A Taiwanese study suggests that free-range eggs may contain many times the levels of toxins, such as the dioxins produced by burning trash, than regular eggs—and may therefore be unhealthier for us. The researchers’ explanation for this is that letting hens out of their cages gives them access to delicious soil, plants, worms, and insects that we have horribly polluted. What goes around comes around.

While this is interesting and important work, it’s a pity it’s been spun (at least in the press release, linked below) as a reason to be concerned about the safety of eating free-range eggs, rather than a story about how pervasive—and well traveled—these toxins are in urbanized Taiwan.

Here’s the press release, and here’s the full paper.

A friend of Inkling tipped us off to this newish Tumblr site (Are all the cool kids on Tumblr now?) Fake Science, whose tagline is “When Facts are Too Confusing.” I wish I’d thought of it first.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, but aside from How Do We Get Oil, shown above (which cuts a little too close to the bone), I’m very fond of How do 3D Glasses work?

Enjoy. And become a Facebook fan! (Also, if you’re not already, here’s where to become a fan of Inkling.)

According to Radio Netherlands, a South African doctor named Sonnet Ehlers is poised to distribute thousands of free anti-rape condoms to local women sometime in the next two months, before the start of the 2010 World Cup. The condom, which Ehlers calls Rape-aXe, can be inserted by a woman like a tampon; if she is then penetrated by an attacker, the condom attaches itself to his penis through “razor-sharp barbs” that don’t break the skin, but do cause excruciating pain if an attempt is made to remove the condom. The idea is that the would-be rapist will hurriedly extract himself and hie to the nearest hospital, where he will first be treated (since the barbs can only be detached by surgical means) and then arrested.

Talk about the myth of the toothed vagina coming to life. I’m all for anti-rape measures, but one has to wonder whether the safety of a woman is going to be enhanced by the act of enraging a rapist with tiny barbs sticking into his penis.

More on the Rape-aXe, which was first developed five years ago and looks almost too much like a medieval torture device to be real, here and here.

As one of six non-Icelandic reporters capable of correctly pronouncing Eyjafjallajokull, the name of the Icelandic volcano that’s been stranding travelers all over the globe, NPR newscaster Korva Coleman has taken on the momentous responsibility of teaching others how to do it.  That’s right. It’s the NPR Eyjafjallajokull rap.

More—much more—almost too much more—help here.

German neurologists have just shown that reading words associated with painful experiences sets off a firestorm of activity in areas of the brain, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), that are responsible for processing physical pain.

Neutral, negative but not pain associated, and positive words were used as controls in the study, and the table showing both the German word list and the English translations is the real reason I’m posting this. It’s a fascinating cross-cultural study in itself. How could the word Krampfartig (English: crampy) not make your brain hurt? Peinigend (English: tantalising) makes me ponder; it’s true the word has tormenting origins, but it’s not quite right for English speakers. And on the positive side, I’m not sure what Hocherotisch (English: highly erotic) would do to my DLPFC, but I would sure like to find out.

You may peruse the table above, as well as the paper describing these findings, without fear—the team reported that no actual physical sensations of pain were associated with reading the painful words.

I’ve just come across this beautiful short film illustrating various mathematical concepts, mainly from geometry, as they play out in nature. Cristóbal Vila is the graphic designer and CGI artist who made the movie. For a detailed explanation of the ideas behind the film and how Vila interpreted them, I highly recommend reading this. Vila even gracefully cops to perpetuating a common misconception, which is that Nautilus shells embody a perfect Fibonacci spiral. Kudos. 

Solarbeat interprets the rotations of the planets in the solar system in musical form, and it is beautiful. Plus, it entertained my cat (who has never before paid any attention to my computer screen) for a good three hundred years or so. In Mercury time, anyway.

Having a hard time deciding if someone’s actions are morally right or wrong? Huh. Have a group of MIT neuroscientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation to mess with the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of your brain lately?

In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible).

In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.

In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible.

More detail on these startling revelations here.

For spotted hyenas, it seems, laughter encodes crucial information. Two zoologists who studied a group of the animals in captivity found that the pitch of a hyena’s “giggle” indicated how old it was, while the frequency of “notes” in its laughter told others in its pack whether it was a dominant or subordinate animal. What we hear as hysterical amusement may actually help hyenas sort out rights to food or summon others to their aid.

You can read the article, published in the open access journal BMC Ecology, here and, more importantly, listen to hyenas giggling here, here, here, and here.

The accepted wisdom is that exposure to the news and other media helps make people more politically educated—but a new study examining 2,400 respondents over the 2008 presidential campaign suggests that when it comes to an entrenched belief (or paranoia), this may not be the case.

Because the survey asked the same questions of the same people in October, September and November of 2008, Hollander was able to explore how people’s beliefs changed over time. The percentage of respondents who believed that Obama was Muslim stayed roughly the same over the study period, shifting from 20.2 percent in September to 19.7 percent in November.

“With most forms of political knowledge, media should theoretically make you more accurate,” Hollander said. “In this case, media exposure had no effect. Ultimately, the message here is that people believe what they want to believe.”

For more, check out the press release about the study.

A new study of older adults and sex, released in the British Medical Journal, finds that men are more likely than women “to be sexually active, report a good quality sex life, and be interested in sex.” In addition, when it comes to being sexually active, women...don’t live as long.

When calculated from age 30, sexual life expectancy for men is nearly 35 years, while sexual life expectancy for women is closer to 31. Those numbers are fairly close, but there’s a key denominator difference - men, on average, die younger than women, leaving women with a greater percentage of their older years in a sexually inactive state.

But, most interestingly, long-term relationships tend to increase women’s sexual life expectancies.

...the gender gap of sexual activity virtually disappeared in those who were married or living with a partner. And in an endorsement of eating right and getting your exercise, health was strongly associated with sexuality in both midlife and later life (whether good health leads to sexuality or vice versa cannot be parsed from the data).

Thanks to the University of Chicago Medical Center’s blog, which I love, for the hat tip.

A new study of 19,567 Chinese subjects found that daily naps increased the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes from 13.5% (without naps) to 15.1% (with naps). In addition, there was some evidence that longer siestas raised the risk more than shorter snoozes.

According to the authors, napping in China is a social norm, which is practiced by all ages primarily as a habit started in childhood. In Western countries, napping is less common and is often unplanned and prompted by sleepiness likely caused by aging, deteriorating health status or nighttime complaints....The authors noted that the association between napping and diabetes was observed despite the fact that nappers had higher levels of physical activity, which has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes.

Lead author Neil Thomas, PhD, reader in epidemiology at the University of Birmingham, U.K., said that additional research is needed to determine if napping itself plays a causative role in the development of type 2 diabetes, or if other factors are involved.

You can read the study abstract here.

Although apes are physically capable of pointing with a finger, scientists had always believed they did so with no particular meaning in mind—that their gestures, in other words, were empty. But a new study of bonobos, a species of great ape native to the Democratic Republic of Congo, suggests that if captive apes are reared in a human culture, in which pointing is carried out with specific intent, they can learn to use the action just as people do: to direct attention, indicate choices, and express ideas. Guess they never met my mother—she always told me pointing was rude.

For more, including a video of bonobos pointing at their preferred human companion, go here.

P.S. If you haven’t yet heard the most recent Radiolab episode about primates raised as humans, you really should. Kanzi, a bonobo from the Great Ape Trust, makes an unforgettable appearance in it.

P.P.S. We recently talked about other human-like things apes can do.

Japanese computer scientists are awesome, aren’t they? I mean, really. They’ve gone and made a program that can tell new parents if their baby is crying because it’s in pain, or just because.

The team has employed sound pattern recognition approach that uses a statistical analysis of the frequency of cries and the power function of the audio spectrum to classify different types of crying. They were then able to correlate the different recorded audio spectra with a baby’s emotional state as confirmed by the child’s parents. In their tests recordings of crying babies with a painful genetic disorder, were used to make differentiating between the babies’ pained cries and other types of crying more obvious. They achieved 100% success rate in a validation to classify pained cries and “normal” cries.

No word on whether the program can translate complex sentences, such as “Stop pinching my cheeks or I’ll bite you, lady!”

Via Eureka News.

Using data collected from Amazon.com book reviews of titles relating to true crime and war and written by members with gendered usernames, researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that women are far more likely to want to read about horrible, violent things (rape, murder, serial killings) that really happened, to ordinary people like themselves. Men, on the other hand, like reading about traumatic injuries and death occurring as a result of gang violence or wars.

Coding usernames for gender, the researchers found that women wrote 70 percent of the reviews of books about true crime, while men wrote 82 percent of the reviews of books on war. The gender of the author appeared to play no role in women’s preference for true crime books.

A second study gave participants summaries of two books...a “true account” of the murder of two women in Hawaii (and) either a true story of two female soldiers who died in a Gulf War army unit, or a true account of two female members of a Los Angeles gang who were killed. Women overwhelmingly chose the true crime books over the books about war or gang violence, even when the main characters of all of the books were female.

The researchers suspected that women prefer true crime stories in part because such stories provide information that the readers feel could help them avoid or escape from a potential attacker. Previous studies have shown that women are much more likely than men to fear becoming crime victims, and there may be an evolutionary benefit to learning from others’ negative experiences, Fraley said. Perhaps the fear of an attack and the desire to avoid becoming a victim drives many women to read true crime stories, he said.

To get at this question, the researchers conducted three more studies in which the summaries of the books included details that might help explain the choices women made. They found that women were much more likely than men to choose a book if it included a “clever trick” the would-be victim used to escape from an attacker, or a psychological profile of the attacker. And women, but not men, were much more interested in books with female victims.

You can read the entire report here.

According to a new study by British evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, social, political, and religious viewpoints that are “evolutionarily novel"—meaning relatively new to human history—are more likely to be held by people of higher intelligence. Among the values Kanazawa classifies as being novel are “caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers you never meet or interact with” (liberalism), and failing to “perceive agency and intention...at work behind otherwise natural phenomena” (atheism).

Kanazawa is set to publish his findings in an upcoming issue of Social Psychology Quarterly; at the moment only the abstract of Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent is available, but you can read a detailed press release here. 

(Whatever else you might think of his work, the guy knows how to write a title: Earlier papers of his include 2001’s Why Single Men Might Abhor Foreign Cultures, and 2004’s Why Beautiful People are More Intelligent.)

It’s probably not exactly a secret to Inkling’s enlightened readers, but this meticulously laid out post on the blog of the dating site OkCupid argues that more men ought to consider dating older women, because:

1) They’re better in bed.
2) They’re happier and more confident.
3) They’re “better looking than you realize.”

(As a qualified “older woman"—at 31! Sheesh—I say check, check, ouch.)

At any rate, the post, though long, is well organized and a fun read. Calculus is involved.

Thanks to Inkling author Anya Weber for the tip.

NPR just filed a charming story about how crows can recognize individual human faces—and built an interactive game in which to answer, once and for all, the burning question: Can I recognize individual crows?

(I tried. I kind of can, but not as easy as it looks at first glance.)

Check out the full story for an explanation of why crows are better at inter-species face recognition than we are.

South Korea’s “EveR-3” (Eve Robot 3), pictured here dressed in a costume created for the Seoul production “Robot Princess and the Seven Dwarfs,” apparently has a long list of other roles with which she’s set to hit the stage in 2010. 

Science news service Physorg quotes Korean scientist Lee Ho-Gil as saying that robot actresses, unlike human ones, never forget their lines—but have been known to bump into things slightly more than their living, breathing counterparts. Aw.

We received a note from Johannes Wiebus, a senior producer at Jynx Productions, this morning. He’s working on a documentary about Arc Attack, an Austin, Texas band whose members regularly perform with electrified Tesla coils, using them to make strange, resonant music. Johannes writes of the video above, “A guy in a chain mail Faraday suit is getting hit with 500,000 volts, generated by a home made Tesla Coil.  Lightning is shooting out of his hands, right over our camera’s lens. We had mounted the camera in its own Faraday cage to protect it—and to attract the sparks.”

More on Arc Attack here.

Are you fans of the Science Creative Quarterly? They’re a sort of small Canadian McSweeneys, only they’re all about science. One thing they’re doing this year, to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity, is something they call their Phylomon Project. They’re soliciting designs for what they envision as being a Pokemon-type card set, as well as ideas for what sorts of games one might play with such a set.

If you’re interested, you can submit illustrations to their Flickr group.

A Japanese astronaut is tweeting photos from space. That up there is a view of Pico De Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico.

THIS IS SO FUCKING COOL. More photos on his Twitpic page here.

A Bristol University poll shows cat owners are more likely to have a university degree than dog owners. Ha. 

“We found that people with a rare genetic disorder cannot use one of the very basic systems of navigation that is present in humans as early as 18 months and shared across a wide range of species,” Landau said. “To our knowledge, this is the first evidence from human studies of a link between the missing genes and the system that we use to reorient ourselves in space.”

More detail here. Thank goodness for smart phones, eh?

...or not.

(PHOTO: DeaPeaJay)

From Proto magazine comes a nice round-up of the latest advances in restoring vision, including artificial retinas (like hearing aids for your eyes), gene therapy, and stem-cell treatments that may be able to regrow damaged retina cells.

The piece has a great opening line: “How many electrodes can fit on the back of an eye?” (Answer: In about five years, hopefully 1,000.)

A Spanish experimental psychologist has just concluded that left-handed people like things on the left better than things on the right, unlike right-handed people, who like things on the right better than things on the left.

In one of his experiments, Casasanto presented participants a diagram that depicts a character who was planning a trip to the zoo, and who loves zebras and thinks they are good, but dislikes pandas and thinks they are bad. The participant had to draw a zebra in the box that best represented good things and a panda in the box that best represented bad things.

You can read the press release here. I kind of love it.

The New York Time’s Economix blog, which reports (rather sassily) about what it calls the science of everyday life, recently linked to an Australian study of happiness and divorce rates in a post entitled Don’t Become Happier Than Your Wife. As someone who had a rather dispiriting 2009 and whose husband is happily ensconced in graduate school right now, doing exactly what he loves doing most, I raised an eyebrow.

Using a meta-analysis of three large sample surveys that include questions about happiness, and correlating this with divorce data, the authors found that “an increase in the happiness gap by 1% raises the probability of separation by 0.24% in Germany (GSOEP), 0.3% in Australia (HILDA) and 0.1% in the United-Kingdom (BHPS).” (This may sound small, but the average risk of breakup in the samples, they claim, is only 1.8% to begin with.)

From the paper itself:

...we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first year of marriage, increases the likelihood of a future separation. We interpret this as the effect of comparisons of well-being between spouses, i.e. aversion to unequal sharing of wellbeing inside couples. Couples are more likely to break-up when the difference in life satisfaction is unfavourable to the wife. The information available in the Australian survey reveals that divorces are indeed predominantly initiated by women, and importantly, by women who are unhappier than their husband.

You can read the entire paper here. As for me, when my husband’s experiments don’t go as well as he hopes, maybe I’ll just tell him his frustration is an investment in our long-term future. 

Stanford Computer Science PhD candidate Philip Guo has a section on his website entitled Observations about People. His latest report, Geek behaviors present during conversations, chronicles “common behaviors I’ve observed from my past few years of interactions with geeks, nerds, and other highly-smart technical people.”

Here’s my favorite bit:

Preferring exact numerical responses
Geeks favor accuracy and correctness over ease-of-comprehension for their listeners. If you ask a geek a question requiring a numerical answer and he knows the exact number, then he will likely repeat it verbatim rather than rounding to present an easier-to-remember response (e.g., “that camera is 4.2 megapixels” rather than “that camera is around 4 megapixels").

Philip’s full report is here.

Look! It’s the prizewinning entry in the BBC Wildlife Magazine and London’s Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. Neat, huh? It’s an awesome photo of an Iberian gray wolf leaping towards its prey! Nature! Wildness! Caught in action! The judges were thrilled!

Oh, snap. Turns out it was all a con. (Probably.)

In a shocking update released today, the photo has been officially disqualified and stripped of its award after the judging panel decided the wolf shown in it was probably a trained hired model, not a wild animal. According to the BBC, “the judging panel looked at a range of evidence and took specialist advice from panel judges who have extensive experience of photographing wildlife including wolves,” before coming to the conclusion that they’d been duped.

The shocking revelation can be found here; the original story about the win is here. The photographer (who had previously explained that the photo was the result of years of planning and even design sketches—somehow this did not catch anyone’s attention) denies any chicanery.

So, you know how birds breathe continuously? How air comes in through their nostrils and travels in a complicated one-way circuit through the respiratory system, passing fresh oxygen along to blood vessels and exiting again without ever turning around on the same path? Meaning birds get fresh oxygen all the time (unlike the rest of us poor suckers), even when they’re breathing out? Well, it’s all true. And until this week, everyone thought birds were the only ones who did.

But no! Alligators started the one-way breathing trend. Alligators! And they passed it along. How did the scientist studying this question, one C.G. Farmer, find this out? I’m so glad you asked.

1) She “pumped air in and out of lungs removed from four dead alligators,” watching the direction of its flow. Cool.
2) She “pushed and pulled water with tiny fluorescent beads through the lungs” of yet another dead alligator, “making movies showing the unidirectional flow.” Movies! So cool!
3) She “performed surgery on six anesthetized alligators,” inserting flow meters into their lungs. Uh. Dude. Indiana-Jones cool.

Much more fascinating detail on the study and its serious scientific implications for evolutionary biology here.

Okay, it’s clear that scents contribute to our experience of flavor—that’s the reason strong-smelling food is the only kind you can taste when you’re stuffed up—but can flavor contribute to our experience of smell? How weird would that be?

Weird enough to be true, I guess. Brandeis neuroscientists recently had rats sniff and eat a particular kind of food while their taste cortex was knocked out (I love that researchers can just knock shit out like that. I’d like them to knock out my procrastination cortex). Then they reactivated the taste cortex and gave the rats the same food to sniff--but this time the animals didn’t recognize it, and were less likely to eat it. So the scientists knocked out the taste cortex again, and the rats went for the food. In other words, the taste and olfactory systems each seem to contribute a piece of sensory information that is combined in the brain to produce a unique...um...food stamp.

My favorite part of this study is that it relies heavily on rats wanting to sniff each other’s breath--the mechanism the scientists used to introduce the food odors. Seems rats, unlike people, love the whiffs of old lunch their peers produce.

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises. That’s how Carl Zimmer opens this post from his Discover magazine blog The Loom. It only gets better from there. And there’s video.

What will make people respond to a holiday card—even if they’ve never heard of the person who sent it?

I’ve just come across two different studies, conducted twenty years apart, in which researchers sent Christmas cards to people they’d never met, then waited to see what they’d do. To make things more interesting, the scientists made some cards look as if they’d come from senders of high status. (In case you were wondering, they accomplished this via the time-tested method of inserting “Dr.” into the sender’s name.)

In both studies, a significant number of people actually responded by sending cards, letters, or photos back, often with a personal note saying how much they missed their old acquaintance. (A relatively small number of the respondents did admit, rather embarrassedly, that they had no idea who the sender was.)

Also in both studies, cards from senders of higher status were far more likely to receive a card in return.

Here’s the published response that I found the most poignant.

Dr. ____, It was good to hear from you again. I was diagnosed with asthma in 1985 by Dr. _____ who has a medical clinic with his Dad, ________M.D. On November 7, 1983, I had a bad asrhma attack at 5:00 am. I went to the V.A. Hospital. They changed my inhalers and medicine and then they took me off both. We sold the house in January in three days. I’m doing A.O.K. Please visit sometime. Thanks for the card, good luck and God bless- Jim

And here are the papers. 

This article, written in 1969, is one of the most fascinating anthropological papers I’ve ever read. In it, Canadian ethnographer Richard Borshay Lee describes a very strange Christmas Day he spent with the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in the late 1960s.

Wanting to thank his subjects for their helpful cooperation with him over the past year of study, Lee decided to gift the tribe with a magnificent ox, to be slaughtered on Christmas Day. Though not Christians, the !Kung had heard of Christmas through British missionaries, and held a celebration around that season. The festivities were mostly filled with local traditions like trance dancing—and cooking and eating an ox.

The animal Lee bought, he writes, “was solid black, stood five feet high at the shoulder, had a five-foot span of horns, and must have weighed 1,200 pounds on the hoof.”

Yet when the iKung saw the beast, they all—to a man—expressed immediate shock and dismay that Lee had purchased such a poor specimen; they complained that it was skin and bones, asserted that it would hardly be worth eating or dancing over at all, and even said the lack of meat to go around might cause fighting amidst the crowd on Christmas!

Utterly baffled, Lee waited and watched on the day of the big feast as the animal was cut open. As he’d known, it was beautiful: fatty and full of meat. What was going on?

Hey /gau,” I burst out, “that ox is loaded with fat. What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?”

“Fat?” /gau shot back, “You call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” And he broke out laughing. So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter. Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking.

There’s an elegant and totally surprising explanation for Lee’s bizarre Kalahari Christmas, one that reveals the !Kung’s marvelously pragmatic approach to gifts and may hold a lesson for ostentatious gift-givers in more familiar societies. I’ll leave you to read it.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I volunteer at the bird lab in the Field Museum of Chicago, making bird study skins once a week. It’s essentially a (very) simplified form of taxidermy, and sometime I’ll tell you more about it, maybe. In the meantime, I wanted to share this fabulous video of the museum’s bug room, which is housed in the bird lab and is one of the star attractions of any behind-the-scenes tour of the Field. The bug room contains glass tanks full of Dermestid beetles, also known as flesh-eating beetles, also known as the coolest thing since sliced bread. They help to clean, more cheaply and efficiently than chemicals, bird and mammal skeletons. Check it out!

Edited to add a clearer link to the video.

Delusional parasitosis is a rare and uncomfortable condition in which people come to be convinced—quite falsely—that they have been infested by parasites. There’s no single cause of delusional parasitosis; sometimes it arises as a manifestation of some underlying psychiatric disorder, such as schizophrenia, but in other cases it emerges in otherwise seemingly healthy, rational people.

I’ve just come across a fascinating case study of eight patients with DP in Singapore, notable because it contains detailed descriptions of the beliefs and behaviors inspired by the condition. One 65-year-old housewife complained of “threadlike worms dropping from pigeon droppings, then becoming insects which fly off from her hair.” She said she heard the noises made by the insects as they bit her, a sound like “tuck, tuck, tuck.” She poured kerosene on her head to try to kill them. A 60-year-old fruit seller saw “small, black, thorny parasites with 8 legs crawling in his skin,” which he believed had been caused by black magic directed at him by another seller in the market where he worked. This man was so tormented by his condition that he tried to hang himself three times.

You can read the entire article here.

(One final note: Many doctors contend delusional parasitosis is behind the strange symptoms reported by people who believe they have a controversial disorder known as Morgellons Disease. So far Morgellons has not been widely accepted as a real diagnosis in the medical community, but so many patients have complained about their terrible suffering, which purportedly includes the discovery of bizarre and unidentifiable fibers lodged beneath their skin, that the CDC recently launched an epidemiological study of it.)

You’ve probably already heard that the world’s first commercial space flight is here—or will be in a couple of years. If you’re planning on being one of the first tourists in space, you might want to take a gander at this fascinating list of ceremonies that Russian cosmonauts are said to engage in before every spaceflight.

Weird and Wonderful Highlights:

• Everyone watches the 1969 Russian romantic action comedy White Sun of the Desert the night before the launch. As far as I can tell, it’s like an old-fashioned Western set in the Caucasus, with harems. And singing.

• Everyone sips champagne and signs their names on their hotel room doors as they leave for the launch site. As they walk out of the hotel, a song by the Russian band “The Earthlings” is played. It’s called “A Green-Grassed Lawn,” it contains the immortal words “But still we hear space music of romance!” and you can listen to it here!

• The buses that take the cosmonauts to the space shuttle have upside-down horseshoes hung on them for good luck. For even more good luck, when they reach the end of their journey, everyone gets out and pees on the bus wheels! Russian cosmonauts are awesome.

If the Virgin Galactic team in charge of herding tourists onto the SpaceShipTwo is smart enough to steal some of these superstitions for their flights out, I’ll let you know. 

The venerable but still, apparently, quite sprightly Royal Society of London—the world’s oldest scientific academy—has just started to release a number of brilliant interactive widgets to celebrate its 350th anniversary. These images are from its photo gallery Moments of Seeing Further, “striking images (that) represent the original moments of discovery of scientists who were able to ‘see further’ to change the world around them.”

They’ve also put together an interactive timeline in which you can read the original manuscripts and see accompanying images for 60 trailblazing scientific papers, including these gems:

• The gruesome account of an early blood transfusion (1666)
• Captain James Cook’s explanation of how he protected his crew from scurvy aboard HMS Resolution (1776)
• Stephen Hawking’s early writing on black holes (1970)
• Benjamin Franklin’s account of flying a kite in a storm to identify the electrical nature of lightning – the Philadelphia Experiment (1752)
• Sir Isaac Newton’s landmark paper on the nature of light and colour (1672)
• A scientific study of a young Mozart confirming him as a musical child genius (1770)
• The Yorkshire cave discovery of the fossilized remains of elephant, tiger, bear and hyena heralding the study of deep time (1822)

It’s a bonanza for anyone interested in science and history, which pretty much defines us here at Inkling. Wonderful news indeed. Happy Birthday, RS, you old fart.

This tragic, yet somehow life-affirming, story comes to us via the inimitable Improbable Research, creators of the Ig Nobel Prizes. You should all subscribe to their newsletter and site feeds post haste.

This report describes the difficulty in evaluating a patient with multiple traumas because he was covered with paint poured from a truck in a car accident...A 29-year-old male patient was admitted to the emergency department following the collision of his car with a paint-carrying truck. His head, face, neck and hands were covered with a cyan-blue oil paint, and bloody “paint mud” covered all frontal and occipital areas of the scalp.

CONCLUSION: Removal of the paint from the skin and the eyes was a prerequisite for the evaluation of the underlying structures. It is difficult to find a cleansing material that can be used effectively and safely in different parts of the body.

You can read the full paper here.

Gapminder is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using statistics to change the world for the better. I just used its online graph-creating software, Trendalyzer (acquired in 2007 by Google), to create a chart of how per capita sugar consumption has changed in the U.S., India, China, and Germany over time (guess who wins?).  It’s neat to look at even in the static version you see above, but what’s even cooler is the fact that Trendalyzer makes statistics move! Woah! To see it in action, go here and click “Play.”

WARNING: This shit is addictive. I also made graphs showing how increasing gender equality smacks down poverty, how access to water swirls infant mortality down the drain, and how cellphones exploded onto the globe beginning in the 1980s. (That last one isn’t terribly revealing, but it’s fun to watch.) I also tried to graph the correlation between the number of billionaires in a country and the number of disasters of various kinds, but sadly there was insufficient data on this point to prove a clear causal relationship.

It’s all pretty amazing—and just plain pretty. And, of course, much of the available data reveals—in a fashion that’s dramatic and hard to ignore—facets of global inequality, those gaps the site is minding.

Last time we wrote about an interactive graph it was a even little more morbid.

I’ve recently become fascinated by the use of self-reported questionnaires in psychological research, and have been noodling around looking at some measures that are freely available. My current favorite is the Disgust Scale, developed by Jonathan Haidt, et al. Here are some choice questions from the 27-number test.

Please indicate how much you agree with each of the following statements:

1. I might be willing to try eating monkey meat, under some circumstances. (Maybe I should be troubled by the fact that I don’t understand why this is supposed to provoke disgust.)

3. It bothers me to hear someone clear a throat full of mucous. (My husband + allergy season = ARGH.)

10. It would not upset me at all to watch a person with a glass eye take the eye out of the socket. (Okay, but if they put it in my glass I might have to put a frog on their pillow).

How disgusting would you find each of the following experiences?

19. Your friend’s pet cat dies, and you have to pick up the dead body with your bare hands. (Aw, that’s really sad. Can I stuff it?)

20. You see someone put ketchup on vanilla ice cream, and eat it. (Whatever floats your boat, baby. Just stay away from my cone.)

22. You discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week. (There is not enough ewwwww in the world for this.)

You can take the test and score yourself here. I got 38 (the highest possible score is 100). You?

British newspapers are reporting this week that biological psychologist Colin Hendrie, of the University of Leeds, has just completed a study showing that a woman seeking to entrap a man should bare precisely 40% of her skin. Less and you’re neglected, more and you’re avoided.

Says the Telegraph of the study’s methods:

Four female researchers… discreetly observed women at one of the city’s biggest nightclubs from a balcony above the dance floor. Using tape recorders hidden in their handbags, the researchers took note of what female clubbers were wearing and how many times they were approached by men asking them to dance… each arm accounted for 10 per cent of the body, each leg for 15 per cent and the torso for 50 per cent.

Also of note: Women who not only bared 40% of their skin, but also dressed in tight clothing and danced “provocatively” attracted the most offers to dance. Wait, what? No fucking way!

Other research articles authored by Hendrie include Evidence to Suggest that Nightclubs Function as Human Sexual Display Grounds, published this year to the astonishment of the biological psychology community. He also wrote the groundbreaking 1998 paper Evidence to Suggest that Self-Medication with Alcohol is Not an Effective Treatment For the Control of Depression.

It’s amazing how the distinction between an electron shell and cloud comes alive through blurry puppy fur!

Watch and enjoy. Next I would like them to explain the quadratic formula.

1) 55% of Twitter users are female.

2) Men and women tweet at the same rate. Which is to say, almost not at all. The study authors calculated the median number of lifetime tweets per user as one. One! This, they say, means most Twitter users post updates less than once every 74 days. Lazy arses.

3) Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

4) The average male Twitterer is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman (and 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman). The average female Twitterer is also more eager to see what the guys are up to: she’s 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. 

Quote: These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.

Aw. That’s sad. Maybe you deserve a little love, guys.

Inkling doesn’t have an official Twitter account yet, though it’s in the works. This news fills us with both trepidation—how can we compete with all these seemingly scintillating male Twits?—and hope: Just make more than one 140-character Zen statement about science in two months, and it’ll be like we’ve published a career’s worth of books. Sweet.

Edited to add that now we DO have a Twitter account! Exciting times, these. Follow us here.