: fake crime scene evidence.

The company, conveniently, also has designed a proprietary test to distinguish between naturally shed DNA and its counterfeit cousin. All the same, this very falsified-evidence scenario has been “cited as a concern for those who make their genome sequence public,” Technology Review notes. It’ll be a concern for those who don’t choose to make their DNA public, too:  Just this spring, the FBI expanded its collection of DNA to include people awaiting trial (who may well be acquitted) as well as detained immigrants.

Source: Technology Review

Image by Darren // DA Creative Photography, licensed under Creative Commons.

Do you have nine minutes for the miracle that is the squid? Evolutionary biologist Casey Dunn of Brown University has enlisted his students in the creation of a video podcast called CreatureCast. The first episode is up now and it's wonderful. The subject is iridescence in squid and the treatment—simple line drawings with the occasional splash of color—is transfixing. Enjoy! 

(Thanks Boing Boing.)

Researchers unlocking the secrets of our DNA may be sparking a new Romantic Age, Freeman Dyson writes for the New York Review of Books. The years between 1770 and 1830, often referred to as the Romantic Age, were characterized by an explosion of both scientific and artistic achievements. Dyson wonders if that billionaire technocrats—like Craig Venter, who led the charge to map the first human genome, and Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway—might play a role similar to “the lightened aristocrats of the eighteenth century.” 

What today's revolution lacks, according to Dyson, is poetry. “Poetry, the dominant art form in many human cultures from Homer to Byron, no longer dominates.” He suggests that biology could become today’s dominant art form, and that creating new kinds of plants and animals could combine art with science.

Enter Christian Bök. In an interview with the Believer, Bök talks about his plans to implant a poem into “an organism that is widely regarded to be the most unkillable bacterium on the planet.” He’s working with scientists to translate a poem into a genetic sequence, that would then be implanted into a portion of the bactirum’s DNA. If it works, Bök’s project, which he calls The Xenotext Experiment, could become “a book that would still be on the planet Earth when the sun explodes.”

Bök told the Believer, “I guess that this is a kind of ambitious attempt to think about art, quite literally, as an eternal endeavor.”

To hear Christian Bök talk about The Xenotext Experiment, watch the video below:

Sources:  The New York Review of Books ,  The Believer  

When English isn’t good enough, innovative inventors set out to create their own languages. Most fail miserably, but every once in a while, a newly formed language will take on a life of its own. “Every time an invented language has found success,” language expert Arika Okrent told Failure magazine, “it has been an unexpected success.”

Okrent, the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, thinks that most would-be language inventors tend to view their new form of speech as a product, while most speakers don’t think of it that way. The most successful invented languages are Esperanto and Klingon, which have both changed far beyond their original intents. Okrent advises potential inventors:

Put your language out there in the world and then let people take it away and ruin it for you. If you try to hold on too tightly you’re going to have problems. If you want people to use it, you have to let them use it, but they are not going to utilize it the way you want them to.

Source: Failure 

Image by  Limako , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Outdated crime laboratories housed inside U.S. law enforcement agencies contribute to wrongful convictions, says Steve Weinberg in the July/August issue of Miller-McCune. He cites a recent study titled, “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward,” and the results are overwhelmingly clear. He writes:

Law enforcement crime laboratories are underfunded, filled with poorly trained and/or technologically backward staff, beset by quality control problems and, too often, complicit in wrongful convictions because criminalists unintentionally misread evidence or intentionally lie.

Weinberg warns that until crime laboratories are updated with current technology and removed from police headquarters, forensic examiners are more likely to succumb to pressure from prosecutors to provide conviction-worthy evidence. “One incompetent or dishonest criminalist,” he writes, “can infect hundreds of cases in a crime laboratory, with some of those cases mutating into wrongful convictions.”

Source: Miller-McCune

Image by billaday, licensed under Creative Commons.

A wise person finds things to learn in his or her mistakes, but when it comes to research published in journals and magazines, successful studies understandably get more play. The Journal of Spurious Correlations seeks to amend this missed opportunity, specifically in the realm of the social sciences. Writing in Foreign Policy, journal cofounder David Lehrer explains:

Editors and readers don’t dwell on—and may never see—findings that are inconclusive, fail to confirm the researcher’s hypothesis, or can’t be easily explained by existing theories. These so-called “negative results” get buried because it’s simply bad marketing to publish wrong answers. But this is a shame, because we could learn a lot from seeing all the evidence.

The data buried in unsuccessful studies can challenge conventional wisdom. Lehrer points to one that “failed” to correlate women’s presence in government with lower levels of corruption—thereby calling into question the widely held belief that women make less crooked leaders than men. Such a negative result would have a hard time finding a home in a conventional journal.

“Publishing rigorous, informative results that seem unsellable will, we hope, give them the prestige and the audience they deserve,” Lehrer explains. “It will help update a scientific culture that prefers the simple and conclusive to the complex and open-ended, and often misses out on valuable information as a result.”

Source: Journal of Spurious Correlations, Foreign Policy

Need a physics fix? You're in luck: Following up on a fascinating column about why wooden houses withstand earthquakes, the Economist tech blog looks at why so few Japanese pagodas have ever fallen down:

What has mystified scholars over the ages is how these tall, wooden buildings cope so well with the earthquakes and typhoons that plague Japan. Many have been struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Others have been torched by marauding warlords. Fire was a perennial hazard in Japan when wood and paper buildings were the norm. But, remarkably, only two of the country’s hundreds of wooden pagodas have collapsed over the past 1,400 years as a result of violent shaking.

Despite having a central pillar that sometimes doesn't even touch the ground and floors stacked on top of one another "like a pile of hats," a Japanese pagoda is a resiliant creation.

...why don’t they topple over at the first tremor? For two reasons. First, as the structure begins to sway, the heavy-tiled roof covering the extended eaves of each storey acts like the long pole with weights on the ends that a tightrope walker uses to steady himself. In both, the large “radius of gyration” means the shaking has a lot of inbuilt inertia to overcome.

Second, as the loosely stacked storeys slide to and fro—with each consecutive floor moving in the opposite direction to the one above and below—they collide internally with the trunk-like shinbashira dangling through the central well of the building. With each collision, they dump more of their kinetic energy into the massive column—trying vainly to make it swing like a pendulum ... How clever of those Japanese craftsmen to figure it all out 14 centuries ago.

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Source:  Economist

Image by  Timothy Lloyd . Licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Type-2 diabetes has reached epidemic levels in the United States and is particularly destructive in low-income and immigrant communities where, according to a New American Media report, language and education barriers affect “the patient’s ability to read food labels, track blood sugar levels, assess insulin amounts, record meal schedules and communicate with clinicians.”

A new program in San Francisco helps low-income and immigrant patients manage their diabetes over the telephone. Participants who enroll in the project—Improving Diabetes Efforts Across Language and Literacy (IDEALL)—aim to better control the disease and its associated health problems by receiving weekly phone calls from an automated telephone support system. Each call is delivered in the patient’s native language (English, Spanish, or Cantonese), and depending on his or her responses, the system generates information “regarding issues ranging from symptoms and taking prescribed medications to diet, physical activity, and self-monitoring of blood sugar.” If necessary, a nurse calls back for a “live” chat.

Dr. Dean Schillinger, director of San Francisco General Hospital’s Center for Vulnerable Populations, which runs the project, told New America Media: “We were really impressed that diabetes patients with limited literacy and limited English proficiency, who many health care workers consider to be ‘hard to reach,’ were the most likely to use this communication tool. . . . We found that better communication between a public health care system and the vulnerable populations they serve yielded concrete benefits.”

It looks like San Francisco wants to expand the program, and not a moment too soon: The University of California at San Francisco estimates that 3 million Californians—about 1 in 10 of the state’s residents—have the disease.

Source: New America Media

At a recent concert, Van Morrison uttered the vulgar phrase, “Fucking shut the fuck up.” The sentence presents a challenge to the linguistic minds at Language Log. The different uses of the word “fuck” don’t affect the meaning of the sentence, since the sentiment could be conveyed simply as “shut up.” According to the blog, “The main syntactic problem is to determine whether the fuck is being used as an pleonastic (semantically empty) direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the preposition phrase (PP) headed by up.” The author concludes the latter.

Source:  Language Log  

Neuroscientists are unraveling why a Pablo Picasso painting appeals to the human brain. “The job of an artist,” Jonah Lehrer writes for Psychology Today, “is to take mundane forms of reality—whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit—and make those forms irresistible to the human brain.” Lehrer draws off research by V.S. Ramachandran who found that artists employ “deliberate hyperbole” that makes it easier for people’s minds to decipher what an image really is.

Source: Psychology Today

Creativity is not a trait that people either have or they don’t. It’s surprisingly orderly, it can be learned. Robert Epstein told the Scientific American, “I think that the fact that creativity is orderly is good news, because it means we can all tap into this rich potential we all have.”

One way to boost creativity is by thinking about problems as abstract. Studies cited by the Scientific American found that picturing problems as more distant in time or space can lead to more creative solutions. In one study, researchers asked people to devise transportation solutions for different cities. The participants who were asked about distant cities came up with more creative solutions than the people who were asked about cities that were close to them.

The Scientific American reports: “Although the geographical origin of the various tasks was completely irrelevant – it shouldn’t have mattered where the questions came from – simply telling subjects that they came from somewhere far away led to more creative thoughts.” 

This research suggests that problems may be solved simply by thinking about them as further away. It also suggests, according to the article, “traveling to faraway places (or even just thinking about such places), thinking about the distant future, communicating with people who are dissimilar to us, and considering unlikely alternatives to reality” would likely make people more creative.

(Thanks, Kaeti.)

Source:  Scientific American  

Image by estoril, licensed under Creative Commons.

A vacationer gazes at a serene sunset over the Mediterranean Sea and whips out his cell phones to compose the perfect Twitter message. Call it an addiction, but according to danah boyd, this need to obsessively update social networking sites is simply the latest embodiment of the human need to share—and sometimes over-share. She writes, “I really wouldn't be surprised if we found a cave painting that outlined what the dwellers ate for breakfast. So why are we so offended when people use the internet to do this?” The issue for boyd is one of moderation:

We like when people share their records. Until we don't. Cuz we also know that there is the notion of Too Much. There are only so many baby photos you can take of a baby that's not related to you before you scream Too Much. There are only so many home videos that you can take until you scream Too Much. And there are only so many vacation photos you can take until you scream Too Much.

Source: apophenia

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation are challenging the constitutionality of gene patents, reports Censorship News, the newsletter of the National Coalition Against Censorship. The groups recently filed a case, “Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. United States Patent and Trademark Office, et al.,” which concerns two patents held on mutations of the BRCA gene.

Mutations of this gene are linked to increased risk for breast and ovarian cancer, and the patents have been used to prevent other researchers from doing work involving the gene. “Like the ACLU, we think this violates the First Amendment,” Censorship News asserts, and promises to keep its readers updated on developments in the case.

Source: Censorship News

Image by mira66, licensed under Creative Commons.

“Sometimes the only thing worse than homeopathic products that have no effect are the ones that do,” Terry J. Allen writes for In These Times. Allen is referring to certain Zicam products, popular homeopathic cold remedies that contain “pharmaceutically significant” amounts of zinc. Zinc can cause anosmia—loss of the ability to smell—when taken intranasally, which is the case with Zicam.

Back in June, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning for consumers to stop using the Zicam products in question. Allen says that the incident shines a bright light on “the giant regulatory loophole that is homeopathy.” While the FDA requires conventional prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines go through testing to be proven safe and effective, these regulations do not apply to homeopathic solutions.

The FDA reserves the right to step in when necessary, which is what happened in June. Up until then, however, this loophole allowed Zicam-maker Matrixx “to slap on the label ‘homeopathic,’ slip under the regulatory wire, and sell 1 billion doses of untested Zicam,” Allen writes.

Source: In These Times

Most phones can take photos and send texts. Now, researchers have developed one that can diagnose disease. Technology Review reports that the new “Cellscope” works like a microscope that straps onto cell phones to analyze spit or blood samples on slides. The contraption can use specialized software to diagnose the samples on the spot, or it can send the images off to specialized centers for further study. Experts believe the technology could prove helpful in remote parts of the world—where health infrastructure is lacking but cell phone coverage is improving—in helping to treat common diseases like tuberculosis and malaria.

Source: Technology Review

Image by  David N. Breslauer et al. , from PLOS1.

With binge drinking and alcohol-related hospital visits ever on the rise in young people, perhaps it’s time to come up with a plan B. As professor John McCardell puts it, “Clearly state laws mandating a minimum drinking age of 21 haven’t eliminated drinking by young adults—they’ve simply driven it underground, where life and health are at greater risk.”

As part of The Atlantic’s annual ideas issue, McCardell offers up his solution to curb the prominence of underage imbibing. His first recommendation is to do away with the yanking of highways funds from states who would dare lower the legal age so we make some “adult” adjustments. With that change, he has a few suggestions for states:

They might license 18-year-olds—adults in the eyes of the law—to drink, provided they’ve completed high school, attended an alcohol education course (that consists of more than temperance lectures and scare tactics), and kept a clean record. They might even mandate alcohol education at a young age. And they might also adopt zero-tolerance laws for drunk drivers of all ages, and require ignition interlocks on their cars.

What do you think? Could initiatives like these actually make a difference?

Source: The Atlantic

It’s time to limit the love and attention lavished on iPhones, Lisa Katayama argues on Boing Boing Gadgets. At first, “I pretended not to care while [my boyfriend] lay in bed smoothing his finger across the unlock bar, and sat stoically at the other end of the dinner table as he and the iPhone whispered sweet nothings to each other,” Katayama writes. “I get it. It’s exciting to be in love with something new.”

“But after several months of this, I started to question whether something was being lost because of my boyfriend’s intense iPhone infatuation. Did we still have stuff to talk about other than new apps and ATT’s shitty cell phone signal in our neighborhood? Was I just hating because I subconsciously want an iPhone, too?”

Their solution: ground rules. No iPhones in bed. No iPhones at the dinner table. On that second count, though—because a little understanding never hurt anyone—“I usually let a short half-minute peek slide every now and then, so he can scratch what itches,” Katayama admits.

(Thanks, @chuckumentary.)

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets

The August issue of Ode magazine is all about laughing—from laughter yoga to the scientific benefits of giggling to an especially interesting article written by Blaine Greteman that delves into the evolution of laughter: 

Today, we tend to focus on “he who laughs last.”  But he who first burst forth with our characteristic “ha-ha-ha” took a major evolutionary leap toward humanity as we know it.  Laughter is ancient, predating the development of language.  It’s ubiquitous; all mammals do it, panting with delight in response to tickling or pratfalls, as noted by none other than Charles Darwin.  It’s also one of the first things babies learn.  Now, though, scientists are asking two dead serious questions: Where does laughter come from?  And why do we do it?

Greteman begins to answer these questions with the research of scientist Robert Provine:

If you digitally remove the “ha” sound from a human laugh the way Provine has in a recording studio, you hear a long exhalation or sigh.  This extended sigh may be our most primal existential defense mechanism, controlling our breathing in ways known to lower heart rate and blood pressure.  Decoupling the laugh from respiration—so that we can giggle instead of pant—was a crucial evolutionary moment, Provine postulates, because it enabled the vocal control that allowed us to make all kinds of other “fancy sounds” needed for speech.

Source: Ode (article not available online)

Image by Jimbowen0306, licensed under Creative Commons.

Wow, if this continental drift animation is at all accurate, you're totally going to be able to see Africa from your house.

If a person truly believes that a sugar pill can ease pain, it probably will. If you believe that expensive, name-brand drugs will work better than cheap generics with the same ingredients, they probably will—for you. Scientists call this the placebo effect. According to Utne Reader’s September-October issue, “sincere belief triggers bona fide reactions in the brain.”

The same power can also be harnessed to hurt people. If a person believes something will harm them, rational or not, the belief can destroy a person’s health, according to Brain Blogger. This phenomenon, called “nocebo” effect, has been little studied, in part because of ethical concerns for patients. Brain Blogger reports that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to prove the nocebo effect’s existence: People have died after receiving a terminal diagnosis, when a post mortem examination revealed that the diagnosis was wrong. The effect could also explain the power of hexes and voodoo curses.

Sources:  Brain Blogger  

Image of  apesara , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The American public loves science, but scientists don’t love the American public back. The Pew Center for People & the Press reports that Americans hold scientists in high esteem, while “many scientists offer unfavorable, if not critical, assessments of the public’s knowledge and expectations.” (The Pew Center offers a test to see how you well your knowledge stacks up to the rest of the American public.)

The admiration given to scientists is also mixed with fear, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum write for Salon. Americans tend to view scientists “as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains,” in the words of Hollywood director James Cameron. That’s an unhealthy place for science in American culture. Kirshenbaum and Mooney write that the wide canon of movies depicting mad scientists hell-bent on destroying the world has fostered a deep mistrust of scientists in real life.

Many scientists blame the media for the science’s image problems. Almost half of scientists polled by the Pew Center believe that media oversimplification is a “major problem.” The flaw in that view, according to Kirshenbaum and Mooney, is that real science would make for really boring movies. Scientists need to “connect with Hollywood on its own terms,” Kirshenbaum and Mooney write, and help them see that science doesn’t need to be the enemy to make a good film. Then, perhaps, science in the public could live happily ever after.

Sources: Pew Center, Salon 

Image adapted from a photo by  pfala , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Great art is subjective. Bad art, on the other hand, can be identified by a pigeon. According to the New Scientist, psychologist Shigeru Watanabe taught art appreciation to several birds by rewarding them with food when they correctly discerned good art from bad. To identify the quality of the art work, Watanabe used children’s paintings that had been graded in a class and by a panel of adults. According to Watanabe, “The experiments demonstrated the ability of discrimination.” He added, however, that it did not show “the ability to enjoy painting.”

The pigeons may be smart, but the research “conflates so many different aspects of the human response to art,” Jessica Palmer writes for Biophemera. Palmer questions, “What is the relation between beauty in art and the quality of the art? Specifically, can ‘good’ art be ugly? Can beautiful art be ‘bad’? Can ugly art, paradoxically enough, be beautiful?” The pigeons haven’t been able to account for these subjective art questions. So, at least for now, art critics won’t be closing up shop just yet.

Sources: New Scientist, Biophemera

Image by Ricardo Martins, licensed under Creative Commons.

People named Aaron or Betty are more likely to get better grades in school than people named Chris or Dave, according to research cited by PsyBlog. The study, which focused on MBA applicants over 15 years, found that people with the initials A or B had higher grade point averages than people with the initials C or D. The study also found that professional baseball players whose first or last names began with K (the baseball shorthand for a strikeout) were more likely to strikeout than any other players.

An “implicit egotism” may explain the statistical differences, according to the blog. People are unconsciously drawn toward outcomes that resemble their own names, because of an innate preference that people have for their names.

(Thanks, MindHacks.)

Source: PsyBlog

Image by TheeErin, licensed under Creative Commons.

People assume that war is inevitable, and that war always has been and always will be a part of the human experience. Science is now proving that is wrong. “A growing number of experts are now arguing that the urge to wage war is not innate,” John Horgan writes for the New Scientist, “and that humanity is already moving in a direction that could make war a thing of the past.”

War is an effect of lifestyle more than any innate warring tendencies, according to some anthropologists. Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University thinks that war first seeped into human culture when we stopped our nomadic lifestyle and shifted to a more settled, agrarian way of life. Individual aggression has always existed, but group warfare is more of a response to environmental conditions, like scarcity, rather than any innate biological need.

Atomic bombs, high-tech weaponry, and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan could lead people to think that society is getting more war-like, but experts believe that humans are actually moving toward a more peaceful world. Violent deaths were far more likely when people fought with clubs and spears than they are today. “Most conflicts now consist of guerilla wars, insurgencies and terrorism,” Horgan writes. Experts have called these more recent conflicts, “the remnants of war.”

Source: The New Scientist

Image by  Jayel Aheram , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Eight years of scientific repression under the Bush administration gave progressives an overly idealized view of science. President Obama was hailed after issuing an order promising that his administration would “base our public policies on the soundest science.” Taken to an extreme, Marcy Darnovsky writes for Democracy Journal, that the subjugation of policy to science threatens progressive ethics. Biomedical advancements from cloning to sex selection, racially targeted drugs to commercial surrogacy, demand ethical and political discussion and consideration.

Progressives were right to fight against the Bush administration’s suppression of environmental research and the undue influence that fundamentalist Christians had over the public policy, Darnovsky writes. The problem is that eight years of fighting against those policies has left progressives with a kind of dangerous reflexive libertarianism that, according to Darnovsky, has the tendency to “discount the importance of regulation and oversight of scientific practice and application.”

The idealization of science, and the discounting of moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in biomedical advances, also gives fodder to progressivism’s opponents. According to the conservative journal The New Atlantis, “Obama never articulates any moral principle other than the absolute sovereignty of scientific activity.” The journal attacks Obama’s politics as “a kind of techno-aristocracy—hypereducated elites with specialized politico-scientific expertise are singled out to manage the benighted rest of us.”

The United States, in fact, remains an outlier for its lack of oversight for genetic modification, assisted reproduction, and other biomedical technologies, according to Darnovsky. Such medical advances could yield benefits, but ethical considerations should come into play. Instead of insulating science from politics, Darnovsky writes that progressives should seek out an ideology that “welcomes the benefits of human biotechnologies while opposing their harmful, excessive, and unprogressive uses.”

Sources:  Democracy Journal  (article not available online), The New Atlantis

 The only thing more unsettling than reading about “neural avalanches” in your brain is watching them. Ah, brain science. Enjoy!

Source: New Scientist 

Memory is not a fixed, static impression left on a person’s brain. Researchers have found that “the very act of remembering could change the memory,” Joseph LeDoux writes for the Scientist. Using that knowledge, his colleagues are working on ways that specific memories could be simply erased from people’s brains. LeDoux asks, “Could traumatic memories be dampened or erased simply by remembering?”

The research is already leading to experiments in lessening post traumatic stress disorder using drugs, as reported on Utne.com. Many have worry about the ethical implications of messing with people’s memories, but according to LeDoux, patients who suffer from reactions to memories they can’t control have said that they would rather risk losing a memory or two if it meant being able to remove the debilitating ones.”

People wouldn’t need to stop at bad memories, Greg Beato writes for Reason. Erasing the good memories from people’s brains could make life a lot more enjoyable. “Imagine falling in love for the first time, again and again and again,” Beato writes, “hearing your all-time favorite album with completely fresh ears; rediscovering the virtues of martinis.” People would no longer get bored with their jobs, their spouses, their music collections, and could continue to experience life as if for the first time.

Sources: The Scientist (subscription required), Reason

Image by Sergio Tudela, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Pope wants his flock to get online and start blogging. In a recent announcement, Pope Benedict XVI extolled the virtues of the world wide web saying, “Young people in particular, I appeal to you: bear witness to your faith through the digital world!” A recent article in the Smart Set points out that religion’s embrace of emerging technologies extends back further than the current, blog-loving pontiff. The Gutenberg bible was cutting-edge media for its time, and the clothespin, the wheel-driven washing machine, and the circular saw were all invented by the industrious Shaker Christians. (Though their sex-adverse beliefs, rather than their ingenious inventions, were likely what doomed the sect.) Golberg also shows how the story of Noah’s ark could be considered a parable for the benefits of embracing technology, before it’s too late.

Source: The Smart Set

Generations of technical innovation, epiphanies, scientific discoveries, work, and toil were needed to create a $10.00 toaster. Humanity needed to learn to master electricity, smelt metals, mould plastics, and create a modernized supply chain. Advanced as they may be, few modern humans could build a toaster on their own. Artist Thomas Thwaites, however, gave it a shot. In his Toaster Project, Thwaites tried to smelt the iron, refine oil into plastics, and build a toaster in an effort to explore the connection people have to every-day technology. Thwaites wrote:

The point at which it stopped being possible for us to make the things that surround us is long past...This faintly ridiculous quest to make a toaster from the 'ground up' serves as a vehicle through which questions about economics, helplessness and life as a consumer can be investigated.

Where Thwaites sees the helplessness of the consumer, Reason magazine’s Radley Balko sees the genius of capitalism and the division of labor. “Pan back until you've framed the entire world economy,” Balko writes, “and it's hard not to marvel at the wonder and miracle of capitalism's invisible hand.”

Sources:  The Toaster Project,   Reason  

Believers in survival of the fittest may struggle to explain the existence of skinny weaklings in human society. Evolutionarily, the muscle-bound beefcakes should have banished the wimps from the face of the earth long ago. New research, however, shows that pipsqueaks may have some evolutionary benefits that jocks don’t have.

Scrawny people may have quicker reaction times than the more physically fit, according to research published on Science Daily. The researchers theorize that the more finely tuned reactions “may have evolved to help the weak get out of the way of approaching danger.”

The most hulking people also have a harder time battling disease. The New Scientist reports that “the downside of all that brawn is a poor immune system and an increased appetite.” The increased appetite may not seem like a bad thing today, but evolutionarily, having to constantly eat may was considered a disadvantage.

All’s not lost for the muscle-bound among us, however. More physically fit men are generally more attractive to women, tended to lose their virginity at a younger age, and had more life-time sexual partners. Researchers think that the relative costs and benefits of physical fitness may explain why both geeks and jocks still survive.

For John Hodgman’s  take on the culture war between nerds and jocks, watch the video below:

Sources:  Science Daily ,  New Scientist  

Image by Crimfants, licensed under Creative Commons.

Thirteen-year-old Scott Campbell recently gave up his iPod for a week, opting instead to use his dad’s clunky old Sony Walkman. He writes about his week with the Walkman for the BBC News Magazine, offering quite a few spot-on (and often very funny) observations from the perspective of a digital-music native.

On the plus side, he notes, the Walkman’s enormous play button "engages with a satisfying clunk, unlike the finger tip tap for the iPod." For the most part, however, he finds the Walkman inconvenient (who wouldn’t?), though he is surprisingly gentle, and generally very technical, in his discussions of its shortcomings.

Another notable feature that the iPod has and the Walkman doesn't is "shuffle," where the player selects random tracks to play. Its a function that, on the face of it, the Walkman lacks. But I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down "rewind" and releasing it randomly—effective, if a little laboured.

I told my dad about my clever idea. His words of warning brought home the difference between the portable music players of today, which don't have moving parts, and the mechanical playback of old. In his words, “Walkmans eat tapes.” So my clumsy clicking could have ended up ruining my favourite tape, leaving me music-less for the rest of the day. 

Source: BBC News Magazine 

Image by nextartist, licensed under Creative Commons.

It seems unfair: Why can some of the greatest creative minds produce masterpieces while under the influence, while others simply end up with drivel? Apparently it’s genetic. The British magazine Prospect reports on a 2004 study that found “around 15 percent of Caucasians have a genetic variant, known as the G-variant, that makes ethanol behave more like an opioid drug, such as morphine, with a stronger than normal effect on mood and behavior.” This allows some “to remain healthy and brilliant despite consumption that would kill others.” But if you happen so be so fortunate, don’t get too carried away—as with any alcohol consumption, there is a fine line between optimum creativity and exceeding your limits.

Source: Prospect

Image by preater, licensed under Creative Commons.

For most of us, Gary Busey brings to mind big teeth and smaller roles in movies like “Black Sheep” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” But for Amelia Fedo, the actor’s name floods her mouth with tastes of cranberry and string cheese.

According to maisonneuve, “Fedo has lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, a rare condition that causes units of speech to trigger involuntary sensations of taste.” This explains why she has such a potent reaction to Mr. Busey and other proper nouns—bringing new meaning to the old idiom about leaving a bad taste in one’s mouth. But Fedo’s experience is just one type of the neurological condition:

Neuroscientists have identified more than one hundred synaesthetic variations, and the sensory combinations appear infinite. In the most common, called grapheme-color synaesthesia, numbers and letters are transformed into brilliant colors (Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman claimed to encounter equations as “light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s”). With sound-color synaesthesia (or chromesthesia), certain sounds—a doorbell, a barking dog, a guitar chord—elicit powerful visual episodes. Other synaesthetes see their orgasms. Some can hear fabrics, taste shapes, and smell their pain.

Despite what must surely be an inconvenience, Fedo takes great care to use specific descriptions for what she is hearing…err, tasting. Here's a sampling of her flavored names:

Roy: unseasoned kidney beans straight from the can

Derek: raw fennel cut into flat slices, with hints of cucumber

Vivian: vinyl records, coarse nylon or denim, with a faint hint of perfume

Danielle: the rind around the edge of a bologna slice

And she’ll taste your name too, if you like.

Source: maisonneuve

New Scientist has assembled a list of "nine games computers are ruining for humanity"—and by "ruining," they mean besting (or rapidly gaining on) Homo sapiens. They explain how and why computers are readily beating us at games like checkers, chess, tic-tac-toe, and rock paper scissors, and how computer scientists are working to build a better poker program.

Good news for bridge players and Jeopardy! aficionados: We're still well ahead of the machines on those fronts. For now.

Source: New Scientist 

(Thanks, Bookforum.)

Image by frozenchipmunk, licensed under Creative Commons.

Using people’s brain waves as the notes, scientists have created music. The researchers from China took brain wave readings from EEGs as the original source and used complex math to create pitch and rhythm for the waves. If their methods were improved, according to the Neruotopia 2.0 blog, the music could be used to detect Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, or other irregularities in the brain. 

Here are a few of the tracks that the researchers have created so far:

Brain with eyes open 

Brain in REM sleep 

Brain in slow-wave sleep 

Right now, Neruotopia 2.0 points out, the notes sound more like a cat on a keyboard than real music:

Source:  PLOS One , Neruotopia 2.0 

Image by Csaba Segesvári, licensed under Creative Commons.

Music by Dan Wu, Chao-Yi Li, De-Zhong Yao, licensed under Creative Commons.

The distance to Mars is unimaginable to most people.  But think about this: a trip to the Red Planet will take an exhausting, mind-numbing six months.  And that’s only one way.  Between the time spent on Mars and allowing for suitable conditions for the trip back, a mission to Mars will last about two and a half years. 

The June issue of IEEE Spectrum features an impressive report on travel to Mars.

“Could China Get to Mars First?” suggests that China’s quickly developing space hardware will allow China to beat the U.S. back to the moon and perhaps even to Mars.

“What to Wear on Mars” gives readers a preview of the sci-fi-esque space suit that may debut on Mars.  The clingy, stretchy material of the BioSuit allows for 8 hours of wandering around the Red Planet.  Unlike the puffy suits used today, rips are easily repaired and limbs can move more freely.  An added bonus: BioSuits costs a tenth of the $20 million price tag of the current suits.

“Space Is Big Business” notes that last year the United States spent four-fifths of the $83 billion 13 countries collectively invested on space.  Corporations world-wide spent two dollars for every government dollar.  Half of that corporate money went to direct-to-home TV, which depends on satellites in space. 

Source: IEEE Spectrum

Bohnam's auction house in New York City will be taking bids on hundreds of tiny treasures from the glory days of NASA's space program. If it weren't for this damn recession, I'd have me one of those lunar rock box thingys. Here's a sampling from the catalog (pdf):

LUNAR ROCK BOX COVER

Lunar rocks were placed in an aluminum storage box that was vacuum sealed on the lunar surface. The crew then placed the box inside the container covers of this type for the journey back to Earth, to prevent lunar dust from spreading inside the Lunar and Command Modules.

$2,000 - 3,000

ASTRONAUT CHARLES DUKE’S SPACE SUIT CUFF CHECKLIST

The cuff checklist used by Lunar Module Pilot Charles Duke, Jr. was exposed directly to the lunar environment for over 12 hours during those exploration periods. Apollo mission planners were well aware of the importance of making every minute productive while astronauts explored the lunar surface. In order to make certain the lunar explorers did not overlook planned tasks, spiralbound cuff checklists were created to provide a detailed script of each task or activity. The crew of Apollo 16 found a special drawing on the next leaf. It features a drooling space-suited astronaut melting away in the arms of a buxom nude woman. The astronaut says: “Happy Birthday Whatever Your Name Is.” This gag illustration continued the tradition started on Apollo 12 with the cuff checklists that had small images of Playboy pinups and Snoopy cartoons.

$200,000 - 300,000

MAN’S FIRST CELESTIAL MEASUREMENTS MADE WHILE ON THE MOON

The navigational chart used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to determine their exact position on the lunar surface just after their historic lunar landing. From Buzz Aldrin: On the back of the star chart, there is a square velcro patch. It has an overall tint of gray with darker grayish material embedded within. Those gray areas are most likely lunar dust that came off our space suits or from various equipment such as the sample return container.”

$70,000 - 90,000

(Thanks, Hrag Vartanian.)

Here’s a lesson: Going to school (and especially graduating) does a body good. In the recent issue of Governing, Penelope Lemov reports that “the higher your degree, the healthier you are.” Statistics show that as people climb the academic ladder their reported level of health increases significantly. This assessment comes from research findings analyzed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which looked at education and health statistics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. There are staggering health differences among those who do or don't graduate from high school and those who have dropped out or finished college—which is great news for those with college diplomas, but quite troubling for those without. Lemov writes:

The most discouraging part of the report is its implication for children. Undereducated parents tend to be poor and to rear their children in households with limited access to grocery stores that carry fresh fruits and vegetables; to live in less safe housing; to have insufficient access to safe places to exercise—all of which affect a family’s health. “For the first time in our history, we are raising a generation of children that may live shorter, sicker lives than their parents,” says Dennis Rivera, a commissioner of RWJF’s Commission to Build a Healthier America.

Sources: Governing, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Image by Herkie, licensed under Creative Commons.

Reports coming out of Iran from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and various blogs are giving foreigners an unprecedented view into the ongoing political crisis in the country. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, blogging from “a pier in Cape Cod,” has emerged as one of the major arbiters of information on the Iranian protests. Twitter and Facebook users are turning their profiles green in support of the protesters. The same technologies are giving idealists around the world the chance to engage in the crisis, both symbolically and actively. But just because people can engage, doesn’t mean they always should.

The raw, unedited nature of much of the information coming out of Iran could give every the impression that they know what’s really going on inside the country. The abject failure of cable news networks to cover the events reinforces that idea. Editor and Publisher recently admitted, “Web reports from Iranians, including Twitter feeds, have outflanked much of print and certainly cable TV.” With foreign reporters getting kicked out of the country, the reliance on social media for news will likely continue to grow.

As influential as social networking tools are in publicizing Iran’s conflict, much of that information has been unreliable. It was widely reported that opposition leader Mousavi was placed under house arrest, which was just one of many rumors that circulated and later turned out to be untrue. The best reporting, according to Kevin Drum writing for Mother Jones, may be coming from the BBC and the New York Times, and other mainstream, traditional outlets.

News from Iran has also made people “desperate to do something to show solidarity,” according to tech guru Clay Shirky in an interview with TED. Shirky said, “Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement.” This has led people to help out the protesters, according to Shirky, by offering secure web proxies to help them mask their online identities. That sense of involvement, however, has the potential to lead people astray.

Some foreigners have been moved to launch web-based attacks against the Iranian state-run media, overwhelm the state’s servers with a constant stream of requests. Tech-President advocated this “bit of cyber aggression aimed at the Iranian government” as a way to channel the considerable energies of observers outside Iran. The process is so easy that I accidentally helped launch one of these attacks by clicking on an errant link while researching this blog post.

The motivation behind the web-attacks is understandable, but they may end up doing more harm than good. Evgeny Morozov, writing for Foreign Policy, points out that these attacks from other countries actually strengthen the Iranian government’s argument that “foreign intervention” is the driving force behind the protests. And if the attacks get bad enough, there’s a chance that the government could simply pull the plug on the highly centralized internet throughout the country, cutting off the Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube videos that feed the foreign knowledge of the protests.

Sources: The Atlantic, Editor and Publisher, Mother Jones, TED, Tech-President, Foreign Policy

Image by  Hamed Saber , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Up to 30 percent of pharmaceutical drugs distributed in the developing world are counterfeit, according to the World Health Organization. To combat this medically dangerous uncertainty, a technology company in Ghana called mPedigree has created a service that allows users to send text messages and find out if their drug is genuine, reports Verge.

Here’s how Worldchanging breaks it down: “mPedigree provides pharmaceutical manufacturers with specially coded labels, which are affixed to individually packaged medicines. At the drugstore counter, the purchaser scratches off a label to reveal a unique code, which he or she texts to a four-digit number. An automated service looks up the code in a database. On the spot, the consumer gets a reply message indicating whether the drug is genuine or fake.”

Smart stuff. For more technological solutions to managing global medicines, check out my colleague Danielle Mastretti’s recent blog about an awesome database that the Indian government created to help battle biopirates. That’s right, biopirates.

Sources: Verge (article not available online), Worldchanging

Image by Lee Nachtigal, licensed under Creative Commons.

When we get old, our eyesight and hearing start to diminish, muscles quit working, and our bodies generally deteriorate. Why can’t humans be more like redwood trees that live for hundreds of years, seemingly immune to the adverse effects of aging? If we stuck around longer, we could presumably impart wisdom on younger generations, thereby benefiting the whole species. But it's not going to happen.

One theory on why humans age, proposed by University of Arizona, is that it protects against epidemics. The greater the population density, the more vulnerable that population is to a disease wiping out much of the species. The blog Ouroboros explains the theory this way:

If I (an organism) am more susceptible than average to a given disease, and that susceptibility has a genetic component, then my closest relatives (who share most of my genes) are likelier than the general population to be susceptible as well. Therefore, my continued existence poses a risk for my progeny, because I represent one more potential host for a pathogen that might infect them – potentially killing us all and ending the line altogether.

The general human tendency, however, is to fight aging at all costs. Talking with RadioLab, geneticist George Church said that advancing technology could make the state of “totally dead” obsolete. Church believes that technology could, hypothetically, reverse engineer people to the point where they could put anyone back together at any time. Then, presumably, people could live forever.

Not pursuing technology that would allow humans to live forever would be “immoral,” according to Cambridge researcher Aubrey de Grey, speaking at TED. According to de Grey, aging is a disease that should be cured for the sake of future generations.

The problem with trying to live forever is not that it would be “crushingly boring” or that “dictators would rule forever” or the other straw man arguments that de Grey throws out. Instead, the problem is the hubris inherent in the quest. People age for a reason, whether or not we understand that reason just yet.

Sources:  Ouroboros ,  RadioLab ,  TED  

Dethroning a queen can be as easy as silencing a single gene, at least in a colony of lab termites, that is.

In a recent German study, worker termites started battling for the throne and acting as if their queen were dead when researchers disabled her Neofem2 gene. Scientists believe this discovery could hold the answer to how honeybee, ant and other “ultrasocial creature” queens keep their kingdoms in check.

Source: Science News 

Image by Velo Steve , licensed under Creative Commons . 

Add dermatitis to the list of diseases now connected to cell phone use. Recent studies reported by the Human Ecologist suggest a link between nickel used in the metallic areas of cell phones and a rise in unexplained facial and ear rashes. In October 2008, the British Association of Dermatologists (B.A.D.) first noted this condition, called “mobile phone dermatitis”, and advised doctors to ask patients with skin rashes about their cell phone use. B.A.D. also warned that rashes could occur on user’s fingers as a result of text messaging.

A study of 22 popular cell phones, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that roughly half contained nickel in areas such as menu buttons, decorative logos, and metallic frames around LCD screens. They recommended that consumers choose phones without metallic accents or materials.

Source: The Human Ecologist (article not available online)

Most jewelry designers create pieces intended for mass production, Chronogram observes. Not so with Nervous System. Cofounders Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz built their company around open-source software that lets people design one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces based on gorgeous, biological patterns.

Louis-Rosenberg and Rosenkrantz, who come from science and architecture backgrounds, also have pre-designed pieces available: their delicate dendrite earrings were inspired by the aggregate growth of coral; their cut-felt radial necklace (part of the radiolaria series) nods to the bubbly repetition of plant cells and honeycomb.

But perhaps best of all? Most people can afford to engage with Nervous System’s art. “Our work is just as beautiful in stainless steel as it would be in silver, so why should we exclude a large segment of the population just to make a little more money?” the duo told Chronogram. “Besides, it is difficult to blur the line between consumer and producer when most consumers cannot afford the pieces.”

Source: Chronogram 

Image from Nervous System, licensed under Creative Commons.

Cooking food is the defining activity that makes us human, according to Harvard biological anthropologist and primatologist Richard Wrangham. In an interview with Seed, Wrangham says that cooking food makes it easier to digest calories, which may have led to our evolutionary dominance over other species. It has also created a system of ownership, where food is saved and owned, rather than eaten straight off the vine like monkeys. 

This ownership society also led to our societal system of marriage, according to Wrangham, where dominant males do “manly” things, like hunt, pillage, and talk politics, while relying on females to cook the dinner. Marriage, Wrangham says, is essentially a “protection racket in which the woman is required to feed a man because of the threat of having her food taken by other men.”

No word from Wrangham on why cooking is such a male-dominated profession.

Source:  Seed  

Image by  liber , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

The Indian government recently finished a massive database that puts thousands of years’ worth of traditional Indian remedies, medicines, and practices in the public domain—and, hopefully, out of reach of Western biotech companies attempting to patent this knowledge. The Ecologist reports that this huge repository of information, dubbed the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, was completed by 200 researchers who spent 8 years transcribing and translating ancient texts on Ayurveda, Unani, and siddha. They’re also working to include yoga poses, which have come under patent-attack by many Western yoga instructors as the practice has grown more popular.

“India has effectively made its store of wisdom public property,” the Ecologist notes, “which can now be accessed and used by anyone, but patented by no one.”

Sources: The Ecologist, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library 

Image by zoyachubby, licensed under Creative Commons.

Back in 2006, we raised a collective eyebrow when we read in now-defunct Plenty that a San Diego company had plans to breed cats with a modified Fel d 1 gene that would render them hypoallergenic. These cats were slated to cost allergy-beset consumers nearly $4,000, and while the company was taking orders, kittens were still a year out, so cat lovers had some waiting to do.

The Scientist now reports that one of the first of these cats to be delivered hasn’t turned out to be all that hypoallergenic. Murray, a gray tabby, caused an early allergic reaction in one of his owners (which eventually tapered off), but guests still can’t tolerate the feline. Allerca, the company that sells the genetically modified cats and dogs, stands behind its claims, and says it warns customers that Fel d 1 is not the only allergen cats produce. Still, here’s the hitch: To get a refund, you have to return your pet. (Murray’s owners have decided they’d rather live with him, allergens and all.)

Sources: The Scientist, Plenty (as archived on Mother Nature Network)

Image by a tai, licensed under Creative Commons.

Hospitals are always looking for ways to save money. Here's one that might surprise you: hospitals that reach out to help homeless people before they pass through emergency room doors can save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. That's according to two studies, one in Chicago and the other in Seattle.

The Chicago study, according to Miller-McCune, focused on 600 chronically ill homeless people, with 200 of them receiving case management and housing:

The group included people living on the street from 30 days to 30 years, in many ways mirroring the 3.5 million Americans (and growing) who face homelessness at some point during the year.

Researchers also selected those with chronic health conditions other than mental health or substance abuse, although participants with these and other conditions were not excluded.

"We wanted, in part, to show whether or not this model works, but we also wanted the literature to broaden and not portray the homeless as severely mentally ill or alcohol dependent or drug abusers because that's just a small portion of the homeless," Dr. Laura Sadowski said.

After 18 months, the group of 200 patients with housing — the intervention group — each made at least one trip to the hospital, but overall they reduced their hospitalizations on average by 2.7 days per person per year, which translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars, far more than the costs of providing the services.

Source: Miller-McCune 

Image by  Franco Folini . Licensed under  Creative Commons . 

When we last wrote about Morskoi Boi, the popular submarine-battle game that was, incredibly, produced by the Soviet Union alongside actual nuclear submarines, it was merely a relic tucked away in Russia's Museum of Soviet Arcade Games. Now it's a fully functioning and utterly primitive Flash game. Gamers, your Cold War is ready.

Source: Russia! 

Image by Varvara Lozenko.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but there’s something new on the sun: sunspots. Last fall, astronomers who ignored their mothers’ advice not to look at the blazing orb observed the spots—which are actually powerful magnetically induced storms—on its surface after a nine-month absence, Canadian Geographic reports (article not available online). The sun hadn’t been spotless that long for 50 years.

The newly increased activity means we’re entering a new 11-year solar cycle in which sunspots will become more and more common. What’s it mean? Maybe warmer weather.

“A spotless sun is slightly cooler than a spotty sun, because the roiling solar plasma around the sunspots generates more energy,” the magazine writes. “Researchers are attempting to establish a correlation between solar activity and the earth’s weather. From 1645 to 1715, the solar cycle stopped, and sunspots virtually disappeared. This interval coincided with the Little Ice Age, a period of severe winters in the Northern Hemisphere that hasn’t been experienced since.”

The spotty sun will almost certainly mean more spectacular northern lights, or aurora borealis, which increase along with solar activity. A light-chasing Alaska photographer who calls himself the Aurora Hunter writes, “We are in the trough, ‘Deep Solar Minimum,’ and will soon be heading upward into what is referred to as Solar Cycle 24.” In layman’s terms, he compares sunspots to “a giant revolving firehose emitting energy into space.”

But don’t rush outdoors at night just yet: The cycle isn’t expected to peak until 2011-2013.

To stay up to date on solar activity and aurora forecasts, visit the website of the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks, Alaska, or Calspace’s Space Weather page.

Sources: Canadian Geographic, Aurora Hunter, Geophysical Institute, Space Weather

Image by Don J. McCrady at StarryVistas.net, courtesy of the photographer . 

When Marian Sandmaier heard the sounds of strange young women’s voices in her front hallway, she dove for the floor, crept upstairs, and hid in her bedroom. What would cause this perfectly functional, successful, and outwardly confident adult to run from her daughter’s friends in a spasm of anxiety?

In this month’s Psychotherapy Networker, Sandmaier explores the lifelong power of one’s temperament. For many years, modern clinicians rejected the idea that one’s temperament was inborn. However, a long-term study by Harvard researcher Jerome Kagan, along with the work of various behavioral molecular geneticists, suggests that our natural inclinations may be hard-wired into our DNA.

Kagan’s study of over 400 children from infancy into young adulthood revealed that roughly half of those who were prone to anxiety, or "high-reactors," shed their early shyness and transformed into extroverted talkers around the age of 15. However, when studied more closely, Kagan found that these seemingly transformed individuals still maintained the same neurological reactions to stress that they exhibited as toddlers. They simply got better at overcompensating for it.

For someone like Sandmaier, who has managed to overcome innate introversion to build a successful career and healthy relationships with others, this means that although she has managed to cultivate a functional “persona” that enables her to navigate the myriad pathways of public life, her “anima”, or private reality, has remained unchanged.

Source: Psychotherapy Networker

The new issue of Imbibe gets inside an interesting debate among coffee connoisseurs: Is aged coffee any good?

“Here’s the first thing to understand,” writes Rivers Janssen for the Portland, Oregon–based magazine of all things drinkable (article not available online). “Aged coffee does not refer to roasted coffee that sits around for weeks, months, or years, either in or out of a vacuum-sealed bag. That’s nothing more than stale coffee, and it will inevitably taste flatter with each passing day.”

In other words, aged coffee does not happen by accident (or, perhaps more accurately, neglect); those who partake often compare it to fine wine. The term, Janssen writes, “generally refers to green, unroasted coffee that professionals intentionally store in a warehouse for a longer-than-usual period in order to tease out certain flavor characteristics while muting others. . . . A coffee that’s high in acidity but with a good body for espresso, for example, might lose some of that acidity after a year of aging, giving it a more balanced flavor.”

Doug Welsh, the vice president of coffee at Peet’s Coffee & Tea, explains to Janssen why he’s a devotee (Peet’s has an aged Sumatra on its menu, which you can sample if you live in California, where the coffee-shop chain is based, or in a handful of other states):

“I like the grape-to-raisin analogy,” he says. “A lot of coffees start out grape-like, especially in their freshness on the palate, their brightness, their sparkle and even their acidity. . . . During the aging process, however, all of those flavors concentrate, just like the sugars concentrate in a raisin or prune. And there’s a fullness of flavor and body that goes along with that.”

Other roasters disagree, of course, pointing out that by the time our coffee makes its way to our cups, it’s already at least a few months old. Ryan Brown, the coffee buyer for San Francisco’s Ritual Coffee Roasters, “opposes storing beans any longer than necessary,” Janssen writes.

“My perspective is that there’s a disconnect between the way coffee can taste and the way it does taste to consumers,” explains Brown. “[Coffee tastes different] when you’re tasting it at origin, when it’s fresh and it hasn’t deteriorated yet, as compared to the way the same coffee usually tastes when it arrives here.”

Source: Imbibe 

Image by DeusXFlorida, licensed under Creative Commons.

If you need a tool in Santa Rosa, you get in touch with Dustin Zuckerman. He's a junior college librarian by day. The rest of the time he's running the Santa Rosa Tool Library from his apartment. Make editor Dale Dougherty writes about Zuckerman's project:

Zuckerman set up his lending library by purchasing circulation software used by small libraries ... "It's good to think like a librarian in setting up a tool-sharing service," he says ... Users register online with their driver's license or ID to borrow a tool. There are no fees for borrowing, but you have to sign a borrowing agreement ... More women than men use his lending library, including a handful who have little experience with power tools. He spends time giving each person a tutorial in how to operate the tools, and provides goggles and earplugs, plus a hard hat, if needed. "I'm not an expert on tools," he says. "I just try to learn the basics so I can pass it on."

A list of tool lending services in three countries and 15 American states lists the Berkeley Tool Lending Library, which opened its dopors in 1979, as the pioneer.

image by Lachlan Hardy. Licensed under Creative Commons. 

Source: Make (article not available online)

How we think about memory is about to change. Psychologist Alain Brunet, who works at McGill University and the Douglas Institute in Montreal, is conducting clinical trials in which participants take propranolol, a blood-pressure drug, after writing about a traumatic experience, reports Technology Review. This exercise seems to “weaken” the emotional strength of the memory, without disturbing any details. Six months after participating in a trial, one Canadian soldier suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) no longer qualified for the diagnosis.

Brunet’s research has to do with unlocking the secrets of how memories are stored, specifically proving the concept of memory reconsolidation. If Brunet is correct, when we recall a memory, it has to be packed away into the brain anew—and during that process the memory is malleable. If this is true, it opens up a bevy of possibilities for the treatment of PTSD, as well as other anxiety disorders and addiction.

There are some concerns that Brunet could be opening the proverbial Pandora’s box, but the psychologist isn’t fazed. “Brunet points out that he is trying to bring PTSD patients’ memories into a normal emotional range, not blunt their power altogether,” Technology Review senior editor Emily Singer writes. “He doesn’t think that using propranolol to render these memories bearable would create any unique potential for abuse as a way to dull the regrets, fears, and embarrassments of everyday life; people already use alcohol and drugs for such purposes.”

Source: Technology Review 

Ten million billion ants, 60,000 papers on the genetics of the common fruit fly, the weaponozation of at least 18 arthropod-borne diseases, and one skinned frog. In the books section of The Guardian, science writer PD Smith offers a titillating roundup of bizarre facts from the history of animal and insect experimentation—and leaves you with a reading list.

Image by  Hamed Saber , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Writing for the online magazine Greater Good, Dacher Keltner explores the evolutionary roots of embarrassment and explains how our pink cheeks can actually help us. Keltner, a psychologist who studies positive emotions, writes: “We may feel alienated, flawed, alone, and exposed when embarrassed, but our display of this complex emotion is a wellspring of forgiveness and reconciliation.”

The simple elements of the embarrassment display I have documented and traced back to other species' appeasement and reconciliation processes—the gaze aversion, downward head movements, awkward smiles, and face touches—are a language of cooperation, they are the unspoken ethic of modesty. With these fleeting displays of deference, we navigate conflict-laden situations—watch how regularly people display embarrassment when in close physical spaces, when negotiating the turn-taking of everyday conversations, or when sharing food. We express gratitude and appreciation. And, with deflections of attention or face-saving parodies of the mishap, we quickly extricate embarrassed souls from their momentary predicaments.

Studying embarrassment does seem sort of fun—at least, for the researchers who are charged with inducing said embarrassment. “In perhaps the most mortifying experiment,” Keltner writes, “participants had to sing Barry Manilow's song ‘Feelings’ using dramatic hand gestures—and then had to watch a video of their performance surrounded by other students.”

(Congrats to Greater Good on their 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nomination for social/cultural coverage!)

Source: Greater Good 

Image by Symic, licensed under Creative Commons.

While we've all got public health campaigns on the brain, we might as well enjoy the aesthetics of it all. The University of Kansas Medical Center hosts an online gallery of vintage Chinese public health posters with translations. Stay healthy!

 Translation:

Terrible disease of the diphtheria

Send patients to the hospital as soon as possible

Take inoculation before getting infection

Translation:

Terrible disease of meningitis

See the doctor immediately when having severe headache and fever

Stay away from crowds

(Thanks, Cee Bee)

Virtual settings allow preteens to try on a variety of personas—they can be athletes or bookworms, preppy or punk, female or male. A recent study by psychologist Sandra Calvert suggests that, despite this opportunity to create a new identity from scratch, the behavior of a child’s avatar tends to stay true to the child’s real-world self.

Calvert and her team studied pairs of fifth graders, having them create avatars and play with one another in a multi-user domain (MUD). About 11 percent of boys and 32 percent of girls experimented with gender-bending, or choosing an avatar of the opposite sex. These opposite-sex avatars, however, still showed play preferences and behavior consistent with the users’ biological sex. Boys largely preferred action-oriented play, while girls opted for typed conversations.

The fact that these behavior styles continued to hold in the virtual realm suggests that MUD play functions like real-world play in providing a space for self-exploration and discovery. And, as in real-world play, social norms such as gender roles can color this self-exploration. Psychologist Kaveri Subrahmanyam concludes, “People don’t go online to leave their bodies behind and find new selves, but instead seem to be taking their offline selves, including their biological selves, with them.”

Source: Science News

Photo by Dan Taylor, licensed under Creative Commons.

This May, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will hear the appeal of Paul Shanley, a Catholic priest who, famously and several years ago, was sentenced to a dozen plus years in prison after four men recovered memories of alleged abuse in the 1980s. But how, exactly, do we judge the science of repressed memories?

In the March 16, 2009 issue of the Nation, reporter JoAnn Wypijewski provides the fascinating back story of how—flush with moral panic—judges, lawyers, and jurors allowed a scientific leap of faith to preclude due process. “People who may not believe in God or aliens believe in repressed memory, with no more justification and maybe less,” she writes. Yet to date there is no conclusive evidence of the hypothesis of repressed memories, which means the theory should be inadmissible in court.

Wypijewski reported on the Shanley case in 2004 for the much lamented, no-longer-in-print Legal Affairs, and her expertise shows as she navigates the legal terrain. “Shanely had had sex,” she writes for the Nation. “He’d had sex with hustlers and teenagers and other men. And he, a priest, had lied about it. That any else might be lying, or confused, or seeking attention, or wanting money, or needing an explanation for the mess of a life only muddied up a good gothic tale.”

Sources: The Nation, Legal Affairs

Babies can follow a beat just days after birth, and they can notice when a rhythm pattern is disrupted, according to study results presented by Discover. Some scientists believe the ability to recognize steady rhythms, called beat induction, could be unique to humans. Some, including the study’s authors, also think it’s innate. Lead researcher Istvan Winkler suggests that a sense of rhythm helps newborns process and respond to repetitive baby talk, paving the way for language acquisition. If he’s right, our affinity for music may be a happy evolutionary accident, a byproduct of other essential learning processes.

Image by Kamal Aboul-Hosn, licensed under Creative Commons.

Neuroimaging grabs headlines, but a recent study, highlighted in the New Scientist, questions the reliability of brain scan research, particularly when it’s used to make claims about human emotions and behavior.

Hal Pashler and his colleagues looked at more than 50 studies that used fMRI scans to link activity in specific brain regions to feelings. They argue that many of the studies—nearly 30—have inflated these correlations or created one where none exists. The problem has to do with methodology. Pashler’s team contends that for any given brain image, researchers should cross-reference two sets of scans in order to accurately judge the strength of a correlation. The studies they criticized relied on only one.

Not surprisingly, the scrutinized groups have already begun to defend themselves, but there’s more than scientific integrity on the line. Studies like the ones in question are already being treated outside scientific circles as fact. As both the New York Times and Justice Talking (pdf) reported, the scans been used as evidence in legal cases for years.

Image by Mikey G. Ottawa, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the not so distant past, it seemed that hobby science had gone the way of the dodo bird. Surveying back issues of Popular Science, Mark Frauenfelder, the editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and co-founder of Boing Boing, noticed that stories about basement adventures with test tubes and hot plates disappeared sometime in the 1960s, replaced by tales of big money experimentation—"the kind that costs billions of dollars and requires an army of PhDs to oversee."

Then along came the internet, that fertile ground the next generation of amateur scientists are springing from, according to Frauenfelder. In a post for Good magazine's blog, he writes:

The Internet inspires and speeds along amateur scientific research by making it possible to share reports, videos, blueprints, data, and discussions. Interestingly, amateur scientists are using the Internet exactly as the architects of the Internet years ago envisioned it 40 years ago—as a scientific research facilitator, replacing snail mail, print versions of peer review papers, and conferences. It's brought far flung researchers together in a shared space where communication is instant and ideas flow fast.

The proof for Frauenfelder lies in the surging popularity of MAKE's annual DIY fair, which he attributes to "the resurgence of experimentation spurred on by Internet communication."

Further solidifying Google move towards total world dominance, Australia's newspaper the Age reports that scientists recently discovered hundreds of new species, including new birds, insects, and monkeys, using Google Earth.

The location of the find on Mount Mabu, Mozambique, was originally singled out for a possible conservation project, but researchers decided to take a closer look when they saw previously unexplored patches of vegetation. You can see the gorgeous photos on the Guardian website.

Image courtesy of  marcbel , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Synesthesia is the source of near-endless fascination for neuroscientists. It’s “probably the sexiest neurological phenomenon around,” Michael Mays observed on Studio 360 last February. Synesthetic people tend to reflexively blend their senses together, seeing colors in response to music, for example, or link shapes with specific tastes.

A new study, highlighted by the New Scientist, documents the first known cases of an unusual form of synesthesia where textures blend with emotions. For these synesthetes, corduroy may produce confusion, while dry leaves might trigger disgust.

For the study, neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran and David Brang tested their subjects twice over the span of eight months to confirm that they felt textures in emotionally specific ways. Their associations stayed the same throughout the tests: One woman described the sensation of sandpaper as “telling a white lie” in the first round of tests, and said she felt “guilty” after touching it the second time, “but not a bad guilt.”

The study follows only two subjects, so this particular form of synesthesia is likely rare, but it’s more than a curiosity. Neurologist Richard Cytowic estimates that 1 in 23 people experience some kind of synesthesia.

Ramachandran theorizes that synesthesia may be an evolutionary adaptation that helps people think creatively and metaphorically. He describes synesthetic experience as a spectrum, where nearly everyone has the ability to make some form of synesthetic connections. For example, he sees traces of tactile-emotional synesthetic thought in the widespread use of phrases like “sharp criticism” or a “rough night.” In fact, Ramachandran thinks that studying synesthesia could help explain some key milestones in human evolution, like the development of language. 

Image courtesy of Djenan Kozic, licensed under Creative Commons.

(Thanks, Seed.)

Just about every episode of the hit medical drama House MD follows a pattern, as the humor magazine Cracked points out: A patient presents weird symptoms that escalate into a life-or-death situation, House and his team take ridiculous risks to save the patient, and then the patient is saved.

What many viewers don’t know is that the National Institutes of Health has its very own House-like team called the Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP). The main idea of the TV show echoes the UDP’s work, but the two don’t have much else in common. The New Scientist interviewed program head William Gahl, who, unlike the TV show's protagonist, seems to be a humble, caring man with a sincere interest in his patients. Plus, real patients usually show up with slow-developing conditions, not the dramatic collapses seen on the show.

The UDP began in May of 2008 and in those seven short months has received over 1000 doctors’ inquiries. The program, according to Gahl, serves two purposes: Not only do the physicians work to diagnose and help patients, they also try to identify new medical conditions in the hopes of making future diagnoses easier for everyone.

The fact that friends influence their friends’ moods should be no surprise, but new research shows that friends-of-friends and friends-of-friends-of-friends—even those who’ve never met—have the power to influence each other’s moods, too.

The influence people hold over other people's moods wanes the further apart they are socially, according to the research reported in the New Scientist. A person is 15 percent more likely to be happy if a friend is happy, but it drops to ten percent for friends of friends, and six percent for friends three-degrees-removed. Six percent may sound like a small number, but a $5000 raise has been shown to bump contentment by just two percent.

The influence ends at three degrees of separation, according to the researchers. After that point, sway through social networks becomes insignificant. Interestingly, the study suggests that social influence doesn’t operate in a simple ripple effect—three is apparently the magic number. After three degrees of separation, “a kind of social dissonance saps the transmission of behavior, almost like a wave.”

Inventions aren’t just for inventors, according to Saul Griffith, one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” His myriad innovations, including low-cost eyeglass lenses and a smart rope that’s able to sense its own load, are undoubtedly impressive. What makes Griffith different is that he wants to help everyone share in the inventive process.

In this episode of the UtneCast, senior editor Keith Goetzman talks with Griffith about the future of invention and innovation, which he believes will be more open and collaborative. Griffith is also helping bring that future to fruition with HowToons, a series of science-based cartoons for children.

You can listen to the interview below, or to subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes, click here.

In a bid to help reverse Europe’s serious population decline, Swedish medical student Anders Svensson recently wrote an academic thesis on the financial benefits of state-subsidized in vitro fertilization, Science Daily reports. The idea may seem odd, but Svensson isn’t the first to make the connection between IVF and the economy. Last year the Rand Corporation published a study calculating the costs and benefits of such an initiative and found that the government would theoretically turn a significant profit on its investment in the form of taxes paid by the individual throughout his or her lifetime.

Europe’s dwindling population is currently threatening many state-maintained support programs like Social Security and health care. If the birth rate doesn’t increase soon, children may be increasingly forced to support the aging European population, which by 2050 will have an estimated one in three people over the age of 65. With that responsibility looming, Svensson and others believe that investing government money in IVF programs and technology could help spur future economic growth, as well as improve the morale of thousands of couples who are involuntarily childless.

Researchers have found that sad people watch significantly more television than happy people, Matt Palmquist reports on the Miller McCune blog, though it’s unclear whether sadness causes more TV watching, or more TV watching leads to sadness. The study, based on the General Society Survey conducted from 1975 to 2006, concluded that “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged, with TV becoming an opiate.” Happy people, according to Palmquist, “were more socially and religiously active, voted frequently, and read more newspapers.”

Video games are evolving into more and more elaborate forms, but they're still dominated by white or Asian protagonists. Writing for The Escapist, Chris LaVigne asks, why aren’t other races and cultures being represented in video games?

The argument for more minorities in video games has been made before, notably in a 2003 article by Ernest Adams, but discourse usually concerns the portrayals of black and Hispanic people in games like Grant Theft Auto. What LaVigne advocates is a way for games to reflect today’s high level of globalization.

As an example of what not to do, LaVigne cites the popular game Tomb Raider, which takes place in Peru, yet the native Peruvians are relegated almost entirely to the background and never speak. And with the glut of World War II games like the Call of Duty series, LaVigne wonders why gamers can’t play as “the Filipino soldiers who fought alongside American forces at the Battle of Luzon to free their capitol city, Manila? Why can't we play as the Rhodesians (now Zimbabweans) who fought with the British military against Axis forces? It was a world war, after all. Why don't developers see the value of telling these unique stories instead of giving us the same 'good ol' boy' Yankees and ‘stiff upper lip’ Britons that were already clichés when they were first introduced?”

Games like Resident Evil 5 (with African characters and setting) and Prince of Persia are headed in the right direction, according to LaVigne. Hopefully, he writes, developers will stop “babying their audience” and open them up to a genuine representation of the world, digital or otherwise.

Image courtesy of RebeccaPollard, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Mars Phoenix Lander has accrued thousands of friends and fans on Facebook and Twitter since “dying” last week, when the red planet’s freezing temperatures ended the machine's functionality, Scientific American reports.

NASA spokeswoman Virginia McGregor became a pseudo-celebrity when she began transmitting Twitter tweets and Facebook messages on the lander’s behalf. This proves that 1) social networking is inescapable, even in space; and 2) humans can mourn inanimate objects in record numbers.

For a space program with a history of public relations problems, harnessing the power of social networking to eulogize the Phoenix was a brilliant bit of marketing, and a great way to exploit the sentimentality of space geeks like [sniff] yours truly.

Adding to the trend of green and alternative burials, one British woman is developing a new, elegantly morbid way to honor the dead: by pressing loved ones’ cremains into fully functional pencils. 

The project “Carbon Copies” is the brainchild of Nadine Jarvis, a product designer who is currently exploring ways “to challenge our archaic post mortem traditions and to offer proposals for alternate treatment for our deceased.”

Image courtesy of Srthnow, licensed under Creative Commons.

Want some help with your math homework, free of charge? Or maybe you need a refresher course without reenrolling in school. Open Culture points to a series of online video lectures on calculus by Princeton lecturer Adrian Banner, author of The Calculus Lifesaver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Calculus.

Banner’s videos join the growing ranks of educational multimedia resources on the web, like the free audiobook site LibriVox and the online lectures via iTunes U. Once you've graduated beyond those, the Boston Globe suggests Fora.tv, Bigthink.com, Edge.org, and any one of the lectures from the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference.

Americans have been warned not to expect too much from Obama’s election too soon, but that doesn’t mean people can’t speculate. The Union of Concerned Scientists believes we’ll see an aggressive approach to climate change policy once Obama takes over, and 3QuarksDaily provides a nice summary of what the federal and state elections mean for science.

Obama and the next Congress are positioned to enact a comprehensive “Green Deal,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, that could modernize our energy infrastructure while stimulating the economy. Already, Obama plans to send delegates to December’s UN climate meeting in Poland, and Cosmos wonders whether Obama can break the deadlock gripping those talks.

One question still remains: Will these actions be enough to forestall the effects of the dangerous environmental regulations (or deregulations) that the New York Times blog speculates the Bush administration is pushing through during its last days in office?

Image by Ralph Alswang, licensed by Creative Commons.

During a speech in Pittsburgh last week, Salon.com reports that Sarah Palin took another swing at earmarked spending, giving a specific wink towards "fruit fly research in Paris, France!"

Palin was referring to money secured by California congressman Mike Thompson for the study of the olive fruit fly, according to Salon. The Alaska Governor opted not to tell the audience that the flies have been infesting olive groves for decades in Mediterranean climates (hence research in France) and more recently have started affecting crops in California. Thompson was adamant about his decision to fund studies of the pest, which he called "the single largest threat to the U.S. olive and olive oil industries.”

Palin may attack the program as frivolous, but fruit fly testing has proven indispensable in genetic research (it was through fruit flies that we discovered how chromosomes determine sex, for example), and it’s also helped scientists better understand autism, an issue in which Palin has repeatedly shown interest.

It's also worth noting that just a few months ago, Palin herself had pushed for earmarked money to study, among other things, the mating habits of crabs. That study seems less ridiculous when revealed that the money would be used to research "Bering Sea crab productivity and sustainability as necessary to restore crab stocks."

Attacking fruit fly and crab studies could make for a cheap political point in front of audiences, but a little more information shows that kind of research deserves respect.

Image courtesy of  shioshvili , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Every new communication method is marked by the technology's first message sent. Colin Barras at the New Scientist rounded up the first messages broadcast with various devices, including the 8,500-year-old Chinese tortoise shells (“woman … eye … window”), Samuel Morse’s “a patient waiter is no loser” telegram in 1838, and “Merry Christmas,” the first text message in 1992.

New Scientist invites readers to submit their predictions for the next communications revolution: “What will be the next communication medium to change the world? And what would your first, historic message be?” One submission will be chosen to win a six-month subscription to the magazine.

I’ll get the ball rolling with my submissions:

1) A banner towed by an airplane bearing a message in LOL speak: “Oh hai! Im up in ur airspace, decorating ur sky!”
2) Subliminal messages embedded in presidential debates: “Attention Joe the Plumber: You are being exploited as a talking point.”
3) Hundred-mile-high lettering etched into the moon’s surface with dynamite: “I Am Writing On the Moon with Dynamite.”

Image by Bill Bradford, licensed by Creative Commons.

Just when you thought Google couldn’t get any more useful (or pervasive), engineers at Google Labs have launched Mail Goggles, a Gmail feature designed to prevent you from sending drunken emails you may regret in the morning. Here’s how it works: When the feature is enabled, Mail Goggles will ask you a series of basic timed math problems to see if you’re functional enough to know what you’re typing. If you pass, your message will be sent. If you fail, it’s probably best to wait until morning to write to your ex (or mother or boss).

To activate Mail Goggles in Gmail, go to the settings, click on "labs" on the right-hand side, and scroll down to find it. The default active time frame for the feature is late at night on weekends, but you can tailor it to your specific needs; say, if you tend to go overboard on the Bloody Marys during brunch, or if you plan on playing one of several drinking games designed for the presidential debates.

(Thanks CNet.com)

Image courtesy of  SuperFantastic , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Engineers at MIT have developed a way to produce smell receptors in a lab, reports ScienceDaily. This might not seem like big news, but scientists have been trying to develop this kind of technology for years. Developing artificial smell sensors could help law enforcement officials replace drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs, which take extensive time and money to train, with artificial noses. Also, considering that diseases including diabetes, asthma, and certain types of cancer have a particular smell, the technology could be used to make early, potentially life-saving diagnoses.

Image courtesy of tuexperto_com3, license under  Creative Commons.

Scientists are trying to understand the concept of beauty using neurology, thinking that the "eye of the beholder" could be linked to a function of the brain. Writing for Seed, Moheb Costandi presents a history of scientific attempts to figure out the essence of beauty, from experiments with mescaline in the 1920s to Semir Zeki’s pioneering work in neuroaesthetics at University College London.

UCL scientists are collaborating with leaders in the arts and humanities to study the beauty in many forms, including prose and music. They’re are also examining the ways people perceive the aesthetics of architecture and other spatial relationships. In one study where scientists monitored brain activity as subjects looked at paintings, Costandi reports that “the ‘uglier’ a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape.”

Researchers hope to learn what universal qualities, if any, the human mind assigns to beautiful things, how long-term exposure to beauty might permanently alter our neurological pathways, and how beauty affects other neurological conditions, such as depression. “An object’s beauty may not be universal,” Costandi speculates, “but the neural basis for appreciating beauty probably is.”

(Thanks, Dan.)

(Image adapted from a photo by goatling, licensed by Creative Commons.)

Even as a fifth grader, I knew better than to claim that gaming is educational when begging for a Nintendo game system.  But video games have evolved exponentially over the past twenty years, becoming more sophisticated and sometimes educational. Today, gaming can teach not just kids, but scientists too.

Writing for Seed, Abbie Morgan looks at five video games, (Spore, Emotiv Systems’ EPOC Headset, Foldit, Immune Attack, and 3D Virtual Creature Evolution) which have each revolutionized and enhanced different areas of science. The games are intriguingly complex, especially the universe-building Spore, the latest offering by The Sims creator Will Wright. Seed has also posted a neat video of a conversation between Wright and astrobiologist Jill Tarter. Considering their applications in modern science, all five games profiled by Morgan could provide young gamers with good ammunition the next time they’re campaigning for more play time from their parents.

Image by  Rebecca Pollard , licensed by  Creative Commons .

An indelible image from last month’s Olympic Games came when Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt dominated the 100-meter dash so completely that he began to celebrate before the race was over. He set a new world record, but how much faster could he have gone if he hadn’t slowed down for a victory dance? For all of those who have been waiting with bated breath to know for sure, a team of physicists at the Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, Norway, has figured it out. * Bolt may have been able to shave a full .14 seconds off his finish, had he run the race normally. Maybe for their next project those scientists can calculate what else they could have studied in the time it took them to figure this one out.

(Thanks, New Scientist)

Image by Richard Giles, licensed under Creative Commons.

* Correction: The item originally read "with baited breath." It has been corrected

The first proton beam whizzed around the Large Hadron Collider track today, far underground, beneath the Swiss-Franco border. “Like first light in a telescope, the first beam in the particle accelerator is a landmark moment for a program that has spanned more than 20 years and involved tens of thousands of scientists,” reports Wired News.

The track is the world’s largest, spanning 17 miles, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Scientists won’t get busy with the good stuff—smashing atoms!—for several weeks, but when they do, many predict discoveries that will revolutionize physics, even our basic understanding of the world. Wired does a heck of a breakdown.

Other predictions for the outcome of the high-energy collisions haven’t been nearly as rosy. Doomsday scenarios include the creation of mini black holes and “dark matter” particles called strangelets. Even though independent reviews have deemed the planned experiments safe, my friend still thinks we should probably be throwing an end-of-the-world party come mid-October. I’m inclined to agree. No RSVP necessary, just check HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com before heading over.

There’s a scientific explanation for why people love donuts at the office. A study recently published in Psychosomatic Medicine reveals that “knowledge-based work” causes people to eat much more than normal, even though their brains are technically performing at the same level of activity as if they were just sitting around. The researchers behind the study offer two possible explanations: One is that eating stabilizes blood glucose levels, which the brain relies on heavily. As evidence, the researchers show that glucose levels change when performing knowledge-based work. The other explanation is that knowledge-based work increases stress, and it’s well-documented that stress leads to increased appetite. Either way, it’s probably a good idea to keep the Snickers out of reach as deadlines approach.

(Image courtesy of Eyedropper, licensed under Creative Commons) 

Information overload, data-security anxiety, and a feeling of queasiness about our culture’s proliferation of nonsense are inextricable parts of the human condition in the Google Age, according to Geert Lovink writing for Eurozine.

The impact of the modern “society of the query,” according to Lovnik, has caused people to forget the “art of asking the right question.” If we don’t know what information we’re looking for, we’ll never find it. No search engine (now matter how advanced) is going to help us find the right questions.

The Google society has also created an overwhelming accumulation of “data trash.” The problem is that if we’re too overwhelmed by data, we’ll have no time for serendipity—the equally lost art of stumbling upon good ideas. Lovnik summarizes his points, writing:

For the time being we will remain obsessed with the diminishing quality of the answers to our queries – and not with the underlying problem, namely the poor quality of our education and the diminishing ability to think in a critical way…What is necessary is a reappropriation of time. At the moment there is simply not enough of it to stroll around like a flaneur. … Stop searching. Start questioning. Rather than trying to defend ourselves against ‘information glut,’ we can approach this situation creatively as the opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our information-rich world.

(Thanks, 3 Quarks Daily.)

Image by Juancho, licensed by Creative Commons.

The U.S. Army Research Office has awarded $4 million to scientists from three universities to study “the neuroscientific and signal-processing foundations of synthetic telepathy.” Put simply, the military wants to read minds. According to an offical press release, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland will collaborate to construct a “brain-computer interface,” where soldiers’ thoughts will be recorded by an EEG and transcribed by a computer-based speech recognition program for others to read. The project’s supporters say that synthetic telepathy would help both wounded soldiers and civilians as well (for example, those sustaining brain damage from trauma or stroke). Critics worry that the technology could be used for interrogation, even though the lead researcher, UC-Irvine's Michael D’Zmura, told the Associated Press that the program "will never be used in a way without somebody's real, active cooperation.”

This is by no means the first time the military has poured money into researching psychic activities like mind-reading or “remote viewing.” Writing for Maisonneuve (article not available online), Alex Roslin details the long history in the US of military psychic research, which stretches all the way back to 1953. The idea reached its peak in the 1970s and ‘80s with Stargate, the CIA’s cinematically titled program for developing remote viewing and precognition techniques.

(Thanks, Democracy Now!)

Image by The She-Creature, licensed under Creative Commons.

Back in November, Google.org (Google's philanthropic branch) announced it was launching a massive effort to support renewable energy. On Tuesday the company reached a milestone in their endeavor by earmarking $10 million for the research and development of geothermal energy, specifically that of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). The official Google.org blog post explains EGS as expanding “the potential of traditional geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. The traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam or hot water. The EGS process, by comparison, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine.”

The money will go to AltaRock Energy and Potter Drilling, two startup EGS companies, and will fund a research grant for Southern Methodist University to study and map US geothermal distribution. The effort is a part of the company’s RE<C initiative, a project geared towards reducing the cost of renewable energy to less than that of coal.

(Thanks, CNET News.)

The American Medical Association is under fire for its recent decision (word document) to advise against home births. Doctors, midwives, feminists, natural family planning proponents, and even Ricki Lake are all upset with the intrusion. 

Childbirth is a natural part of life, writes Dr. Vijay Goel for The Health Care Blog. It’s been around longer than hospitals have. So why is the AMA advocating against home birth, a practice that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics, only one percent of women choose? The AMA’s resolution “appears to be based more on turf management than evidence,” writes Goel, “...especially when evidence exists that the process is safe for low-risk mothers.” Condemning home birth is another medical attack in the battle between women and doctors over childbirth in the United States.

Restricting all women to hospital or birthing center delivery, like encouraging unnecessary cesarean sections, is prompted by “junk science and further reduces the credibility of our once proud profession,” writes Goel. Doctors elsewhere would disagree with the AMA’s decision, points out Jennifer Block, author of Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care, writing for the Los Angeles Times. Block quotes a British National Health Service handout, which states: “There is no evidence to support the common assertion that home birth is a less safe option for women experiencing uncomplicated pregnancies.” 

For more on the ideas and issues surrounding home births, read “Drugs, Knives, and Midwives” and “A Tale of Two Births” from the March/April 2007 issue of Utne Reader.

Image by Big Ben(Gaijin Bikers), licensed under Creative Commons.

Getting rid of glasses and contact lenses with Lasik surgery sounds enticing, but subjecting your eyes to a laser might, understandably, make you squeamish. Another alternative, reports the Hudson Valley Chronogram, is natural vision care, a treatment plan that incorporates acupuncture, behavioral changes, and nutritional counseling into eye care. 

The behavioral changes suggested by natural vision care can start simply: less monitor-gazing. “We do things like stare at a computer for six hours straight without looking up, and never blink,” says Nancy Neff, a natural vision educator who weaned herself from glasses. Wearing corrective lenses can also contribute to worsening vision, Neff suggests, since it lessens the work eye muscles do. “I run every day, and doing that without the glasses in the beginning was really challenging,” she says. “I used to say hello to the mailboxes! Slowly, you break that addiction, and go to weaker glasses for things that aren’t that challenging. Now, I do almost everything without my glasses.” 

Natural vision care is more than just extreme jogging, of course. It's a holistic health plan that includes changes in diet and habits. “Nothing replaces a nutritious diet overall,” Chronogram writes, “especially when it’s combined with a positive, healthy lifestyle that also includes regular exercise and daily relaxation such as meditation or a walk in nature.” (Glasses optional.)

Covet the British genteel wit. It can make even techno-gadflies sound delightful. “The Nice, Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st-Century Way. Please. Now.” That, reports the London-based New Statesman, is the “civic hacker” group MySociety’s subtitle to its Free Our Bills campaign. The idea is to bring crusty old parliamentarians up to tech-savvy speed by having them publish their bills in XML format rather than HTML. The shorter acronym stands for eXtensible mark-up language (take that hypertext mark-up language) and allows for all kinds of dynamic fun for readers scanning legislation. New Statesman explains:

... it could turn its two dimensional bills into glorious three-dimensional structures, incorporating information about who proposed them, who amended them, when they did so, and what other bills and acts of parliament each piece of proposed legislation refers to. Crucially, they could let outside bodies, such as MySociety, extend the XML schemas in order to build services around the bill-making process that would make it easier for the average citizen to get a handle on what on earth it is that parliament does all day.

What sort of services could MySociety offer? It could email you every time a bill mentions something you've told the site you're interested in. It could tell you how your MP is interacting with a bill as it travels through the legislative process. It could create Wikified bills that allowed people to leave notes and comments. These are just the things MySociety has thought of already: the beauty of its suggestion is that it would open the door to anybody who wanted to innovate around the way parliament publishes information, to bring citizens closer to the way parliament makes laws.

Now if we could just get MySociety to whip up a snazzy slogan that will make Americans care about net neutrality.

—Hannah Lobel

Have you ever wondered how you’re going to die? Unless you intend to take matters into your own hands—and you’ll have to move quickly to ensure a falling anvil or piano doesn’t get you first—you’ll just have to wait and see. If you're considering gambling with your life, check out the National Safety Council’s website, where you’ll find Vegas-style odds for nearly every cause of death imaginable.

*Spoiler alert: Your lifetime odds of dying from a falling anvil, or some other falling object, are one in 1,335. That’s far from a long shot, so watch out.

 (Thanks, Seed.)

 —Morgan Winters

Image by Adrian Sampson, licensed by  Creative Commons.