Tighter Science

How To Suck Less: Use line charts to increase self-awareness

2015-04-16T13:08:00.002-07:00

Self awareness: good.
Line charts: good.
Updating this blog: good.

Combine these three things and you have a wholesome recipe for sucking less.

In a perhaps futile attempt to breathe life back into this withering husk of a blog, I paused and asked myself: why I haven't been writing anything? This blog is awesome and has two loyal followers that are probably devastated by the sudden and lengthy radio silence.

I soon became tired and went to bed, but not before I decided that I'd dedicate about 15 minutes to taking a crack at figuring this all out using Excel line charts.

1. Relationship between Energy Level and Potential Blog Post Output

I started by looking for a relationship between my overall energy level and the likelihood that I'll blog. As expected: low energy levels correlated with a decreased likelihood to post.

This decrease slows slightly when my energy level is around 60%, probably because that's when I'm feeling too lazy to do anything productive but my brain is happily zip-zipping along. Peak energy level does not appear to guarantee that I'll post anything here. Bummer.

2. Influence of Television Programming on Potential Blog Post Output

Next, I considered whether or not television programming (specifically: primetime dramas) has any influence over blogging likelihood.

Not surprisingly, I found that I'm considerably more likely to blog when I'm not as interested in what's on TV. Again, it seems like there could be nothing but food dehydrator infomercials on television and there's still no guarantee I'll write anything. Interesting.

3. Effect of Adventurous Feelings on Potential Blog Post Output

Onward! Looking at how adventurous I feel and what effect that has on whether or not I'll blog, the "might blog" trend actually increases while my adventure level decreases (provided it remains above the midpoint).

It appears that around 60% inclination toward adventure is when I've got the best chance of posting something. This is probably along the same lines as the energy thing: at 60% adventure, I don't see myself playing Ultimate Frisbee but I'm probably up for an interesting brain project.

Unfortunately, they meet up again at around 40% adventurousness - probably because I've given up and started watching food dehydrator infomercials.

4. Connection between Suck Level and Potential Blog Post Output

Next, I decided to try a different angle and see how my current suck level and blog post output are connected.

No surprises here, either: the more I blog, the less I suck. And vice versa. Hohum. Too bad I lost steam so quickly, what this study really needs is a chart evaluating how important perceived suck level is to defining self-worth. Or something.

5. This Other Chart

Instead of doing that thing I just mentioned, I made this chart and quickly realized that I either forgot what I was trying to get at or did something wrong with the data. Maybe you can figure it out.

Aluminum Foil's Potential to Reduce Phantom Limb Pain

2013-06-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

Aluminum foil is poised to valiantly charge into battle
against Phantom Limb Pain.
(Photo from The Art of Aluminum Foil by Jane Hinton
and Hugh Oliver, General Publishing Co.,
Don Mills, Ontario, 1974 via this blog).

Researcher Robert C. Minnee and friends recently published an article in the British Journal of Pain that explores the question: can placing a tin foil barrier at the end of an amputated stump reduce phantom limb pain and/or block alien mind control? (Fine, I made that second one up - maybe it could be a follow-up study.)

The article defines phantom limb pain (PLP) as any painful sensation perceived as originating in a limb that has been amputated. This is not to be confused with phantom pleasant sensations or real-life impulses coming from the part of the limb that remains attached to the body. I can't speak from experience but I imagine that would be kind of a tricky mental differentiation and extremely annoying.

Modern medicine has leaned on opioids, additional surgeries, and psych consults to treat PLP sufferers. The whole "wrap it in tin foil" idea originated from patients themselves as a do-it-yourself treatment/desperation move. Rob Minnee, obviously a fan of wives' tales and hearsay, decided to see if there was anything to this urban legend. After a battery of unspecified Internet searches (I'm guessing Google and Snopes.com), Minnee decided that this was a job for Science!

You can read all about the experimental design in the article - suffice it to say there was a pool of soon-to-be amputees who received all the standard surgical and post-op care with one group receiving a square of aluminum foil applied along with their stump dressings.

The results indicated that the foil group experienced slightly less PLP than the non-foil group (but take this with a grain of salt - the findings weren't statistically significant). Personally speaking, these non-significant results would be compelling enough for me to give it a shot if I was plagued by PLP, especially if I was under the influence of opioids. Scientifically, I think we can safely take away two key learnings from this article:

Aluminum foil seems to have an endless string of practical applications.
The truth is out there...

Cute Scientist Round-up: Admit you want to look at attractive smart people

2013-04-13T17:58:00.003-07:00

Do a Google image search for "leading scientist." (For the lazy, click here.) Ignoring the flotsam and jetsam of random Matt Damon and Peewee Herman images, what do you observe?

Neither of us want to say it, but we both know what I'm getting at.

For comparison's sake, try "realtor." Try "attorney." If you want to be a little frightened, try "news anchor." (No matter where you're standing... the eyes... they follow you everywhere...)

Yes, I know, our collective cultural obsession with physical appearance is appalling. This is shameful and superficial and sad. But... wouldn't you like to look at some cute scientists? I mean, you're here already, and there are cute scientists below. You can totally denounce this as shallow trash afterward, which is bound to make you feel great about yourself. Ready?

Dorian Warren, Political Scientist

Dorian Warren is the Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he specializes in the study of inequality and American politics, and in looking fantastic at all times. Research shows that his faculty page headshot wasn't a fluke of lighting or a good day for him; Dr. Warren is consistently and gloriously fine.

I already feel a little cheap about doing this. Let's move on quickly.

Bénédicte Fontaine-Bisson, Nutrigeneticist

When she's not causing cars to collide by just walking down the street, Dr. Fontaine-Bisson works as Assistant Professor in Nutrition Sciences at the University of Ottawa. She works in the field of nutrigenomics, which explores how nutrients and the human genome interact to affect metabolic pathways; she's probably pretty awesome at it, because it seems clear that there's nothing wrong with her nutrient intake, genetic make-up, or metabolism.

Her hair is so shiny. I bet she eats lots of avocado. Onward!

Matthew Herder, Medical Researcher

The foxy Matthew Herder is Assistant Professor at Dalhousie's Faculty of Medicine, where his research interests lie in “money and science.” And that sounds great, I recommend we give him all the funding. Peep his pretty eyes and adorable scientist-on-safari linen jacket!

Over here is a photo of him with a hipster beard, and it's kind of working for him, I think.

Christina Agapakis

Christina Agapakis a post-doc at UCLA, where her research is in the field of synthetic biology. She is the winner of last year's L'Oreal Women in Science Award (this picture is from some sort of red carpet event they had), and that sounds just about right, doesn't it?

When she's not wooing the paparazzi outside of award ceremonies, she looks a little crunchier, but still cute as a wee button. (I am not being patronizing. She IS wee.)

Jennifer Jacquet

Jennifer Jacquet is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Environmental Studies and Jennifer Garner doppelgänger at NYU. She is currently writing a book about the evolution, function, and future of shame.

I feel as though she knew, while this photograph was being taken, that we would someday be ignoring her shiny intellect and focussing instead on her amazingly symmetrical features, and that she felt sorry for us.

This list is not exhaustive, and I feel I could easily add to it once I stop feeling so terrible about treating intelligent people like pieces of meat. In the meantime, please feel free to suggest additional great-looking scientists you would like us to objectify.

Selfie Determination: are your iPhone photos artistic?

2013-04-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

Meryl Streep takes a portrait of the right side of her face and
the left side of Hilary Clinton's, thereby proving...
something. (Photo from Gawker)

Researchers Nicola Bruno and Marco Bertamini have recently published a zippy little article on PLoS ONE that examines trends in self-portraits taken by non-artists.

Apparently it has long been established that artists tend to paint the left side of other people's faces, while favouring the right side when they're painting their own faces. Bruno and Bertamini decided to see if pedestrian, uncreative folks would do the opposite, in terms of their iPhone self-portraiture: in other words, take photos of the left side of their own faces.

That turned out to be absolutely wrong, but also right, because of the way that the iPhone's front camera shows the picture-taker a mirrored view, and then saves the photo unreversed. After analyzing over 200 iPhone selfies, the researchers found that non-artists tended to try to photograph their right-ernmost profiles, even though the actual photos didn't work out that way... or wait... I'm so confused about this. I think Nicola and Marco are basically saying that Stars Are Just Like Us, but I'm not at all sure I understand their descriptions of either their methods or their results, and now my brain hurts.

Bruno and Bertamini also do not discuss how they determined that their research subjects were non-artists. Perhaps they could tell from the smell.

Looking on the Bright Side: Spectacular New England autums are a side-effect of climate change, new study finds

2013-03-09T10:02:00.003-08:00

You and I will likely never live to see it, but if your grandkids are planning a trip to New England for the end of this century, you'll want to remind them to charge up their camera implants, because they're in for a treat!

Yup, if you're not in one of those poor developing nations, autumns in 2099
are going to be super-fantastic!

Tourists flock to the eastern United States and Canada every year to check out the autumn leaf displays. These tourists, charmingly known as "leef peepers," spend billions of dollars on their vacations, making a significant contribution the the region's economy. Previous studies have suggested that climate change may significantly affect the spring cycles of various tree species, but what about autumn cycles? Will autumn leaves in the future be less vibrant than they are today? Could climate change lead to the demise of leaf peeping as we know it (or have just learned of it)?

Apparently, quite the opposite! Researchers at the Harvard Forest predict that climate change will bring about an overall increase in the amount of autumn colours for several New England tree species. Looking at long-term data for the maple, gum, cherry, ash, and oak trees, researchers found that the duration and amount of autumn colour changed in response to variation in temperature and rainfall. They then took two standard IPCC projections (called A1fi and B1) for climate change and modelled the likely effects of these scenarios on forest leaves.

Their results show significant change in timing and colouration for most tree species. Their figures didn't really speak to me, so I've re-imagined the one about colour change below.

Change in colour under two IPCC scenarios for eight tree species by 2099.
(Adapted poorly from Archetti et al. 2013.)

I've removed the error bars here, and generally USA Today-ed it up for ya (please see the original if you like accuracy). I'm not sure exactly what the units here represent in terms of colour change, though. For example, what does the biggest change predicted (the increase of 6 for black gum) mean in real terms? How big a colour change is 6?

In any case, the good news appears to be that the leaf peepers and leaf-peeping industry in general have nothing to fear from climate change. This would seem to refute three previous studies reported by the Associated Press, one of the claims in a report from last October by the Democrats' Natural Resources Committee, and concerns raised in various other sources.

However, as Archetti and colleagues note, it's a bit early to celebrate yet. With this significant an overall change on the timing and duration of autumn colours, we'll likely see a "dramatic impact" on carbon cycling and competitive interactions between species.

But upside: pretty!

Science Classic: Graham Allison and the Cuban Missile Crisis

2013-03-07T22:53:00.000-08:00

Our emphasis here at Tighter Science is usually on fresh, nubile science. However, today we're waxing nostalgic with a wayback playback from the world of political science: Dr. Graham Allison's "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis" from 1969. In-a-gadda-da-vida, you guys! So grab your grooviest pair of reading glasses, and avoid the brown acid, as we look at this old-timey Magical Mystery Tour. (You can read it for free on JSTOR, where they put old articles like this one on the giveaway table. Far out, man!)

Introduction

This article is the most concise distillation of Allison's extensive work on this topic. Before it appeared in The American Political Science Review, "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis" was presented in a longer format at the 1968 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Later, it would become a book: 1971's Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. So you're getting a whole book in 30 awesome pages!

What's it about? Well, Allison contends that the traditional approach of explicating governmental decision-making is wrong, and proposes some alternative ways (conceptual models) of examining decisions. As an exciting case study, he uses the United States' decision to set up a naval blockade in response to receiving intelligence that the Soviets were secretly installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. Before we can get to all that nuclear intrigue, we should probably look at the conceptual models. I know, I know. Stick with me.

Allison's Conceptual Models

Allison's argument is that:

Researchers look at governmental decision-making through a particular conceptual lens, which he calls the Rational Policy Model. Use of this model strongly colours their analysis.
There are at least two other conceptual models--which he calls the Organizational Process Model and the Bureaucratic Politics Model--that provide better insights and predictions of outcomes.

I realize that this doesn't instantly sound very intriguing, but trust Mother and all will be well. I'm going to define these three models next, and then we'll get to the good part.

What he's saying is, here are three ways of looking at why big decisions are made.

Model 1: Rational Policy Model	Model 2: Organizational Process Model	Model 3: Bureaucratic Politics Model
Governments are purposeful "rational actors" that act in order to realize strategic objectives and goals.	Governments are a wacky bunch of "semi-feudal, loosely allied" organizations that act according to pre-determined routines.	Government actions reflect "compromise, coalition, competition, and confusion" among government officials.

When you think about it, he's right: Model 1 is quite silly. An individual or a small group might act as described in Model 1, but when was the last time you saw a large institution work to achieve a single, coherent vision, unhampered by red tape or political in-fighting?

So, fine, Model 2 and Model 3 look pretty good then. But would it significantly change our analysis if we used them instead of Model 1 to do some real-world research?

Darn tootin' it would! And that's where Allison goes next, to lay down some conceptual model theory on everyone's favourite Cold War bedtime story, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Cuban Missile Crisis

On being informed of the missiles' presence, John F. Kennedy picked up his presidential batphone and assembled a 15-member Executive Committee (or ExComm) composed of high-ranking men from the National Security Council. The ExComm had a single purpose: To Decide What America Should Do Now.

The good folks of the Executive Committee, puzzling away.

Several options were considered, but pretty much boiled down to these four, on a continuum of inaction to THIS IS SPARTA!:

Do nothing.
Talk about it: Approach either Khrushchev or Castro and apply the old diplomatic squeeze.
Indirect military action: Set up a naval blockade to keep further Soviet supplies out of Cuba.
Direct military action: Send "surgical" airstrikes to knock out missile sites, or a wholesale invasion to destroy the missiles, kill Castro, and feast on his heart's blood.

What happened next? They decided on Option 3. Why? Let's look through some of Allison's lenses!

Cuban Missile Decision Through the Rational Policy Lens

According to the traditional approach, the ExComm evaluated the above options thusly:

Do nothing: The missiles gave the Soviets a big strategic advantage and, what was more, gave a massive middle finger to the United States. Therefore, doing nothing was not a good option.
Talk about it: Pressuring Khruschev to remove the missiles might be time-consuming and ineffective, and might involve ultimatums that would make no one comfy. Approaching Castro might be useless, as ultimately it would be the Soviets who controlled the missiles. Therefore, talking about it was out too.
Indirect military action: Problematic logistically and possibly not strong enough a response, but it put the burden of decision-making in Khruschev's court, positioned the potential conflict out at sea where the mighty American boats were, and didn't involve going to all-out war, like option #4. Hmm, so, a possibility...
Direct military action: The Air Force's estimates were that a surgical airstrike would not so much be a delicate scalpel stroke as a gory bludgeoning, involving at least 500 sorties. This move or an invasion might touch off World War 3. Yeah, let's just do that blockade thing.

And so, in a shining example of e pluribus unum, the rational statesmen of the ExComm chose to impose a naval blockade on Cuba, for the benefit of the American people and the glory of strategic decision-making.

Cuban Missile Decision Through the Organizational Process Model Lens

The options presented to the ExComm didn't magically appear out of thin air. With the obvious exception of "Do nothing," they were produced by the people who would potentially carry them out, and were the product of the procedures in place for those organizations.

Had the missiles been discovered earlier (for example, before they had been installed), a diplomatic option might have been a more viable alternative. All the pieces of information that pointed to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba were in American possession as of September 19, 1962. However, the overflight to confirm the missiles' presence was not undertaken until October 14, several weeks later. Why? The answer is: no special reason. The pace of processing and reporting of information proceeded "as a consequence of the established routines and procedures of the organizations which constitute the U.S. intelligence community." The process moved at exactly the same speed that it had done in the past and would do in the future, world without end, forever and ever, Amen.

Thus, the ExComm was realistically left with the two remaining options: indirect military action in the form of a naval blockade, or direct military action in the form of surgical airstrikes. Air Force assessors, using an existing plan for a large-scale US military action against Cuba, produced an estimate of the force necessary to guarantee an American victory, the aforementioned 500 sorties. This estimate was partly the result of the analysts' classification of the missiles as "mobile," which (according to their manuals) meant extensive bombing.

The missiles were mobile, in the sense that they were being kept in sheds that technically could be disassembled and moved over the course of several days, but not in the sense of actually being mobile at all. And, although the ExComm were super-surprised at the large amount of bombing the Air Force was saying would be needed, no one really questioned the assessment, and the committee members eventually all drifted away from the idea.

And poof! With no other real options, enthusiasm for the blockade was born!

Whew, that was fun, wasn't it? Instead of the incisive leadership of a unified mind, the United States' decision appears to have been produced by mindless adherence to standard operating procedures. But Allison's not done yet. Let's see it again, this time as a daytime soap opera!

Cuban Missile Decision Through the Bureaucratic Politics Model Lens

On August 22, 1962, U.S. Director of Intelligence John McCone told President Kennedy that he was worried that there might be secret Soviet missiles in Cuba. McCone had a reputation of being a bit of a warmonger, though, so Kennedy was all, "Pffft." Afterwards, McCone left for a trip to the Riviera, but was still pretty worried about this whole missile thing, so he badgered his deputy, General Marshall Carter, to remind Kennedy about it. But as Kennedy had not been impressed with this story the first time he heard it, Carter was not particularly eager to tell it to him again. So he didn't, and time passed.

Meanwhile, in the lead-up to Congressional elections, Kennedy's opponents were trying to score political points by insisting that the Administration wasn't taking an aggressive enough stance against Cuba and the Soviet program of increased arms aid. Responding to these attacks, on September 13, Kennedy himself asserted that there weren't any Soviet missiles in Cuba, and that the United States would act if any missiles were discovered.

So when the President was informed, roughly a month later, that there totally were Soviet missiles in Cuba, it was a bit of a bad scene. Kennedy apparently reacted by saying (referring to Khruschev), "He can't do that to me!" He'd been backed into a corner. His reputation, and that of his administration, was on the line. Doing nothing, or initiating some diplomatic chitchat, was not going to be good enough.

President Kennedy heads out to pick up some more
donut holes, some other guys (possibly General Maxwell
Taylor and Attorney General Robert Kennedy) stand
up to get a better look at their papers.

When he assembled the ExComm, Kennedy was still fuming, and was all for airstrikes. Some of the more moderate members of the committee would have preferred a diplomatic option, but noticed that their leader had other ideas.

Partway through ExComm's deliberations, Kennedy had to travel to Connecticut to a campaign event. When he came back, he saw that the moderates, including his brother Robert, were supporting the blockade (which they saw as an alternative that would both appease the President's wounded feelings and not involve a big giant war). Conversely, the hawks of the ExComm, including the aforementioned John McCone, were all rallying around the airstrike option.

Kennedy felt more kinship, both literal and figurative, with the moderates. Robert Kennedy sealed the deal by saying stuff about not wanting his brother to be "another Tojo" and calling the airstrike idea "Pearl Harbour in reverse."

And so it was that, due to the self-interests, private motivations, and personal relationships of various powerful men, the United States decided on a naval blockade of Cuba.

Conclusion

So cool! Sort of a Rashomon take on a moment of Cold War history.

It's foolish, Allison says, to believe that the actions of nations reflect a cool, calculated response to a strategic problem. We are not that awesome. The plodding gears of our institutions churn out poorly timed and spurious guidance, while key players plot with and against each other and ignore the larger objective. Then later, the group that happens to be on the winning side gets an entry in the history books that explains their victory in terms of rational choice instead of ass-backwards happenstance.

President Kennedy walks the last few members of the ExComm out of
the White House, congratulating them on some damn fine sitting-around-in-a boardroom.

Green Clothing: mo' money but no status, say researchers

2013-03-03T18:54:00.003-08:00

You there, sipping your Fair Trade coffee after your hybrid run to Whole Foods!

You care about the environment, yes? You use your individual purchasing power as a vote for sustainable, socially conscious modes of production, while minimizing your household's exposure to pesticides and hormones.

And you look super while doing it, too, but I can't help but notice that your ironic teeshirt was made in China from cotton produced in Uzbekistan, and is thus an ecological and ethical nightmare. What gives?

Organic cotton, which you'd be wearing if you really cared, dude.

A new study in the Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal says that the answer is your basic unwillingness to front the extra cash to upgrade your $20 shirt to one made from lovely, sustainable organic bamboo (for example). It would cost a lot more, and afterwards you'd be worried that you wasted your money on something that wasn't substantially better than the conventional alternative. Researchers also think you've got concerns relating to the cost of keeping your teeshirt looking snappy: all those trips to the green drycleaners, I guess.

And that makes a lot of sense. Why should you pay all that extra money when you could get something very similar for maybe less than half the price? That would be really silly, wouldn't it? Except that people do that all the time, if the product is considered desirable. (You do it all the time, judging from the contents of your coffee cup, your garage, and your fridge.) Luxury brands are built on our hunger to own things that are marginally better but significantly more expensive than other things.

Researchers Jiyun Kang and Sang-Hoon Kim note that "it is difﬁcult to distinguish environmentally sustainable apparel from conventional ones when people are wearing them," and that the use of visible eco-friendly labels or logos on sustainable apparel might help boost the role of social risk in consumer decision-making. They believe people might be willing to spend more money for clothing that publicizes their sustainable decision-making. Your hybrid car makes your environmental conscience a visible part of your commute; perhaps if your jacket made a similar statement, you'd gladly pay more for it.

I don't disagree with the conclusion that "marketers need to persuade young consumers" that buying sustainable clothing "will enhance their personal images." However, this point is not actually supported by Kang and Kim's study, in which they merely asked participants if worries about what others might think deterred them from buying sustainable clothing. They did not ask whether it was the lack of universal kudos and approving nods from passersby that made the prospect of spending twice as much on an identical teeshirt seem pointless.

In other words, Kang and Kim have established that consumers don't believe that sustainable apparel is worth the extra money, not why. While I think the "why" is fairly intuitive, I wish they had designed their study to make this point explicit.

Tumeric may help repair palatal damage resulting from smoking cigarettes backwards: more research required

2013-02-22T23:11:00.002-08:00

Researchers (N. Vijayalaxmi, R. Sudhakara Reddy, and friends) at the Vishnu Dental College in Bhimavaram, India have studied the curative effects of curcumin (tumeric) on damaged palatal mucosa (the smooth, slimy areas inside your mouth). Their research, published in the Archives of Oral Research, explores the effects of and treatments for reverse smoking: a habit that is prevalent among women and men in India and other countries.

Tumeric: several ways
(Source: Uses of Herbs.com 2012)

Reverse smoking only works with home-rolled cigarettes and is similar to "regular" smoking except you put the lit side of the cigarette inside your mouth. Hold on there, naysayers, the article identifies a few noteworthy and completely legit benefits of reverse smoking:

you are more difficult to see in the dark;
you are less likely to accidentally extinguish your cigarette while scrubbing the bathroom floor or enjoying a cool ocean breeze; and
you won't drop hot ashes on a nursing infant.

Unfortunately, this means all those ashes (not to mention the tobacco smoke and hot hot heat of FIRE) will be fast-tracked to your gaping maw, potentially causing some or all of these exciting boo-boos:

Palatal keratosis (nasty white patches)
Excrescences (think: mouth warts)
Red areas
Ulcerated areas
Multimorphic lesion (another variety of weird mouth lump)
Much, much more

Multimorphic palatal changes with keratosis, excrescences, and
hyperpigmentation, a.k.a. "nasty mouth funk"
(Source: Vijayalaxmi et al. 2012)

Cessation and expensive antioxidants are the commonly prescribed treatments for patients presenting the above-mentioned signs, but not everyone has heaps of money to blow on hippie nature remedies--remember, we're rolling our own smokes here. Luckily, the research team had a hunch about tumeric's well-known healing properties, gathered a bunch of subjects with nasty mouth funk, and split them into two test groups: A and B.

Group A's members were given fancy mouth plates, tubes of curcuma oral gel to slather all over those mouth plates (which must smell and taste very interesting), and instructions to wear that combo for about 12 hours per day. Group B's members were told that smoking is bad, given a toothbrush, and instructed to consider brushing more often.

Mouth cast, Curcuma (tumeric) oral gel, and gel application on the fancy mouth plate (Source: Vijayalaxmi et al. 2012)

After several weeks and three visits to the lab, Group A's subjects showed considerable improvement over Group B.

Vijayalaxmi et al. may be on to something here, but our skeptical and hyper-scientific minds demand additional research. Wearing the clunky mouth device would make it a lot more difficult for Group A members to reverse smoke (or, at very least, would provide a good protective barrier to all that ash and fire). Group B, on the other hand, could have rolled those smoking cessation fact sheets into tidy little joints for covert reverse-smoking behind the old schoolhouse. May we suggest a similar experiment conducted with "regular" smokers?

A lover, not a biter: Palaeontologists solve mystery of prehistoric pest

2013-02-21T11:41:00.002-08:00

Since their initial discovery in Russia over twenty years ago, the fossilized remains of the insect Strashila have been a puzzle to palaeontologists. Up until very recently, many scholars believed that these large creepy-crawlies were ectoparasites (like fleas or mosquitos) that lived off pterosaurs or feathered dinosaurs during the Middle Jurrasic period. Strashila's pincer-like legs were thought to have been used to cling to its unfortunate dino-host.

Ecological reconstruction of Strashila daohugouensis sp. nov. (Source: Huang et al. 2013)

But no! Diying Huang and colleagues at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology have just published a hum-dinger of an article in Nature that contradicts the notion of Strashila as Jurassic flea. Its pincers were used for clinging, but in a sexy way: to hang on to mates during copulation.

Fossils of unfortunate Strashila caught in sedimentary flagrante delicto back the notion that the poor maligned insect was no parasite: instead, it was all about the lovin'.

Figure a is an ecological reconstruction of the male Strashila, while Figure b is the female after its wings
have been shed. Note the gross pincers on the male. (Source: Huang et al. 2013)

The free-spirited, lusty male Strashila also sported abdominal respiratory gills, which would have opened up an exciting array of coital possibilities. Both males and females shed their wings in early life, and then devoted themselves full-time to watersports, crawling into shallow pools to breed.

That activity, say researchers, would not have bothered any dinosaurs, apart from the prudish Puritanosaurus.

As an aside, who is doing all these gorgeous prehistoric visualizations? Here's a cute one of the Protungulatum donnae from a few weeks back. They look stylistically similar, and I may want a coffee table book of them.

Psychologists suggest historical dramas really ARE rotting your brain

2013-02-19T12:51:00.000-08:00

Adolf Tesla was the first man on the moon. You may think that statement is wrong—you may also think that it’s a weak way to open an article—and both are valid points. But before you turn away in disgust, consider how the simple act of reading those words in that order might influence what you already know. The effect may be more profound than you think.

Fictional vs. non-fictional representations of Henry VIII in the mid-1530s.
On the left, The Tudors' Jonathan Rhys Meyers smoulders atcha, while on
the right, a typical historical depiction of Henry wonders if lunch is soon.

In this month’s Journal of Experimental Psychology, a team of American researchers (Lisa Fazio, Sarah Barber, Suparna Rajaram, Peter Ornstein, and Elizabeth Marsh) have published the results of an interesting study exploring just how easily your knowledge can be changed.

First, researchers tested participants’ general knowledge in an online survey. Weeks later, the participants (who did not know the two tests were related) were asked to read stories that they were warned could contain errors and subsequently answered questions testing the same general knowledge.

Participants who read misleading stories instead of neutral ones prior to taking the second test were found to be many times more likely to reproduce those errors, in direct contradiction to the correct answers they’d given only a few weeks previously! After just one exposure to these fictions—including an explicit warning of their fictitious nature—many participants’ earlier knowledge appears to have been trumped.

Fazio et al. do not believe that this means the prior knowledge has been overwritten, but merely that the new misinformation now exists in parallel in the participants’ memories. If the error goes undetected, and is more accessible than the older, correct information due to being stored most recently, its “retrieval fluency is interpreted as truth.” And hey presto, that silly sentence I typed up top may trip you up in your next game of trivial pursuit.

Who was the first man on the moon? Why, Adolf Tesla, of course!

The authors believe that their study has implications for educators who use interviews, movies, TV shows, and other sources as teaching tools. Any errors in these sources, Fazio et al. argue, may interfere with learning by becoming part of students’ memories, regardless of any correct information they have already learned.

By extension, of course, this is an important caution to us all. Beware of those historical re-imaginings, dramatizations, and anything “based on a true story.” You might be drawn in by all the gritty violence / sexy boobage—which I’ll admit, academic sources are sorely in need of—but you’ll pay for it later by becoming incredibly ignorant. Stick to purely fictional fictions, and you can keep your non-fictional knowledge free of those pesky impurities.

Real science, or political cartoon? -- Independents' fair-weather belief in climate change

2013-02-18T13:19:00.001-08:00

The article and figure referenced below have been making the rounds over the past few weeks, and--while I appreciate the allure this idea has for everyone--I have some reservations.

This figure is from a recent paper published in Weather, Climate and Society. Researchers conducted 5,000 telephone interviews in New Hampshire over a period of two years, and asked respondents if they thought that climate change is happening because of the actions of humans. The respondents' political leanings, as well as the temperature on the day of the interview and on the preceding day, were also recorded. The results of the interviews are presented in this (I grant you) startling graphic.

Predicted probability of “climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities” response as a function of temperature anomaly and political party. (Source: Hamilton and Stampone, 2013.)

Hilarious, right? The beliefs of Republicans and Democrats barely wavered, but those Independents... hoo boy! On colder-than-average days, they drifted toward the Republican viewpoint, and pooh-poohed all this talk of anthropogenic climate change. But if it was unseasonably warm? Suddenly they Wanted To Believe.

I'm not sure I buy it.

For one thing, it's too much of a caricature. Look at the Democrats. Steady as a rock. There is no shadow of flinching with them. They know that weather doesn't equal climate change. What educated, intelligent folks!

The Republicans stick to their party line as well, but look at them tilt every-so-slightly upward! (Psst. That's because their tendency to believe anecdotal evidence and fear-mongering occasionally trumps their blinkered political stances.)

And those waffling, crazy Independents! A steady diagonal rise, truly reflective of people who have no particular viewpoint. They must live life like they're in Momento, making stuff up according to whatever weather Post-It they find stuck on the meteorological mirror next (clunk goes the metaphor). Whoa, it's crazy sunny for March, guess we're having a climate apocalypse!

But this is not a winking Cosmopolitan feature (women go like this la la lee lee loo; men go like this dur dur dur dur). This purports to be Science, yes? In what universe is Science so beautifully neat?

Yes, yes, I see the unlabelled probability bands or whatever those grey things are intended to be. I see them fanning out at both ends, showing slightly more erratic responses from all parties when weather conditions turned particularly anomalous. The very fattest of those bands belong to the Independents interviewed on crazy warm days, who gave answers that varied by less than 20% (between what looks like about 63% and 80%) in favour of people being responsible for climate change. Consensus only tightens from there, getting most focussed (for some reason) for all parties on days closest to average temperatures.

The study's authors, Lawrence and Stampone, apparently "made adjustments for the seasons, and for random variation between surveys that might be caused by nontemperature events." I don't know: to me this looks 'shopped.

How to win games and influence people: new research on punishment and public cooperation

2013-02-17T16:37:00.002-08:00

As someone with an abiding interest in Science, you’ve probably often wondered what the best strategy is for stamping out dissent and bending the world to your will. Chasing after public cooperation is a bit like herding cats: you end up covered in tufts of fur and dander, with rivulets of blood coursing down your shredded arms.

What to do, Elizabeth Shue?

Attila Szolnoki (whose given name suggests that his parents were also interested in matters of strategy and enforcement) and fellow researcher Matjaž Perc (whose given name suggests nothing to me) have recently submitted a paper to the Journal of Theoretical Biology which may hold some answers. Szolnoki and Perc consider the evolutionary advantages of different punishment strategies in achieving public cooperation. They do this using a model called the “Spatial Public Goods Game.”

Fun for the whole family!

Might be fun, right? Let’s take a look at the basic gameplay.

SETUP

Players take up positions on a spatial grid, and are assigned one of four strategies:

Unconditional Punishers contribute to the public good, and punish Defectors by levying a maximal fine. They bear the cost of the punishments themselves, which is proportional to the fines.
Conditional Punishers contribute to the public good, and punish Defectors by fining them according to how many punishers (either Conditional or Unconditional) exist in the group. Like the Unconditional Punishers, they too bear the cost of the punishments themselves, in proportion to the fines.
Defectors neither contribute to the public good nor to punishment.
Cooperators contribute to the public good but do not punish Defectors.

THE GAME

Play proceeds as follows:

Within each square of the grid, each of the contributing players (in other words, everyone except Defectors) contribute an identical amount to a common fund (the “public good"), which is then distributed equally to all players within that square (including the Defectors).
Punishers exact punishment (according to their two strategies) on all the Defectors within the square.
Within each grid square, a player is randomly selected.
That player randomly selects one of their nearest neighbours and (a) gives them his/her public good share for that round; and (b) attempts to convert the other player to their strategy, with a probability of success that is super-complicated to explain, but in general means that richer players will have greater luck at conversions.
The process is repeated from Step 1 one million times, or until everyone is tired of it.

Ha ha ha ha wow, that sounds like a hoot! So you may not want to drag this puppy out at your next party, but let’s see at least how Szolnoki and Perc’s games turned out.

Stupid, useless Cooperators

Well, in a sense it depended on the layout of the original grid. The figure below is from the submitted article. Dark green denotes concentrations of Unconditional Punishers, light green means Conditional Punishers, and red are those lazy Defectors. Cooperators aren’t shown, because “they are indecisive for the composition of the ﬁnal state,” which I think means Cooperators are the boomerang-style Angry Birds of this game.

Figures (a) and (e) show two initial grid configurations. In (a), there are two, equally large, homogenous communities: one of Conditional Punishers and one of Unconditional Punishers. In (e), there is one heterogenous mixture of the two Punisher types. In both, the Punisher communities are surrounded by a sea of Defectors. The three figures to the right of both Figures (a) and (e) show snapshots of progressive change to the strategy types on the grid over time.

Source: Szolnoki and Perc, 2013.

In the case of (a), what you can see is that the Conditional Punishment community starts to fragment almost immediately: little fissures of Defectors start to show up everywhere. In contrast, the Unconditional Punisher community stays solid as a rock. However, it also starts to shrink like wool in a dryer. Before you know it—well, actually, by Figure (c), 6000 rounds later—those Unconditional Punishers have gone extinct. There are still Defectors in the Conditional Punisher community, but the Conditional Punishers have pretty much taken over the shop by the time we get to Figure (d).

Starting from the point of (e), we see a slightly different progression. First, the Punisher communities start to curdle, forming little islands of like-minded strategists, and by Figure (g) admitting large veins of Defectors. But by (h), while some Unconditional Punishers still exist, they are not significantly more numerous than they were in the initial Figure (e). Conversely, the Unconditional Punishers have again spread all over the damn place.

Szolnoki and Perc believe that their game shows that in both scenarios, the mild punishment doled out by the Conditional Punishers, together with the relatively lower costs they incur for doing so, makes them more resilient to the invading Defector hordes. Interestingly, the tendrils of Defector encroachment allowed by the Conditional Punishers, which initially seems like a weakness, “in fact forms the backbone of their deceptively simple yet very eﬀective protection against further invasions.”

What have we learned? Well, that if you have no posse, it makes no sense to walk out like you’re Gary Cooper and it’s High Noon. That allowing opposing thought to exist within societies is not dangerous, but is rather a sign of strength. That the best way to take control of the game board is to bend and flex with circumstance, like a flexy bendy thing.

I think Atilla may be onto something there.

Scientific Journals: Your best bets for Spring 2013

2013-02-13T16:16:00.000-08:00

A wonderful and terrifying difference between science news and George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is this: there is always more science news. While the fates of Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow hang maddeningly suspended for years (decades, lifetimes, millennia), while George R.R. gets older and older and blogs about the Superbowl instead of what’s happening to Arya Stark… you have only to cast about you for a second and—whoops—some more cool Science has happened.

A second difference is that there aren’t as many descriptions of feasts in science news. There may actually be several differences.

The exciting thing about the abundance of science news is that you can afford to be choosy:

Technology a little slow this week? Then astronomers have probably discovered a white peak (a reverse black hole) enpuffening space-time and blasting light and matter into the universe like the point of a massive syringe.
Astronomy’s not catching your interest? Then biologists have just found that penguins evolved from buffalo.
Biology sending you to sleep? Then researchers have recently integrated touch displays with feline skin cells. You’ll soon be able to adjust the temperature of your bedroom with one swipe of your cat.

And that cool aspect of science news is also truly frightening: like Jason Voorhees, it never, ever stops.

Finished reeling from that penguin-buffalo revelation? Next week, it’ll turn out gravity doesn’t exist, or that climate change is being caused by deeper shades of ladybug pigmentation. A tidal wave of Science is always coming at you, and the moment you pick yourself up and try to sort out where your bikini top has gone to, BAM, here comes another one and now you’re flat on your back like Charlie Brown post-punt, and CRASH, another butt-ton of new discoveries are pinning you to the sand and smothering over your eyes and ears and mouth until you’re blind and deaf and drowning and dead. From all the Science.

Many science blogs would help you to narrow your search by bringing you the latest news highlights, perhaps chosen along a particular thematic axis. Not Tighter Science! No, we don’t have the time or the attention spans for that. Instead, we present a survey of early 2013 science journal covers. Yes, it’s a superficial look at the very first page of the latest publications: the page with the pretty picture and not a lot of stupid words.

You’re welcome.

Science News that Fucking Owns

Nature

February 14 2013

BOOM! Science'd! On the cover of the current issue of Nature is an awesome explosion and headline. It features an artist's rendering of a massive comet striking Asteroid 4 Vesta about a billion years ago, creating a massive crater called Veneneia. The headline refers to a second planet-scale collision on the same impact scar, which happened more recently. Poor Vesta. KO'd by the old one-two.

Look at this cover. Remove the fine print. Add Daniel Craig's name there somewhere. Seriously, I'm not sure why you're still reading this; I'd have clicked the link above and gone to check out the Michael Bay-type action over there at Nature. (Or did you already go there, and were you detered by all the talk of olivine-rich lithologies? And now you're back? No shame there, gentle reader.)

Science News for Teatime

Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences)

April 7, 2013

Big 'splosions not really your style? Well, the latest from the Proceedings of the Royal Society's biology journal offers you this image of an iridescent Helicoverpa armigera caterpillar trudging stolidly along the surface of a plant leaf. That's sure to be a pleasant article that you can talk about between bites of crumpet.

"Great Scott!" you can exclaim, lowering the edge of the Proceedings to glance over at Margery, curled up in the windowseat, crocheting a new cover for the piano forte. "Rather surprisingly, it turns out that certain insects will modify their behaviours in response to induced plant defences!"

Margery's face will turn, your spiffing nugget of science news momentarily distracting her from a view of the groundskeeper splitting logs shirtless near one of the outbuildings, the muscles sliding beneath the tanned and dirty skin of his arms, back, and abdomen in a ballet of power and grace. "Goodness, my dear, how interesting!" she will murmur, and then you probably won't need to interact with her again for at least three days.

Science News for Hiding Your Porn In

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences)

March 13, 2013

Not everyone's interested in Science, but most people would open the journal with the planetary collision on it, and some might wanna see more pictures of rainbow caterpillars inside that last one. But no one--no sane person, anyway--is going to be interested in learning more about this picture of old I-beams and other scrap metal. The photo is not connected with any article in particular, but with the issue's theme, which relates to improving material efficiency.

This unbelievably dull cover makes the current issue of Philosophical Transactions Tighter Science's top pick as a hiding place for porn or other flat items you'd rather keep private. This journal is like an Invisibility Cloak for documents.

Science News for Staring At, Just Taking It In, Man

Science

February 8, 2013

This cover shows a picture of the far side of the moon.

There are lots of bright colours on the moon.

Have you ever put your hand on a tabletop and tried to forget what experience has taught you: that your skin and the surface of the table mark the fixed boundaries between entities? Inside your skin, you are yourself; you extend that far and no further. Similarly, the table's tableness stops at its outermost layer of varnish. But you and the table are both collections of atoms: over 99.999% of you both is just empty space. If you could somehow break the tissue-thin membrane that separates You and not-You, slip suddenly through those containing barriers, flow generously into everyone and every thing, dissolve and disperse throughout Creation... would that be like becoming a god? Or is to be God the opposite of inhabiting the totality of created things: is it to be the outside looking in?

The word "GRAIL" is also on there pretty big.

Science News for the Immature

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

February 12, 2013

Heh. PNAS.

Okay, so in the current issue of PNAS, Yang-Yu Liu et al. figured out the exact nodes needed to represent the complete internal state of a complex system. They then used this to model biochemical reaction systems. Their method could potentially have wide-ranging biological and socioeconomic applications; for example, to map biomarkers, allowing researchers to monitor cellular metabolism.

It says PNAS right on the cover of this science journal. And then there are all those green Matrix-style connect-the-dots boners. LOL!

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Whatever your particular appetite in science reportage, there's bound to be a satisfying read out there somewhere. Above is a small sampling--consider it an amuse bouche--of the plethora of news items available to you this spring. We hope that it's gotten your reading juices flowing... ewww, no, we hope that you're as enthused as we are about discovering all the thousands of super-fantastic things Science has probably done in the last few months.

We can't wait!

Science Essentials: Face protection

2013-02-11T16:15:00.000-08:00

Science can be a messy, messy business. It's a slow day in the lab when nothing hatches out of grotesque mucous-covered pods or explodes into a fine toxic mist that eats through steel. If you want to live to be a cranky old scientist someday, you're going to need to keep all that slime and particulate poison out of your various orifices, especially the ones that are routinely closest to incubators and centrifuges: your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.
We've already shown you what's out there in the way of eye protection, so now you know your way around the safety goggle aisle. But what about the rest of your face? Sweet scientist-reader, never fret! Below you'll find an exciting round-up of facial protection measures for all degrees of scientific risk you may encounter, from mild to oh God RUUUUN!

Protection for Faintly Hazardous Situations

Are the test monkeys a little frisky with the feces today? Does one of the lab technicians have a bad cough? Is there a slightly disconcerting steam coming off a few of the petrie dishes? Is Mister Scientist scared of all the big bad germs floating around the dark, scary lab?

Kimberly-Clark Pleat-style Procedure Mask
Protection: nose and mouth
Retail Price: $6:07 for box of 50

The Kimberly-Clark procedure mask comes in a variety of soothing pastel shades (pale yellow, pink, mint, and blue) that'll keep those nasty buggies out while reminding you of your nursery and your binky, which should help a little. A few spatters of blood or bodily fluids are no big deal; the protective three-layer construction of this disposable procedure mask makes it perfect to wear all day, or at least until juicebox and Quiet Time roll around, you delicate peach.

Protection for Looking at Sloshy Science

If you're actually planning to get near enough to the Science that you're worried some might fly up in your eye, that procedure mask above isn't gonna cut it. You could just wear safety goggles, I suppose, but then you'd have to clean the pig blood off them afterward. For some seriously splatter-y lab work, you want something that offers goggle protection in a disposable solution.

ValuMax Ultra-3-in-1 Ear-Loop Masks with Splash Visors
Protection: eyes, nose, and mouth
Retail Price: $23.95 for box of 25

The splash visor on this little beauty has both an anti-fog and anti-glare treatment, making it suitable for laboratories on the Yorkshire moors or the Sahara desert. The mask on the ValuMax is more robust than the procedure mask, too, featuring a high filtration inner lining made of cellulose for maximum breathability. Wear this mask and feel confident getting up close and personal with the squirtiest specimens.

Protection for the Hirsute Scientist

Being super-hairy can be a real pain in the laboratory. Your hair can ignite over a bunsen burner, fall into a beaker, or get caught in an autoclave. Not to mention the humiliation/mutilation potential in having something creep its way up your luscious locks on its way into any of the openings in your face (or maybe-yikes--create its own way in). You could just shave it all off, but your head's a funny shape and you're basically going to look like a Q-tip.

GenPro® Certified Beard Cover
Protection: mouth and greater mouth region
Retail Price: $47.38 for case of 1,000

Keep your beard clear of nanobots, larva, viscera, and corrosives with this stylish chin baggy from GenPro. This durable, light-weight beard cover will ensure that your facescape is free of contaminants, and contaminants are free of lil' bits of your facescape.

Yes, it's just sort of a gauze bandage on an elastic band. Yes, you'll look like a rube. They cost about 22 cents each, so I'm not really sure what you were expecting.

Maytex Bouffant Cap
Protection: Near your ear area?
Retail Price: $42.99 for 500 21” caps / $48.99 for 500 24” caps

Or, if the hair you want to protect is topside, check out Maytex's disposable bouffant caps, so poofy and elegant, you're sure to pose for a product thumbnail smiling like a psychotic church lady. Like the beard covers, these caps are essentially tissues held on with cheap elastic, but it's worth it to know that at the end of the day, you won't be brushing bits of dried rat brain out of your 'do.

Protection for X-treme Science

Maybe you've looked over the products above with a growing sense of amusement. I get a speck of Substance 57D on that beard cover, and it'll catch fire and melt my face off, you've thought to yourself. When are they going to get to the good stuff? We knew you'd stick it out, my friend; we put the kiddie stuff up front because those soft, pallid little shits have short attention spans. You're an actual scientist, and you've got guts. Specifically, you've got massive gouts of guts full of bacteria and excrement and various secretions gushing over you in juicy waves. You want facial protection that does more than put a thin layer of reinforced paper between you and a genetically enhanced plague.

Uvex Bionic Faceshield
Protection: eyes, nose, mouth, fronts of ears
Retail Price: $48.50

The Uvex faceshield is bionic, which is how you know it isn't fucking around. Its heavy-duty shell protects your chin and the top of your head from projectiles flying at certain specific angles. The adjustable headgear tilts the visor into 2,784 possible positions. That's right, nearly three thousand positions! Think of how useful those will be!

There's also a locking mechanism for secure fit, and comfy foam padding on the strap at the back. The entire assembly is 100% dialectric (i.e., it has no metal parts), allowing you to work in the middle of electromagnetic fields with that nonchalant confidence that characterizes your usual demeanour in risky situations. You're kind of like a god. You know that, right?

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We hope that the aforegoing has given you a flavour of the wild diversity of products that are out there, which really boil down to some flimsy paper products and a few badass items that Iron Man would maybe wear.

Before making your choice, think carefully about what kind of Science you're going to attempt. If a custard-yellow Kleenex is enough for you, are you sure you're taking this important calling seriously? If your biggest concern is getting a piece of your hair in the acid bath, please step aside and let some actual scientists take over; I hear Banana Republic is hiring. If you're contemplating the bionic faceshield... godspeed, soldier. You'll be in our prayers.

Our ancient ancestor is adorable!

2013-02-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

A team of American and Canadian scientists has just published the fascinating reconstruction below of what they believe may be our "hypothetical placental ancestor": a furry, insect-eating thing called Protungulatum donnae. By "placental ancestor," they mean that every single mammal that has lived in the last 66 million years is descended from this one little critter.

My fuzzy widdle bug-eating forebear. (Illustration from Leary et al.)

Protungulatum donnae--or Aunt and Uncle Protty, as I'm sure they'd prefer to be called--weighed less than a quarter of a kilogram soaking wet, and were adapted for tickling you with their dextrous little paws. Their babies were born one at a time, blind and hairless and cute as prehistoric buttons. It was a jungle out there for our poor Aunt and Uncle, dodging the giant clumsy feet of their massive reptilian neighbours; the world was wild and dangerous, and they were small and defenceless.

But they were also survivors: unlike their mammal contemporaries, they were not annihilated by the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs. "Huzzah, more bugs for us!" they likely squeaked as they scampered over the corpses of the dead and up into the trees to fill their wee tummies with grubs and aphids.

And they didn't stay in those trees, oh no! They got slightly bigger, invented language, and began a project of bending the Earth to their will. So sick of getting stepped on, they thought, grinding their three sets of molars together in bitter recollection, Watch out, world. Now it's our turn.

I think you have Aunt Protty's eyes, and maybe her separate anal and urogenital openings.

The pill offers no hope to helium-voiced men

2011-04-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

High male voices give everyone the heebs.

As we all know, women prefer men with deeper voices. A man with a deep voice is perceived as large, dominant, and masculine, and all the ladies just love that sort of thing. A gap in current scientific research has been that none of the studies that identified booming baritones as being wildly attractive to women have taken into account the effects of birth control pills. Since some studies have suggested that ovulating women go especially keraaaazy for low-voiced gentlemen, might perhaps a pill that affects hormone levels also affect their voice preferences? And maybe there’s a pill that would make them all hot for nerds in lab coats, too? Anyhow, worth a shot.

Or maybe not! Reasearchers Jason Whitaker, Ryan Setten, and Ulv Ankerstjerne (of the Universities of California, San Diego, and Copenhagen, respectively) have just presented a poster-type thingy at the 80th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. In their nifty poster, Messrs. Whitaker, Setten, and Ankerstjerne show the results of their study, which took a group of 145 women–85 off birth control pills and 60 on–and subjected them to recordings of two men (modulated three different ways each) pronouncing some monophthong vowels. Ooooooooo, monophthong vowels. (Swoons.)

In what is surely a blow to squeaky scientists everywhere, the women in the study tended to prefer the naturally lower-pitched male voice, and this preference did not seem to be dependent on their time of the month or on their contraceptive status. However, they did not prefer the lowest-pitched variants of either of the two male voices, instead finding the middle variant of Voice A to be a cool slice of watermelon on a hot summer’s day.

So what have we learned? Well, Whitaker, Setten, and Ankerwhatever feel that the small sample size, and perhaps the innate sexiness of that tasty Voice A, may have futzed their results a little. They are most confident about one thing: their study found absolutely no evidence that using birth control pills changes how you might feel about that chirpy-sounding dude down the hall. You still think he sounds like a loser.

Tea: Drinking your way to a better you

2011-03-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

What will the next Superfood be? Giraffe meat? Pineapple leaves? Mr. Clean Magic Erasers? No one knows, but the search for the one consumable that will make us all dewy, nubile, and immortal goes ever onward. Trouble is, the media have cried “Superfood!” (with little real cause) so many times, we mostly just pretend we’re not home, and then try to get the door closed before we’re stuck with another copy of The Watchtower.

"Tea, Lady Elizabeth?" said Mr. Osbourne, ignoring
the catcalls from drunken hecklers on the staircase.

As Hippocrates once said after a game of Frisbee golf, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” There’s certainly something sexy about the idea that we could consume our way to health, especially with our healthy modern consumer appetites. We just need to have someone point us in the right direction, and we will nom whatever it is until we are fit and young and smart as razors. So whither our nomming? Although it’s rarely accorded magic bullet cure-all-that-ails-ya status, there is one consumable that’s consistently shown to have a wide variety of benefits to nearly all your vital systems. It isn’t sexy though: it’s tea.

Tea, for lack of a better word, is good. Tea is right. Tea works.

Science agrees. Want to protect yourself from cancer? Drink some tea. Tired of being fat? Drink some tea. Disease-ridden? Drink some tea. Or just have some really bad breath? Drink some tea.

Not drinking tea right now? What are you, crazy? Full disclosure: I’m currently drinking tea that contains lemongrass, hawthorn root, and hibiscus flowers, and consequently my intellect dwarfs yours, so before you read the last three paragraphs I suggest you go put a kettle on. Otherwise, just read slowly. Maybe try sounding out the words.

In totally non-shocking news, Dutch researchers have just published further evidence linking tea drinking to awesomeness: this time, it’s cardiovascular health. Their work, which comprised meta-analyses of nine studies from other research groups, bolsters other work in the same vein (zing! or maybe lemon zing!). Ras, Zock, and Draijer found that consumption of two to three cups of green or black tea a day increased the median diameter of dilations in the brachial artery by 40% compared to placebo or baseline conditions.

Poor relaxation of the brachial artery is linked to cardiovascular disease, and is frequently seen in individuals with diabetes or hypertension or who are just getting super old, so this 40% is a potentially life-saving number. Ras et al. believe that this effect is caused by components of the tea called flavonoids, the plant pigments that give the tea its colour.

I say, why stop there? If two or three cups a day gives your arteries an extra 40% of bounce and sass, maybe we should start pushing the boundaries of tea consumption, and see what glories can be found in its upper reaches. I plan to drink another twenty cups after this one. And when I've ascended to godhood, try not to be afraid of me. Up, off your knees; dare to look me in the face.

Taskers vs. Multi-taskers: Why can't we all just get along?

2011-03-05T16:10:00.000-08:00

It’s a fast-paced world. Productivity is key. How can we do more, be more, have more?

One technique for accomplishing more is multi-tasking. Answer e-mails on the bus. Jog while you study. Eat in your sleep. Do origami during open-heart surgery. With a little luck, you can cram so much into every day that people will weep at your graveside, thinking about the many, many tasks you were able to complete the last time they saw you. Your children will rise up and call you blessed, while making a salad and learning Japanese.

Do we have to multi-task? Some say we do, or else we will be lost in the maelstrom of tasks our smashcut, ADD-infested world requires of us. You’re reading this article, but for your sake I hope you are also doing something else right now. Like maybe skiing. Do it or get left behind with some of the best minds of our generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. Do it or lose your edge to the kids whose footsteps you hear when they get on the decks.

Others pooh-pooh multi-tasking. Pooh-pooh, they say. You can’t do five things at once, not really. You could do all the tasks better faster stronger if you did them in sequence. You’re kidding yourselves with that rockety-roll music, and you look ridiculous knitting on the treadmill. All these new-fangled gadgets just make a lot of noise, anyway. Now pass the All-Bran.

So who is right? According to Scottish researchers Drs. Tracy Alloway and Ross Alloway of Stirling University and the University of Edinburgh, respectively, the answer (as usual) may be no one. The Doctors Alloway recently published a paper in which they studied the habits of workers using digital technology in an office setting.

In their study, the Alloways first identified the workers as either active digital technology (ADT) or passive digital technology (PDT) users. ADT users tend to spend more time in online pursuits, while PDT users are into more traditional pursuits, like shaving cats or playing with aluminum foil.

Both ADT and PDF users were then given several tasks to do that involved selecting (or not selecting) the number 5 out of a series.

Right off the block, it seemed like the tweaking web addict ADT users were doing better. Their answers came faster and were more accurate than those dopey PDTs. They were chirpy, clicking (or avoiding) all the 5s with a casual air while playing a cadenza and preparing some iced tea.

After the first round of tasks was over, however, the plodding PDT users started to settle in and make up ground. While their accuracy in the first round was low, by the end of the study their answers were as accurate as their competitors’.

The Alloways conclude that maybe there’s room for both approaches in our modern workplaces. ADT nutjobs will excel in environments where they have to take care of multiple streams of information simultaneously, while boring ol’ PDT-ers will do better if they can devote their attention to one task at a time, even if they’re sometimes required to switch from task to task.

Dr. Tracey Alloway and Dr. Ross Alloway. I don't know these
people at all, obviously, but... she's one of the ADT users, yes?

The electric nose knows (sort of)

2011-03-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

A study published in Advances in Natural Science discusses new technology that detects the presence of Escherichia coli (E.coli) in animal meat. Meat most commonly becomes contaminated with E. coli when it comes into contact with feces, which is a completely disgusting thought. While you can kill poop bacteria by thoroughly cooking your tasty steak, wouldn’t it be better if it just wasn’t there to begin with?

Sure it would, but this is Earth and everything here is either filled with, covered in, or made of poop. Don’t throw that steak away just yet, though – Science can at least give you a heads up about the poop germs before you eat them.

This meat probably has poop on it, but does
it have too much poop?

The study’s focus is the Cyranose-320, an array of 32 composite sensors that swell up when they come into contact with vapour and then transmit information to a processor that plays a wicked good game of Guess That Funk. The Cyranose-320 (or E-nose) works in conjunction with a “PC nose software program run on a personal computer” to test for the presence of E. coli in meat. For the purpose of this study, that means goat meat obtained from Fort Valley State University’s Goat Meat Research Center (yes, it really exists).

Researchers Ning-ye Ding, Yu-bin Lan, and Xian-zhe Zheng cut the goat meat into measured pieces and placed it into 50 ml jars, some of which were infused with a carefully prepared E. coli glaze and sealed to marinate. After a few hours had elapsed, the E-nose was “trained” through a series of ten exposures to each of the au naturel and spiced up samples. Once well versed in the art of sniffing out the culprit, it was exposed to a bunch more dubious samples.

The results of the study’s preliminary experiments showed that the E-nose was able to detect the silent-but-deadly meat, but its accuracy ranged from a dismal 18% to a still-not-great 77%. On a more positive note, the researchers discovered that the E-nose would retain its training for as long as two weeks.

If the researchers continue testing and fine-tune the E-nose, it could be a valuable commercial or household tool for quickly detecting contaminated meat. Until then, I’m going to stick with my food taster.

Science Essentials: Safety glasses

2011-03-03T13:58:00.000-08:00

If the white coat is a scientist’s mask and cape, then the perfect pair of safety glasses is a scientist’s X-ray vision. Without safety glasses, a scientist is just some charlatan posing as a scientist to impress their new girlfriend/boyfriend/mom.

Any scientist worth their Science knows that safety glasses aren’t a cookie-cutter, standard-issue item. The perfect safety glasses for a welder aren’t necessarily the right ones for a woodworker or a sanitation worker or a scientist.

That said, all safety glasses have a few fundamental things in common:

The lenses should be stronger than those used for regular glasses. Lenses made of impact-resistant plastic polycarbonate are a good choice.
The frames should be stronger than regular glasses and are often heat resistant and designed to prevent that thing in the incubator from pushing the lenses into your eyes.
The safety glasses should fit your head. The definition of “fit” will vary depending on how hardcore and dangerous your science is but, generally speaking, the temples should fit comfortably over your ears and the frames should fit closely against your face.

As you embark on your quest for the perfect safety glasses, one of the first things you’ll notice is that there are an overwhelming number of choices. Don’t panic, we did a bunch of that icky leg work for you and short-listed the following excellent options.

Safety On A Shoestring

It’s not easy being a budding young scientist. You’re likely still living with roommates and enduring bowl after bowl of nourishing instant noodles. Don’t worry, that research grant will come through and the resulting paper will be published in your country’s leading scientific journal. You’d best make sure that you have eyes to see it.

Echo Series Troop Visitor Specs
Retail Price: $1.95 to $2.30 each, but you can knock that price right down if you buy in bulk.

Although these are technically “visitor specs,” they are totally good enough to protect you from your own Science. These safety glasses feature a one-piece, wraparound design with adjustable temples and an integral brow bridge offering uniform strength and a wide field of vision. Even better: you can wear these bad boys over your regular prescription glasses, so there’s no need to shell out extra cash for special lenses. That means you can splurge on KD tonight, hooray!

Safety On A Slightly Longer Shoestring

Well, that grant came through and you’ve been published – congratulations! However, you know what this means: you’ll need to upgrade those Echo Series Visitor Specs to something that’s going to look more respectable in all those glossy magazine photos you’re suddenly being asked to pose for.

3M Maxim Safety Glasses
Retail Price: $9.60 to $12.80 each, with slightly less impressive discounts for bulk orders.

Ahh, now we’re talking. These safety glasses, brought to you by the people who make tape and post-it notes, are apparently “sleek, uniquely styled, and unlike anything else on the market today.”

The lenses are prescription-quality which means that you no longer need to wear glasses over your glasses – you can just have these puppies made to whatever prescription you require. They weigh less than an ounce, feature a soft and comfy browguard, and the nosebridge is adjustable for larger-nosed scientists. As an added bonus, they feature a patented, three-position pantoscopic lens angle adjustment, which I assume is a good thing.

Safety For Your Vagina

Okay, that’s not an entirely accurate description but I’m sure looking forward to seeing how much it skews our Google Analytics data. Female scientists need safety glasses too, as do the girlfriends of male scientists (and the girlfriends of female scientists, for that matter).

Sperian W200 Series Safety Glasses
Retail Price: $3.70 to $5.90 each, with bulk order discounts if you’re planning on hosting a girl’s night at the lab.

These safety glasses are specifically designed to fit the apparently smaller heads of the fairer sex (go Google Analytics!) through a design that makes them narrower across the front with a shorter temple and nosepiece. Just think – having a better fit means that you’re less likely to lose them as you peer into a cadaver, how awesome would that be? For the extra girly-girls, the frames also come in dusty rose.

Safety For The Maverick Scientist

You’re a loose cannon, man. I don’t even want you around the lab. You don’t follow the rules–you don’t even know what the rules are–and I think one of these days you’re gonna kill someone. Maybe yourself. Oh, who am I kidding? I love you, rebel scientist! I love your devil-may-care attitude about procedure, I love your steely squint, I love your dissonant theme music, I feel free and young and crazy whenever I’m with you. Never grow up.

Smith & Wesson Magnum Series Safety Glasses
Retail Price: $7.10 to $14.20 each, with fairly impressive bulk discounts.

From Smith & Wesson, purveyors of quality firearms since 1852, comes the Magnum Series, suitable for the gun range or the lab or the gun range that is also a lab for some reason.

Firing a Sigma semi-automatic into the head of the alien-donkey hybrid you created because you just didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought? Smashing up the last case of antidote because you kind of want the Death Starker scorpions to sting you death? Mixing bleach with ammonia because you’re just really bored? You’re going to want glasses that reflect your dangerous lifestyle. Shatter-resistent lenses stand up to the biggest temper tantrums, drunkenest stumbling down the stairs, and deadliest driving on the wrong side of the road so you can just feel… God… anything…

Safety For Poop Scientists

Gotta look at some poop? Like, way super closely? Let’s face it, we can’t all be swishypants, lah-di-dah scientists studying how to make a really great cup of tea or the effects of foie gras on Chopin aficionados. Some scientists have to look at poo, and squish around in the poo, because you really need to feel it and hold it and scrutinize it and smell it to totally get where it lives. Nuclear fission is all very well, but everyone shits, so it’s important that we keep pushing the boundaries of feces research. It’s ginger peachy that you’ve decided to make it your life’s work. Really.

AOSafety Fectoggle Safety Glasses
Retail Price:$15.30 each with tiered discounts depending on how many you want to order.

The portmanteau of feces-rectum-goggle says it all: these are safety glasses for people who need to have poop mere millimetres from their faces. You can get up close and personal with perfect confidence using AOSafety’s Fectgoggles, with their soft foam flanges to keep out pesky fine particulates, and a superior lens coating that resists that inevitable steaming. You’re going to look at excrement in a whole new way!

We hope that these finds have inspired you to tirelessly search for safety glasses that suit your scientific personality. There’s truly something for everyone out there, even those wacko poo scientists. Wait, are they still here?

Mind-reading goes from sci-fi to sci-seriously

2011-03-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Princeton University have published a study exploring the possibility of translating brain images into text. They have apparently been taking pictures of brains and reading them like wee novellas. I’ll give you a moment to consider that.

Okay, did you freak out a little bit? I did! I was torn between dancing a jig of joy or a jig of fear. Let’s find out more!

From analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) performed while study participants read the names of 60 objects, researchers were able to generate lists of words relating to each object. The top ten words from these scans were compared with Wikipedia articles about each object, and the articles were consistently found to be chockablock with those words. (Holy crap! Feel free to do a jig of wonder at this point.)

For example, the fMRI results from a participant reading the word dress were found to contain the words wear, woman, clothe, century, dress, type, form, fashion, style, and design. We don’t really need to consult Wikipedia to know the brain scan translation was right on the money there. Other results showed that the system may need some honing: images taken while subjects read the word bell were interpreted as: produce, wine, contain, state, time, world, common, type, process, and century. Overall, though, the words produced were impressively on-target. You can read and marvel at the full list here.

Researchers Francisco Pereira, Matthew Botvinick, and the yummy Greg Detre believe that this technique could be used in the development of computer-human interfaces, which seems like tragically small thinking for such smart guys. (Sorry Greg! Smooches!) The most obvious application is actually interrogation.

Figure from Pereira et al.'s jaw-dropping pre-print article, showing how brain
scans were converted into text relating to the concept "table." Whoa.

Eating and drinking 2.0

2011-02-28T16:07:00.000-08:00

Eating is so yesterday. Chew, swallow, chew, swallow. Where does it end? Actually, don’t answer that question. Instead, picture a world without the day-in-day-out drudgery of food preparation and consumption: a place where you can literally breathe in the flavours.

Harvard professor David Edwards wants to make lots of things as easy as inhaling. Want to drink coffee while on your morning jog? Breathe in some espresso! Have trouble swallowing those awkwardly shaped, nasty-tasting vitamin tablets? Breathe in your supplements! At risk for malaria and other nasty diseases? Breathe in a handy vaccine! And of course, want all the satisfying taste of chocolate without the inconvenience and enfatteningness of actually digesting it? Breathe in a bon-bon!

Dr. Edwards’ company, Breathable Food, would like me to describe this process as whiffing, which I refuse to do, because to me whiffing is a synonym for fucking up big-time. (How're you doing in chem this term, dude? –Man, I'm whiffing it so bad!) Their product, known as Le Whif, has been available commercially since 2009, and has apparently been taking the too-lazy-to-masticate crowd by storm ever since.

The "How To Whif" instructions. This is a real thing.

Sold in a lipstick-shaped inhaler, Le Whif chocolates come in plain, mint, and raspberry flavours. Teeny tiny particles of chocolate (50 to 100 μm in size) are then delivered to your greedy, waiting mouth via aerosol. Each puff contains less than one calorie, so you can breathe in all that decadent, dessert-like air to your heart’s—or lungs’—content! What will Science think of next?

Not surprisingly, Science thought of alcohol next. Though it’s not ready for market yet, scientists in Dr. Edwards’ labs are now perfecting Le Whaf, breathable alcohol for the boozehound on the go.

A suave man whafs a refreshing bowl of fog.

Whaffing currently involves some cumbersome paraphernalia, but is similar in concept to the chocolate Le Whifs: a flavourful fog containing 5 μm particles of alcohol that you breathe rather than sip/munch. Sadly, in the same way that you won’t get a full belly from Le Whifs, you shouldn’t expect to get sloshed from alcoholic Le Whafs. “It is very poetic and subtle, not a way to get hammered,” said Dr. Edwards in an interview with Engineering & Technology. That sounds like such a party.

How To Suck Less: Plan to do things!

2011-02-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

A study published in Psychology & Health on February 18, 2011 has shown that planning to do things makes you a whole lot more likely to do them.

Researchers came to that mind-boggling conclusion after challenging 177 McGill University students to eat more fruit for seven days, and then analyzing the results for about seven minutes. While all of the study participants ended up eating more fruit, those who had an actual fruit consumption strategy that included writing down a plan, visualizing themselves eating more fruit, and possibly reading The Secret, consumed twice as much as those lazy jerks who decided to wing it.

Here’s what the study’s awesomely-named lead researcher, Bärbel Knäuper, had to say about it:

Telling people to just change the way they eat doesn’t work; we’ve known that for a while [...] But research has shown that if people make a concrete plan about what they are going to do, they are better at acting on their intentions.

Whoa, maaaaan. Whoooooooooa. For those of you who are curious or could use some easy money, this ground-breaking research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

How To Suck Less: Don't be Maine Governor Paul LePage

2011-02-24T16:05:00.000-08:00

Good news! The whole bisphenol-A (BPA) issue has been way overblown, says Maine Governor Paul LePage.

After Canada banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and cups, many other countries and even some states moved to do the same. BPA is an endocrine disruptor that can mimic a person’s own hormones, which some scientists think can lead to some Very Bad Things. However, Governor LePage thinks it’s all a lot of boo-hooing over nothing. Seemingly aware he was in front of reporters and being filmed, LePage said:

Until I see Science that tells me that BPA is a problem, and I haven’t seen it–quite frankly, the Science that I’m looking at says there is no… there’s not been any Science that identifies that there is a problem. The only thing that I’ve heard is if you take a plastic bottle, put it in the microwave and heat it up, it gives off a chemical that’s similar to estrogen. And, um…so, I mean, the worst case is some women may have little beards.

LePage and some lady friends that he apparently wouldn't
mind see bearded.

Click here to watch Governor LePage suck on camera! The magic starts at about 1:20.

Bearded ladies! Inconvenient, possibly confusing, sure, but nothing too terrible, right?

A few months ago, when he was running for governor, LePage wasn’t so blase about people with ambiguous sexual identities. Speaking about transgendered students and the Maine Human Rights Act, he declared, “I just don’t understand how people, at least sane people, would want to allow transgender in our primary schools and our high schools.” Back then, the idea of a bearded woman, or a skirted man, or a lady with a pee-pee seemed like some sort of crazy nightmare to Governor LePage. I guess he’s grown.

LePage and his (currently) unbearded Stepford family pose
in front of a greenscreen with their genuinely adorable doggy
Baxter. (Click to enlarge! Seriously, it's worth it!)

Leaving aside the (1) bad taste of the joke, (2) hypocrisy of the chosen imagery, and (3) douchey repertoire of comments the governor seems to have at his fingertips, LePage has obviously not looked very hard for the Science he claims to need. There have been ample studies to show that BPA is, at the very least, worth treating with caution, especially when it comes to infant exposure.

Science discovers people can be pretty happy just blinking: I discover I'm a whiny prat

2011-02-24T16:01:00.000-08:00

According to a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal’s BMJ Open, people with Locked-in Syndrome (LIS)–who are paralyzed and communicate primarily through blinking and moving their eyes–are a pretty cheery bunch, all things considered. Belgian researchers asked a pool of 65 LIS patients a series of questions about their quality of life; 47 declared themselves to be happy and only 18 said that they were unhappy.

This article has gotten a lot of press, including features in the Washington Post, the Times of India, ABC News, and BBC radio and television news programs, so there’s little point in re-hashing the whole thing, especially since LIS is not a hilarious topic and I have a frivolous mind. I would like, however, to draw your attention to one of the questions on the survey and the responses collected, which I found remarkable.

Patients were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement:

I am able to participate in recreational activities (hobbies, crafts, sports, reading, television, games, computers, etc) as I want to.

Of those surveyed, 57% answered with a straight-up, “Yes.” Fifty-seven! A further 31% answered, “Rather yes.” Only 12% responded “No” or “Rather No.”

Putting myself in the position of an LIS patient (which I realize I am absolutely unqualified to do), I would have thought one of the chief burdens would be the unending montony of it. Like being Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, except without the baseball. Or the escape. I am shocked to learn that nearly 90% of the LIS patients reported having little to complain about, entertainment-wise.

And now, an anecdote…

Leaving work a little later than usual today, I missed my usual bus and stood for a full fifteen extra minutes in the cold waiting for the next one. Brrrrr grumble grumble I thought to myself when it arrived, and then just Grumble grumble grumble as I made myself comfy in its heated interior. My MP3 player was out of batteries, so instead of my own music I listened to the tinny fsk fsk fsk sound spilling out of the earbuds of my seatmate all the way home. The Thursday Times crossword was too hard. My left foot was doing that thing where it spasms hard inside your shoe and hurts like a mofo and there’s nothing much you can do about it. In summary, it was like my commute was a long TV movie starring Judith Light where she is terribly abused, but then she breaks free and rises above it, thinking she can outrun her oppressor, but then her past comes back to haunt her and threatens her reclaimed empowerment and all looks pretty bleak for poor Judith… you know, just like that.

And then there was this article about people who have had so many possibilities taken away and are still feeling positive about the whole deal, and it turns out I’m actually kind of a jerk. Dag.