science

{ The patterns of links between buyers and sellers of sex in an online forum differs in important ways from other internet related networks, says a new study. This may have important implications for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases | Patterns of Captured in Social Network | full story }
update/related { A top journalist caught on tape with a pile of cocaine and a party girl named Moomoo, an opposition activist filmed handing over a bribe… Who’s behind the spate of mysterious coke-and-hooker entrapment attacks on Russian opposition figures? The Daily Beast | full story }
economics, health, science, sex-oriented, social networks | March 23rd, 2010 2:00 pm

What makes a fruit “super?”
First of all, we have to define what characteristics a fruit has to have to be labeled “super.” The superfruit craze seems to have hit a tipping point in 2004, however there appear to be no clear standards as to how a fruit attains a “super” status. Marketing and exotic appeal rather than science have given select fruits a more salubrious appeal. As most health claims however, these are based on perception rather than evidence.
One thing that superfuits do have in common, however, is a high ORAC value.
The Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) assay was developed to directly test the antioxidant capacity of biological samples. There are however many different tests of antioxidant capacity that have been developed and utilized, each with various shortcomings.
{ Nutritional Blogma | Continue reading }
drawing { Ellsworth Kelly, Tangerine, 1964-65 }
Ellsworth Kelly, food, drinks, restaurants, health, science | March 23rd, 2010 1:26 pm
climate, horror, water | March 23rd, 2010 12:51 pm

Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?
It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.
“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
photo { Laura Taylor }
ideas, leisure, psychology | March 20th, 2010 9:00 am

We live in a world of complex systems. The environment is a complex system. The government is a complex system. Financial markets are complex systems. The human mind is a complex system—most minds, at least.
By a complex system I mean one in which the elements of the system interact among themselves, such that any modification we make to the system will produce results that we cannot predict in advance.
Furthermore, a complex system demonstrates sensitivity to initial conditions. You can get one result on one day, but the identical interaction the next day may yield a different result. We cannot know with certainty how the system will respond.
Third, when we interact with a complex system, we may provoke downstream consequences that emerge weeks or even years later. We must always be watchful for delayed and untoward consequences.
The science that underlies our understanding of complex systems is now thirty years old. A third of a century should be plenty of time for this knowledge and to filter down to everyday consciousness, but except for slogans — like the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane halfway around the world — not much has penetrated ordinary human thinking.
On the other hand, complexity theory has raced through the financial world. It has been briskly incorporated into medicine. But organizations that care about the environment do not seem to notice that their ministrations are deleterious in many cases. Lawmakers do not seem to notice when their laws have unexpected consequences, or make things worse. Governors and mayors and managers may manage their complex systems well or badly, but if they manage well, it is usually because they have an instinctive understanding of how to deal with complex systems. Most managers fail.
Why? Our human predisposition treat all systems as linear when they are not. A linear system is a rocket flying to Mars. Or a cannonball fired from a cannon. Its behavior is quite easily described mathematically. A complex system is water gurgling over rocks, or air flowing over a bird’s wing. Here the mathematics are complicated, and in fact no understanding of these systems was possible until the widespread availability of computers.
One complex system that most people have dealt with is a child. If so, you’ve probably experienced that when you give the child an instruction, you can never be certain what response you will get. Especially if the child is a teenager. And similarly, you can’t be certain that an identical interaction on another day won’t lead to spectacularly different results.
If you have a teenager, or if you invest in the stock market, you know very well that a complex system cannot be controlled, it can only be managed. Because responses cannot be predicted, the system can only be observed and responded to. The system may resist attempts to change its state. It may show resiliency. Or fragility. Or both.
An important feature of complex systems is that we don’t know how they work. We don’t understand them except in a general way; we simply interact with them. Whenever we think we understand them, we learn we don’t. Sometimes spectacularly.
{ Michael Crichton | Continue reading }
archives, economics, ideas, science | March 18th, 2010 2:55 pm

…sooner or later, helium will become more precious than gold. Though best known as the lifting gas in balloons (and the high squeaky voices it evokes when inhaled), helium’s buoyancy, inertness, and other unique properties make it irreplaceable for some of our civilization’s highest technologies. Without large amounts of helium, liquid-fueled rockets cannot be safely tested and launched, semiconductors and optical fibers cannot be easily manufactured, and cryogenically cooled particle accelerators and medical MRI machines cannot function. Helium may also prove crucial as a working fluid or even a fuel in future nuclear reactors. And unlike gold, which can be eternally recovered and shaped to new functions, only very expensive countermeasures can prevent helium, once used, from escaping into the atmosphere and drifting away into outer space.
Helium’s rarity on Earth and relative abundance in America are cosmic and planetary accidents. After hydrogen, helium is the second most common element in the universe, with the bulk of it formed during the big bang.
{ Seed magazine | Continue reading }
photo { Stephen Shore }
elements, science, technology | March 18th, 2010 2:45 pm

Formation of a memory is widely believed to leave a ‘trace’ in the brain - a fleeting pattern of electrical activity which strengthens the connections within a widely distributed network of neurons, and which re-emerges when the memory is recalled. The concept of the memory trace was first proposed nearly a century ago, but the nature of the trace, its precise location in the brain and the underlying neural mechanisms all remain elusive. Researchers from University College London now report that functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) can be used to decode individual memory traces and to predict which of three recently encoded memories is being recalled.
{ Neurophilosophy/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }
photo { Sebastian Kim }
brain, science | March 18th, 2010 2:45 pm

Is mental illness good for you?
Mental illness is surprisingly common. About 10% of the population is affected by it at any one time and up to 25% suffer some kind of mental illness over their lifetime. This has led some people (many people in fact) to surmise that it must exist for a reason – in particular that it must be associated with some kind of evolutionary advantage. Indeed, this is a popular and persistent idea both in scientific circles and in the general public.
Such theories come in two main varieties – the first, that mental illness confers some specific advantage to those afflicted; and second, that the mutations which cause mental illness in one person’s genetic background may confer an advantage when they are in a different genetic background (balancing selection).
{ Wiring the brain | Continue reading }
health, ideas, psychology, science | March 18th, 2010 2:40 pm

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.
But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion. (…)
These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. (…)
Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent.
{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }
photo { Daemian and Christine }
psychology, time | March 18th, 2010 2:30 pm

Can psychiatry be a science?
You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. (…) After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?
However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it.
{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }
photo { Ujin Lee Dust }
experience, health, incidents, psychology, science | March 18th, 2010 2:22 pm

If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I’m having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he’s chair of the Seti (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Task Group. They’re a group of the world’s most eminent scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet’s alien welcome committee.
{ Guardian | Continue reading }
photo { Tim Barber }
mystery and paranormal, space | March 17th, 2010 5:22 pm

Can a clean smell make you a better person?
That’s the provocative suggestion of a recent study in the journal Psychological Science. A team of researchers found that when people were in a room recently spritzed with a citrus-scented cleanser, they behaved more fairly when playing a classic trust game. In another experiment, the smell of cleanser made subjects more likely to volunteer for a charity.
The findings suggest that simply smelling something clean makes people clean up their behavior - that a smell can provoke a mental leap between cleanliness and morality, making people think differently about the world around them. The authors even suggested that clean smells could be employed as a tool to influence how people act.
The idea that a smell can affect something as complex as ethical behavior seems surprising, not least because smell has long been seen as a “lower” sense, playing on our emotions and instincts while our reason and judgment operate on another plane. But research increasingly shows that smell doesn’t just affect how we feel: It affects how we think, in ways that are just beginning to be understood.
{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }
One of the works that helps visualize the breakthrough is a painting done in 1961, which consists in a greatly enlarged version of a simple black-and-white advertisement of the kind that appears in side columns and back pages of cheap newspapers. It advertised the services of a plastic surgeon, and showed two profiles of the same woman, before and after an operation on her nose.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
artwork { Andy Warhol, Before and After, 1961 }
olfaction, psychology, science, warhol | March 17th, 2010 4:48 pm

“The government has been telling us the truth,” declared David Clarke, a senior lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, who has a side interest in U.F.O.’s. “There are a lot of weird things in the sky, and some of them we can’t explain, but there’s not a shred of evidence for a single alien visitation.”
Which is, frankly, a letdown, as is the government’s prosaic explanation of why, for decades, it has meticulously documented reports of U.F.O. sightings. (…)
In the old days, the United States systematically compiled reports of U.F.O. sightings, too. But its last program, known as Project Blue Book, was closed down in 1969 after government officials concluded that if something was out there, it was not anything they wanted to investigate.
{ NY Times, 2008 | Continue reading }
previously/related { Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? }
mystery and paranormal, space, weirdos | March 17th, 2010 4:47 pm

A physical object like Mont Blanc or a species of plant or animal can be the subject of aesthetic analysis and evaluation, but such analysis is not part of natural science. Similarly, any human artistic activity has a psychological and eventually a neuro-physiological or biochemical basis, but this does not make a study of the brain activity of Michelangelo while he was painting part of “the humanities” (as we would call them). Neither is it the case that there is some specific method or set of characteristic methods used by the natural as opposed to the cultural sciences (or vice versa). Precise observation is equally important everywhere, and the basic forms of logical inference and evidentiary argumentation are similar in all scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, Windelband argued, there is an important distinction between the two basic kinds of “science”; it is merely that the distinction is not in terms of methods or subject matter but in terms of goals or aims.
{ Raymond Geuss, Goals, Origins, Disciplines | Continue reading | PDF }
ideas, science | March 11th, 2010 4:53 pm

What distinguishes women with unusually high numbers of sex partners?
We recruited two groups of women who differed in their number of lifetime sex partners in order to investigate several hypotheses related to female sociosexuality. Specifically, we explored whether women who engage in casual sex have low mate value, are especially likely to have come from stressful family environments, or are masculine in other respects besides their interest in casual sex.
Women with many partners were not lower than other women on direct or indirect indicators of mate value. Nor were they more likely to recall adverse family environments during childhood.
On several measures related to masculinity, women with many sex partners were elevated compared with other women.
{ Evolution and Human Behavior }
illustration { Stuart Patterson }
relationships, science, sex-oriented | March 11th, 2010 4:53 pm

As long as we’re on the topic of impulsivity, a brief remark about the word ‘manipulative,’ which I’ve found to be a remarkably overused, overrated explanation for the behavior of inflexible-explosive children. To me, the act of manipulation requires a fair amount of forethought, planning, affective modulation, and calculation — qualities that are in short supply in the vast majority of the inflexible-explosive children I know. Given that few of us enjoy being manipulated, believing that a child is being manipulative often causes adults to behave in counterproductive ways and hinders their consideration of more accurate explanations.
{ Ross Greene, The Explosive Child, 1998 | Thanks Blue M.! }
ideas, kids, psychology | March 11th, 2010 4:50 pm

Climate scientists have long warned that global warming could unlock vast stores of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen into the Arctic permafrost, setting off potentially significant increases in global warming.
Now researchers at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and elsewhere say this change is under way in a little-studied area under the sea, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, west of the Bering Strait.
{ NY Times | Continue reading }
climate, horror | March 11th, 2010 4:50 pm
animals, science | March 11th, 2010 4:49 pm

How to tell if a guy is trustworthy?
Men with wider faces are not only perceived as untrustworthy, they may deserve the reputation, according to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. (…)
A growing body of science is showing that facial configuration — placement of the eyes, width of the cheekbones and so on — provides clues to a person’s personality, including likelihood to be extroverted, conscientious and, now, trustworthy. While this analysis is not unfailing, it works slightly more often than not.
{ LiveScience | Continue reading }
psychology, relationships, science | March 11th, 2010 4:47 pm
psychology, sport | March 11th, 2010 4:46 pm