Here’s one of those studies you probably didn’t need science to tell you: guys show off to impress women.
In the experiment, a group of men and women (on the younger side, with an average age of 21) were given the opportunity to donate money to a fund, knowing they would get nothing in return other than the pride of their selflessness. Whether they were watched or not, women donated at the same rate. But men, when watched by women, donated at higher rates. They didn’t donate at higher rates when men watched.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sure flabbergasted by this one. Who would have guessed?
In this paper we demonstrate that writing a Ph.D. dissertation can have many benefits. Not only do you obtain extensive typesetting experience, but afterwards you can have your frequent-flyer literature addressed to “Dr. Your Name.”
Chapter I: Introduction
Ph.D. dissertations (e.g., Schulman 1995a; Cox 1995) are commonly believed to be comprehensive compendiums of the original research done by a graduate student in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.² In reality, the Ph.D. thesis is usually a number of disparate chapters whose most important feature is not the thoroughness of the experimental description but rather the width of the margins. In this paper, the second article in a series on scientific writing that began with Schulman (1996a), we will discuss the phenomenon of the Ph.D. thesis.
Chapter II: Preparing to Write
There comes a time in the life of every graduate student when she or he realizes that another two years of graduate school cannot be endured. Even though a year spent writing your thesis will be filled with frustration and angst, it will end up being worth it in order to escape school forever.
Remember the following phrase: “No one will ever read your thesis.” You’ll hear this phrase a number of times as you finish up, and it’s vitally important that you believe it to be true. The phrase is important because without it you would be tempted to work on your thesis until everything is perfect, and you would never finish.
Say “It’s good enough for the thesis” to yourself several times a day. Tell yourself that you’ll correct all the mistakes when you turn the various chapters into independent scientific papers, even though this won’t happen (see Schulman 1996aand references therein).
Chapter III: Your Thesis Committee
Your thesis committee should consist of between four and nine researchers in and outside of your field. Each committee member has a specific duty.
Your thesis advisor has the most important job: to reassure you that you don’t have to do many of the things you’re positive you should do. She or he will likely say, “It’s good enough for the thesis” fairly often.
You also need one committee member who will insist on more mathematical rigor, one who will demand that the thesis be made more concise by getting rid of all that irrelevant math, and two or three to say that you should do all the things your thesis advisor told you didn’t need to be done. more …
A European Union Council rule mandates “that cattle housed in groups should be given sufficient space so that they can all lie down simultaneously”. Researchers at Oxford University and Clarkson University in New York state were curious to determine whether this was necessary. Do cows ever all lie down at the same time?
Their key insight, the team says, was to realise “it is biologically plausible to view [cattle] as oscillators … During the first stage (standing/feeding), they stand up to graze but they strongly prefer to lie down and ‘ruminate’ or chew the cud for the second stage (lying/ruminating). They thus oscillate between two stages.”
The researchers “modelled the eating, lying and standing dynamics of a cow using a piecewise linear dynamical system … We chose a form of coupling based on cows having an increased desire to eat if they notice another cow eating and an increased desire to lie down if they notice another cow lying down.” This, they say, led to at least one unexpected discovery: “[We] showed that it is possible for cows to synchronise less when the coupling is increased.”
I’m not sure what implications this has for livestock producers, but this is not the first study of its kind, as you’ll see in an article at The Guardian. Link -via Improbable Research, where you can find the worst version of Deck The Halls ever recorded.
Spend some time on the internet and you should became an expert at both detecting and delivering sarcasm. According to research into the subject, that could benefit your brain.
Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.
Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”
Bless their hearts. This article from Smithsonian looks at various studies and what they tell us about how we use, misuse, and abuse sarcasm. Link
Everyone knows that kids who play video games all day don’t have time to exercise and thus, often weigh more than kids who do spend time outside. But scientists only recently discovered that gaming teens are more likely to be heavy for another reason as well -those that spend an hour gaming typically eat more afterward than those that don’t.
What the study found is that the teenagers who were playing games eat, on average, 163 calories more than the teenagers who were doing something else. On top of that, the gamers didn’t actually burn any more calories than the control group, so the increased calorie intake wasn’t replaced by the energy spent on all that thumb movement or anything. There were also no biological indicators of stress in these gamers, so that couldn’t explain it either.
What do you guys think the reason for the increased caloric intake was? Do you tend to eat more while gaming?
Although people say that “a penny’s not going to kill you,” that’s not strictly true. Sometimes a penny will kill you.
There are several cases on record where ingesting a penny has killed a child,1 but, this report deals only with adult misadventures. Children have respect for pennies. Too often, adults do not.
Yen and A Quarter
Pennies are not uniquely a source of danger. There are two notable and curious cases,2,3 which I will not go into here except briefly, of other kinds of coins being involved with death.
Sectional view of the nose, mouth, pharynx, etc.
A 50-yen coin and/or a 100-yen coin can kill you, as researchers at Osaka University Medical School handled discovered. As they describe it:
A 28-year-old male was found dead on a bed in a hotel. He had two electric wires, the ends of which were fastened to each coin (50 and 100 yen); the coins were attached to a left hypochondrial region and a left side of the chest. The other ends of the wires were connected to a time switch, which had been connected to a plug top (100 V, 60 Hz alternating current)…. The cause of death was thus judged to be suicidal electrocution. It seems that suicide was influenced by a “Manual Book of Suicide,” which was found in his bag.
However, it appears that a quarter cannot kill you, at least not if you are already dead. Investigators at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Department made that discovery, which they describe thusly:
A 69-year-old Chinese woman… was found at autopsy to have a quarter in her air passages. Inquiry showed that her family had placed the coin in her mouth at the time of death according to traditional Chinese funeral practices. This practice is apparently not widely known among forensic pathologists.
Other than these two cases, however, the scope of the current investigation is limited to pennies.
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.
The 21st annual Ig Nobel Prizes will be awarded on Thursday, September 29th. The tickets to the ceremony at Sanders Theater at Harvard University are sold out, but the presentations will be streamed live at YouTube. Also, if you want to organize a viewing party, the folks at Improbable Research will be glad to help you coordinate it. The theme this year is “CHEMISTRY,” which is why the promo video features chemist Daniel Rosenberg, who will perform at the event. Link
A team of doctors and medical researchers at the University of Pennsylvania tried a bold new experiment on three leukemia patients who seemed to have no hope left. One of them was 65-year-old William Ludwig.
Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.
At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.
A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.
Another patient had a complete remission, and the third had a partial remission. What is surprising about the experimental treatment is that it uses diabled HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, to carry the new cancer-fighting genes to the patient’s T-cells.
The University of Pennsylvania team seems to have hit all the targets at once. Inside the patients, the T-cells modified by the researchers multiplied to 1,000 to 10,000 times the number infused, wiped out the cancer and then gradually diminished, leaving a population of “memory” cells that can quickly proliferate again if needed.
The researchers remain cautious, because so few patients have been given the treatment, and because the therapy itself can be dangerous. But Mr. Ludwig has gained 40 pounds and a playing golf again. Read how they did it at the New York Times. Link -via Metafilter
If you want to show the world what you’re REALLY made of, guts and all, then your wait is almost over. Thanks to Japanese researchers from RIKEN, biological tissue can be turned transparent via chemical reagent, so you can look like a superhero without the need to have powers or a cool alien back story. Unfortunately, this reagent doesn’t work on living tissue, so you’ll have to wait a while longer for your clear skin makeover. Until then, read on at PopSci and imagine all the creepy possibilities!
Savoring the colorful research of an under-publicized researcher
compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell and Stephen Drew
This issue’s under-publicized scientist is Nicolas Guéguen, who finds significance, or at least fascination, in the goad of small things. He does what might be called voyeuristic microscopy, watching how people react to mundanely noticeable sights and sounds and touching. Many of the experiments involve young female confederates who are shaped or perfumed or who lay a hand upon strangers in particular ways. Generally, the test subjects who respond most vigorously are men.
Based at the University of Bretagne-Sud, France, Professor Guéguen has been pumping out publications since the year 2000. He honors the academic custom of referring to himself, in print, with the royal “we.”
His experiments probe a range of human behavior.
A study called “Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation,” 1 describes how Professor Guéguen tested “the effect of a woman’s breast size on approaches made by males. We hypothesized that an increase in breast size would be associated with an increase in approaches by men.” The study ends with an 827-word assertion that “Our hypothesis was confirmed.”
A related experiment produced a study called “Bust Size and Hitchhiking: A Field Study.”2 There Professor Guéguen reports that “1200 male and female French motorists were tested in a hitchhiking situation. A 20-year-old female confederate wore a bra which permitted variation in the size of cup to vary her breast size. She stood by the side of a road frequented by hitchhikers and held out her thumb to catch a ride. Increasing the bra-size of the female hitchhiker was significantly associated with an increase in number of male drivers, but not female drivers, who stopped to offer a ride.” more …
It goes without saying that smoking is bad for you, but as it turns out, when you smoke can affect just how much of a health impact a cigarette could have on your body. Two new studies have shown that smokers who light up first thing in the morning are more likely to get lung, neck and head cancers than those who wait to take the first puff.
Artists often come up with concepts and ideas that require help to reach the light of day, and whenever an artist teams up with a scientist the unlikely duo is most likely on the verge of making an incredible discovery. Case and point-the collaboration between Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi and Utah State researcher Randy Lewis has resulted in a bulletproof, skin-like material that has been fabricated from silk threads produced by a genetically modified silk worm. And the ultimate point of this exercise in left brain/right brain cooperation? To someday create a synthetic human skin and artificial tendons and ligaments. Read more on this fascinating development over at PhysOrg.
Science videos have never looked so cool, thanks to the introduction of 3d visual effects and simulations that make the scientific process geeky fun to watch. Whether you understand what’s happening in each short film or not, the visuals are mind blowing and quite beautiful to watch. You can see all 10 videos over at Wired.
by Robert E. Pyatt Ph.D.
Assistant Laboratory Director
Nationwide Children’s Hospital
Columbus, Ohio
This is a comparison of classic films and science articles that share the same name.
The movie facts come from the Internet Movie Database. Information about the science articles comes from the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
Starring Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef. Directed by Sergio Leone.
Spaghetti Western set against the backdrop of the Civil War where 3 men, the good (Eastwood), the bad (Van Cleef), and the ugly (Wallach), race to uncover a hidden stash of Confederate gold.
“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (with Apologies to Sergio Leone)”
M.V. Connelly, Facial Plastic Surgery Clinics of North America, vol. 16, no. 2, May 2008 pp. 179–82.
Tales of a plastic surgery practice set in a small city including the good (well informed patients who follow all pre and post-op instructions and are “thoroughly pleased with the postoperative results”), the bad (patients who “bring you grief and perhaps damage your reputation”), and the ugly (“disparaging remarks from another surgeon in your area”).
A Night at the Opera
A Night at the Opera (1935)
Starring the Marx Brothers and Kitty Carlisle. Directed by Sam Wood.
The Marx Brothers take on high society as the boys help two opera singers find fame and true love.
“A Night at the Opera”
[no author listed] Mental Health Today,October 2005, pp. 10-1. Touching and comedic tale of “Streetwise Opera,” a company which designs, stages, and performs operas with a combination of professional performers and homeless people.
Animated short featuring the first silver screen pairing of two of Hollywood’s most memorable creatures with the expected tragic consequences.
“Psychotherapy Research Evidence and Reimbursement Decisions: Bambi Meets Godzilla”
M.B. Parloff, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 139, no. 6, June 1986, pp.718–27.
Like a tender doe standing in a sunny forest glen, “policy guiding reimbursement issues for mental health care” faces off against the gargantuan “research evidence of psychotherapy outcome”. Eerily similar ending to its big screen counterpart.
Saturday Night Fever
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Starring John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney. Directed by John Badham.
“The tribal rites of the new Saturday night.” Two New Yorkers, Tony (Travolta) and Stephanie (Gorney), discover passion, maturity, and themselves as they disco dance across Manhattan.
“Saturday Night Fever: A Common Source Outbreak of Rubella Among Adults in Hawaii”
J.S. Marks, M.K. Serdula, N.A. Halsey, M.V. Gunaratne, R.B. Craven, K.A. Murphy, G.Y. Kobayashi and N.H. Wiebenga, American Journal of Epidemiology, vol. 114,
no. 4, October 1981, pp. 574–83.
It’s a whole other kind of fever on this Saturday night as a rubella outbreak infects young adults, with the common place of exposure being a discotheque. Evidence suggests that the virus source was a piano player/singer at the club and that transmission was airborne, rather than person to person, and occurred during his singing.
According to a new scientific paper, cancer might actually be a newly evolved species of parasite based on the fact that the cells depend on their hosts for food, but otherwise act independently and to the detriment of their host.
Duesberg, a molecular and cell biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues believe that carcinogenesis—the generation of cancer—is just another form of speciation, the evolution of new species.
“Cancer is comparable to a bacterial level of complexity, but still autonomous, that is, it doesn’t depend on other cells for survival; it doesn’t follow orders like other cells in the body, and it can grow where, when and how it likes,” said Duesberg in a UC Berkeley press release. “That’s what species are all about…Once a cell has crossed that barrier of autonomy, it’s a new species.”
Researchers are hopeful that if this is true, the species might be defeated if we continue to force them to rapidly evolve through the use of increasingly powerful medicines. What do you think, is it a parasitic species or a disease?
What movies make you cry? When I saw The Champ during its initial theater run, I did not expect to cry, but I did, and so did everyone in the audience. Watching 9-year-old Ricky Schroeder begging his father not to die was just too much. When researchers Robert Levenson and James Gross began looking for a trigger that would ethically induce sadness in volunteer test subjects, they searched for the most sure-fire tear-jerking film ever. It took years, but they found The Champ.
In 1995, Gross and Levenson published the results of their test screenings. They came up with a list of 16 short film clips able to elicit a single emotion, such as anger, fear or surprise. Their recommendation for inducing disgust was a short film showing an amputation. Their top-rated film clip for amusement was the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. And then there’s the two-minute, 51-second clip of Schroder weeping over his father’s dead body in The Champ, which Levenson and Gross found produced more sadness in laboratory subjects than the death of Bambi’s mom.
“I still feel sad when I see that boy crying his heart out,” Gross says.
Cue the argument for Old Yeller. Excuse me, I think I need a handkerchief. Link -via Metafilter
I love scientific studies. I read study reports before reading study reports was my job, and I continued afterward just for kicks. In the piles of new innovation and breakthroughs, though, there always seem to be a few that make me wonder why the topic warranted study at all—sometimes, it seems, science sets out to confirm the obvious. Here are a few such results, in no particular order.
What’s that you say? Chicks dig the swagger? We like the dark, broody type? Yes, we know. But, in case there was doubt, a study published in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion indicates that women find men who look powerful or moody more sexually attractive than smiling men. Conversely, men in the same study find smiling women most attractive, and are least likely to find powerful- or confident-looking women appealing.
Theories about why this is true rely on data from other studies, which report that male expressions of pride accentuate masculine features that women find most drool-worthy, whereas men find amiable, happy women most enticing, aligning with the traditional role of women as “submissive and vulnerable.” It seems feminism and gender equality haven’t been around long enough to change the way our brains work. It also explains why Don Draper is dead sexy even though he’s such a jerk.
If people are talking smack about you, chances are they probably see you differently than they see others. I mean, duh, right? Think about it: you probably see between dozens and hundreds of people in a given day, but you don’t notice them all. If, however, a person is preceded by a bit of bad gossip, your brain will pick him or her out of a crowd. But why? To determine whether someone is a friend or foe, according to Science Now.
To test this, researchers showed different images to each subject’s left and right eye at the same time, effectively pitting them against each other in a contest for the brain’s attention. The viewer has to register one image before the other; the winner is the picture with priority granted by the brain. Every picture (all of people) was given a bit of information: “threw a chair at a classmate” or “helped an elderly woman with her groceries,” or similarly negative/positive statements. The negatively noted face reached the subjects’ consciousness about half a second faster than the nice person’s face, essentially spotting a foe or rival with
So, in short: if you think a person might be worth avoiding, you can spot them in a crowd pretty quickly. This sounds pretty much like high school to me, but it’s nice that it’s been confirmed.
Huh. Really. This is one of the least surprising no-brainers in this list, I think, for no other reason than I can’t imagine a situation in which the opposite (or anything like it) might be true. But it’s not the snotty nose or hiccuping wail that makes men hightail it for the door–it’s the smell of your tears, woman.
Even if the scent isn’t detectable on a conscious level, the chemical signal of weepy eyes will temporarily send testosterone plummeting in nearby men. You can blame pheromones for this one; tears produced as a result of emotional turmoil are chemically different than, say, eyelash-in-the-eye tears. And the worst part may be that men who sniffed a woman’s sad tears were not only not attracted to her, they were also less empathetic. Yeesh.
The study’s reverse–testing the female reaction to the emotional tears of men–hasn’t been conducted yet. It seems getting men to cry voluntarily, even for science, is not an easy task
That’s right. Scientists know that people will find their conclusions a matter of common sense. Hindsight bias is a bit like the Guess Which Number I’m Thinking Of game; you have no idea which number I’m thinking of, but when I say “42!” you think, “Ugh, I knew that!”
The brain is a place that likes to keep its contents organized. So when you learn new information, you tend to lose previous contradictory ideas that would muddy-up the works. You thought I was thinking of 17, then maybe 4, then maybe 291. But when I tell you I’ve been thinking of 42 the entire time, you toss out your old ideas about it and replace those ideas with memories graced with hindsight. You know now what I was thinking, so you knew then, too. Or so you tell yourself. You Are Not So Smart explains it like this:
You are always looking back at the person you used to be, always reconstructing the story of your life to better match the person you are today. You have needed to keep a tidy mind to navigate the world ever since you lived in jungles and on savannas. Cluttered minds got bogged down, and the bodies they controlled got eaten. Once you learn from your mistakes, or replace bad info with good, there isn’t much use in retaining the garbage, so you delete it. This deletion of your old incorrect assumptions de-clutters your mind. Sure, you are lying to yourself, but it’s for a good cause.
If hindsight bias holds true, everything on this list was news to me when I read it the first time, and in looking back, I’m replacing my previous ideas about what women like and how men react to emotional outbursts with what I know now.
But I knew that already, of course. It’s so obvious.
Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner are both New York-based ad execs who attended a TED Talk in 2008 revealing the economic sense of capuchin monkeys. The pair teamed up with Laurie Santos, the Yale University primatologist who gave the TED talk, to develop an experiment that tests the effects of advertising on monkeys. The solution? Branded capuchin food.
The objective, says Olwell, is to see if advertising can make brown capuchins change their behaviour. The team will create two brands of food – the team is considering making two colours of jello – specifically targeted at brown capuchins, one supported by an ad campaign and the other not.
How do you advertise to monkeys? Easy: create a billboard campaign that hangs outside the monkeys’ enclosure.
“The foods will be novel to them and are equally delicious,” Olwell says. Brand A will be advertised and brand B will not. After a period of exposure to the campaign, the monkeys will be offered a choice of both brands.
Santos plans to kick off the experimental campaign in the coming weeks. “If they tend toward one and not the other we’ll be witnessing preference shifting due to our advertising,” Olwell says.
But what kind of advertising might a capuchin–without language, pop culture, or an appreciation for human aesthetics–find appealing? The answer is simple, if wholly unrelated to the food in question:
One billboard shows a graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed, alongside the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the capuchin troop associated with brand A.
Olwell expects brand A to be the capuchins’ favoured product. “Monkeys have been shown in previous studies to really love photographs of alpha males and shots of genitals, and we think this will drive their purchasing habits.”
It’s not going to be beating anyone at Jeopardy any time soon, but scientists have created an artificial brain derived from rat cells. The brain is capable of 12 second short term memory and will be used to study how neural networks store data.
Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently. The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring seen above.
Researchers have discovered that only four percent of galaxies have similar qualities as our own Milky Way. I guess every galaxy really is a snowflake.
The research team compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies in terms of luminosity–a measure of how much light is emitted–and distance to other bright galaxies. They found galaxies that have two satellites that are as bright and close by as the Milky Way’s two closest satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, are rare.
Every day, scientists are striving to make our lives better and to better understand our lives through a range of experiments on just about every subject. Unfortunately, not all of these projects work out so well. These five experiments have all gone wrong, whether due to the errors of the scientists, the unexpected behavior of the subjects or because the public reaction destroyed what may have actually been an advantageous advance in the field.
While many test animals are killed in the name of research, many of them are at least being used to investigate potentially life-saving drugs. Perhaps the saddest and most spectacular failure of any animal-based experiment occurred in 1962, when Tusko the elephant (not the one pictured) was given LSD simply for the sake of seeing how the magnificent beast would react to such a substance.
Unfortunately, the researchers, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce, had no idea how much LSD it would take to dose an elephant. Rather than erroring on the side of safety, the doctors decided that they didn’t want to have to do the experiment again just because they underdosed the elephant the first time. They ended up deciding to give Tusko 297 milligrams, which is about 3000 times the dosage a human takes, despite the fact that an elephant weighs about 90 times more than the average human.
After being dosed, Tusko immediately started running around in his pen and soon lost control of his movements, eventually collapsing to the ground and going into seizures. To counteract the LSD, the doctors gave the elephant 2,800 milligrams of an antipsychotic. The drug reduced his seizures slightly, but didn’t stop them. After another hours, the doctors decided to give Tusko a barbiturate to calm him down, but it didn’t help. He died a few minutes later.
Two other elephants were later dosed with the drug and suffered no ill effects. Ultimately, the doctors that dosed Tusko summed up their experiment in Science by saying, simply, “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.” Even so, it is still unclear whether or not Tusko died from the acid or a combination of the three drugs given to him that day.
The Monster Study
The effects of positive vs. negative reinforcement have fascinated scientists and parents for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, testing on a group of unsuspecting orphans isn’t the best way to find out. In 1939, Doctor Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa and his assistant, Mary Tudor, selected 22 children from an orphanage in Iowa. Ten of the children had stutters and the rest spoke just fine.
The stutterers were put in two groups, group IA that was to use positive reinforcement and other, group IB, that was to receive negative reinforcement. The non-stutterers were also broken into two groups, group IIB, that was told they spoke fine, and group IIA, who were told they were starting to stutter and needed to avoid making mistakes at any cost. The goal was to get those in group IA to stop stuttering and those in group IIA to start stuttering.
The impact on group IIA was exactly what the doctor had hoped for. The entire group started falling behind on their school work. The children started to second-guess their speech abilities and many stopped talking at all. One girl ran away shortly after the experiment ended. While Mary Tudor visited the orphanage three times after the experiment was over, attempting to convince the children that they didn’t have any speech problems, the damage was already done. Although none of the kids became stutterers, many of the children retained speech problems their entire life and most were reluctant to speak. In 2007, six of these children were awarded $925,000 in a lawsuit against the state for the university’s role in the experiment.
The study has since been dubbed “The Monster Study” by the public and scientists alike who were disgusted with the doctor’s methods. more …
To help us understand earthquakes after the big one in Japan, Smithsonian has republished an article about how scientists study earthquakes of the past to predict and prepare for future quakes. Past disasters left clues behind, like dead cedar trees in Washington state.
In one of the more remarkable feats of modern geoscience, researchers have pinpointed the date, hour and size of the cataclysm that killed these cedars. In Japan, officials had recorded an “orphan” tsunami—unconnected with any felt earthquake— with waves up to ten feet high along 600 miles of the Honshu coast at midnight, January 27, 1700. Several years ago, Japanese researchers, by estimating the tsunami’s speed, path and other properties, concluded that it was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake that warped the seafloor off the Washington coast at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 1700. To confirm it, U.S. researchers found a few old trees of known age that had survived the earthquake and compared their tree rings with the rings of the ghost forest cedars. The trees had indeed died just before the growing season of 1700.
Although earthquakes still cannot be predicted accurately, the body of data is growing that may lead to better forecasts. Link
Some monkeys have enough self-awareness to realize when they don’t know an answer, and will tell us if we make it worth their time. It appears that uncertainty is not an exclusively human trait.
A team of researchers taught macaques how to maneuver a joystick to indicate whether the pixel density on a screen was sparse or dense. Given a pixel scenario, the monkeys would maneuver a joystick to a letter S (for sparse) or D (for dense). They were given a treat when they selected the correct answer, but when they were wrong, the game paused for a couple seconds. A third possible answer, though, allowed the monkeys to select a question mark, and thereby forgo the pause (and potentially get more treats).
And as John David Smith, a researcher at SUNY Buffalo, and Michael Beran, a researcher at Georgia State University, announced at the AAAS meeting this weekend, the macaques selected the question mark just as humans do when they encounter a mind-stumping question. As Smith told the BBC, “Monkeys apparently appreciate when they are likely to make an error…. They seem to know when they don’t know.”
The same experiment with capuchin monkeys returned different results: they didn’t use the question mark button. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Shannon Keith and Gary Smith started the Beagle Freedom Project to find new homes for beagles that have been used for research. They named their first rescue dogs Freedom and Bigsby, and videotaped the beagles’ first brush with the great outdoors. Be warned that the video, while not graphic, may be disturbing and you’ll want to have a hanky handy.
Anyone interested in fostering or adopting a lab beagle should be aware of the challenges these dogs have. They will not be accustomed to life in a home and will not have experience with children, cats, or other dogs. They will not be house-trained and accidents will happen, although they learn quickly. Many have gone directly from a commercial breeder to the lab, and have never felt grass under their feet or even seen the sun. They will have been fed a special diet formulated for lab animals and may be difficult to adjust to new foods. They will be unfamiliar with treats, toys, bedding and may never have walked on a leash. They will have lived in cages with steel wire floors and may have inflamed or infected paws from the pressure. They may be fearful of people initially and may have phobias from a lifetime in confinement or from being restrained. They are likely to have been surgically de-barked by the breeder and have an ID number tattooed in their ear. Please also be aware that although these beagles are considered healthy, you will be given very little information about the beagle’s medical history, and you will not be told its origins or what kind of testing they may have been used for.
The video of Freedom and Bigsby is at the home page of the organization. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Stanford University has an ongoing study of how children learn language. Part of that study is how they learn color names. They found it to be difficult for a lot of children -in fact, their parents worried that they might be colorblind!
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”
Why does this matter? It has to do with how attention works. In conversation, people have to track what’s being talked about, and they often do this visually. This is particularly so if they’re trying to make sense of whatever it is someone is going on about. Indeed, should I start blathering about “the old mumpsimus in the corner” you’re apt to begin discretely looking around for the mystery person or object.
Kids do the exact same thing, only more avidly, because they have much, much more to learn about. That means that when you stick the noun before the color word, you can successfully narrow their focus to whatever it is you’re talking about before you hit them with the color. Say “the balloon is red,” for example, and you will have helped to narrow “red-ness” to being an attribute of the balloon, and not some general property of the world at large. This helps kids discern what about the balloon makes it red.
When the researchers switched the color and noun, they found a significant improvement in performance over the children’s baseline performances, compared to the children who received prenominal training. Link -via TYWKIWBI
by Catherine Maloney, Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut, Sarah J. Lichtblau, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois Nadya Karpook, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida Carolyn Chou, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Anthony Arena-DeRosa, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
A feline subject reacts to a photograph of a man with a full dark semicircular beard.
Abstract
Cats were exposed to photographs of bearded men. The beards were of various sizes, shapes, and styles. The cats’ responses were recorded and analyzed.
Findings of Prior Investigators
Boone (1958) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to clean-shaven men. O’Connor and Brynner (1990) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to shaven heads. Quant (1965) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to bangs. Seuss (1955) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to hats. Ciccone (1986) found inconclusive results in studying feline reactions to hairy legs. Other related studies (Smith/Brothers 1972, Conroy 1987, Schwartzenegger 1983) have since been retracted because the investigators were not able to reproduce their results.
Norquist (1988) performed a series of experiments in which cats were exposed to photographs of Robert Bork[1] (not pictured here), a man whose beard is confined largely to the underside of the jaw. After viewing the Bork photograph, 26% of the cats exhibited paralysis of the legs and body, including the neck. An additional 31% of the cats exposed to the Bork photograph showed other types of severe neurological and/or pulmocardial distress and/or exhibited extremely violent behavior. Because of this, we did not include a photograph of this type of bearded man in our study. more …
Cracked looks at studies that have compared the amount of time people spend watching TV and the differences between those who watch a lot and those who don’t. The results show that watching more TV over years make folks more likely to commit violent acts, gain weight, and have short attention spans. But the news isn’t all bad.
Using a combination of four studies, scientists have shown that television shows can instill a sense of belonging in people with low self-esteem who have been rejected by friends or family. This is called the social surrogacy hypothesis, which figures that in order to fill the emotional void of social deprivation, a person will establish relationships with fictional characters (as teenagers, many of us had a similar type of relationship with late-night Cinemax).
One study showed that subjects who were experiencing feelings of loneliness felt better after turning on their favorite television programs. Another had subjects writing essays about either their favorite shows or some other random subject as a control. The subjects who wrote about their favorite shows used fewer words expressing loneliness than the control group.
We (meaning I) present observations on the scientific publishing process which (meaning that) are important and timely in that unless I have more published papers soon, I will never get another job. These observations are consistent with the theory that it is difficult to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough publications to get future jobs.
1. Introduction
Scientific papers (e.g. Schulman 1988; Schulman & Fomalont 1992; Schulman, Bregman, & Roberts 1994; Schulman & Bregman 1995; Schulman 1996) are an important, though poorly understood, method of publication. They are important because without them scientists cannot get money from the government or from universities. They are poorly understood because they are not written very well (see, for example, Schulman 1995 and selected references therein). An excellent example of the latter phenomenon occurs in most introductions, which are supposed to introduce the reader to the subject so that the paper will be comprehensible even if the reader has not done any work in the field. The real purpose of introductions, of course, is to cite your own work (e.g. Schulman et al. 1993a), the work of your advisor (e.g. Bregman, Schulman, & Tomisaka 1995), the work of your spouse (e.g. Cox, Schulman, & Bregman 1993), the work of a friend from college (e.g. Taylor, Morris, & Schulman 1993), or even the work of someone you have never met, as long as your name happens to be on the paper (e.g. Richmond et al. 1994). Note that these citations should not be limited to refereed journal articles (e.g. Collura et al. 1994), but should also include conference proceedings (e.g. Schulman et al. 1993b), and other published or unpublished work (e.g. Schulman 1990). At the end of the introduction you must summarize the paper by reciting the section headings. In this paper, we discuss scientific research (section 2), scientific writing (section 3) and scientific publication (section 4), and draw some conclusions (section 5).
2. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
The purpose of science is to get paid for doing fun stuff if you’re not a good enough programmer to write computer games for a living (Schulman et al. 1991). Nominally, science involves discovering something new about the universe, but this is not really necessary. What is really necessary is a grant. In order to obtain a grant, your application must state that the research will discover something incredibly fundamental. The grant agency must also believe that you are the best person to do this particular research, so you should cite yourself both early (Schulman 1994) and often (Schulman et al. 1993c). Feel free to cite other papers as well (e.g. Blakeslee et al. 1993; Levine et al. 1993), so long as you are on the author list. Once you get the grant, your university, company, or government agency will immediately take 30 to 70% of it so that they can heat the building, pay for Internet connections, and purchase large yachts. Now it’s time for the actual research. You will quickly find out that (a) your project is not as simple as you thought it would be and (b) you can’t actually solve the problem. However (and this is very important) you must publish anyway (Schulman & Bregman 1994).
3. Scientific Writing
You have spent years on a project and have finally discovered that you cannot solve the problem you set out to solve. Nonetheless, you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific community (Schulman et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just as important as positive results, and also that if you don’t publish enough you will never be able to stay in science. While writing a scientific paper, the most important thing to remember is that the word “which” should almost never be used. Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e. 12 hours a day) typesetting the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman & Bregman 1992).
4. Scientific Publishing
You have written the paper, and now it is time to submit it to a scientific journal. The journal editor will pick the referee most likely to be offended by your paper, because then at least the referee will read it and get a report back within the lifetime of the editor (Schulman, Cox, & Williams 1993). Referees who don’t care one way or the other about a paper have a tendency to leave manuscripts under a growing pile of paper until the floor collapses, killing the 27 English graduate students who share the office below. Be aware that every scientific paper contains serious errors. If your errors are not caught before publication, you will eventually have to write an erratum to the paper explaining (a) how and why you messed up and (b) that even though your experimental results are now totally different, your conclusions needn’t be changed. Errata can be good for your career. They are easy to write, and the convention is to reference them as if they were real papers, leading the casual reader (and perhaps the Science Citation Index) to think that you have published more papers than you really have (Schulman et al. 1994).
5. Conclusions
The conclusion section is very easy to write: all you have to do is to take your abstract and change the tense from present to past. It is considered good form to mention at least one relevant theory only in the abstract and conclusion. By doing this, you don’t have to say why your experiment does (or does not) agree with the theory, you merely have to state that it does (or does not). We (meaning I) presented observations on the scientific publishing process which (meaning that) are important and timely in that unless I have more published papers soon, I will never get another job. These observations are consistent with the theory that it is difficult to do good science, write good scientific papers, and have enough publications to get future jobs.
This classic article, by E. Robert Schulman is from the airchives of the Annals of Improbable Research. Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
One man (Not JFK) stopped the Cuban Missile Crisis from becoming WW3. One woman’s cells have continued to save lives even after her death. These are just a couple of the true heros who have saved billions of lives, often unrecognized, through their actions, good thinking, and altruism. Take James Harrison (pictured):
Specifically, his blood contains an extremely rare enzyme that can be used to treat babies dying of Rhesus disease. If you’ve never heard of that disease and figure it’s not a big deal, well, wait for the numbers.
Harrison, being a generous type, has donated his rare, life-saving blood roughly 1,000 times over 56 years. This has saved the lives of–seriously, you’re not going to believe this–over two million babies around the world.
Despite the many opportunities for research in the oceans, the surfaces of those seas tend to get rough. Ships being tossed around tend to do less research, so in 1962 the Office of Naval Research helped to develop the Floating Instrument Platform (FLIP).
FLIP can be used in either a drifting or moored mode, based on the science requirements, and FLIP can remain on station in the vertical position for substantial periods of time. For research requiring a stationary rather than drifting platform, a deep moor capability has been developed.
This 350 foot long contraption is towed out to the open ocean, and flipped 90° to the vertical position to become a stable spar buoy. The 50 or so feet that juts above the waterline becomes the crew operations area, where research can be carried out in stable, calm conditions.
Link (Marine Physical Laboratory) Photo: Dept. of Navy
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Here’s one of those studies you probably didn’t need science to tell you: guys show off to impress women.
E. Robert Schulman
(Image credit: Flickr user 
A European Union Council rule mandates “that cattle housed in groups should be given sufficient space so that they can all lie down simultaneously”. Researchers at Oxford University and Clarkson University in New York state were curious to determine whether this was necessary. Do cows ever all lie down at the same time?
Spend some time on the internet and you should became an expert at both detecting and delivering sarcasm. According to research into the subject, that could benefit your brain.
Everyone knows that kids who play video games all day don’t have time to exercise and thus, often weigh more than kids who do spend time outside. But scientists only recently discovered that gaming teens are more likely to be heavy for another reason as well -those that spend an hour gaming typically eat more afterward than those that don’t.
by Ernest Ersatz, Improbable Research staff
A team of doctors and medical researchers at the University of Pennsylvania tried a bold new experiment on three leukemia patients who seemed to have no hope left. One of them was 65-year-old William Ludwig.
This issue’s under-publicized scientist is 
It goes without saying that smoking is bad for you, but as it turns out, when you smoke can affect just how much of a health impact a cigarette could have on your body. Two new studies have shown that smokers who light up first thing in the morning are more likely to get lung, neck and head cancers than those who wait to take the first puff.
Artists often come up with concepts and ideas that require help to reach the light of day, and whenever an artist teams up with a scientist the unlikely duo is most likely on the verge of making an incredible discovery. Case and point-the collaboration between Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi and Utah State researcher Randy Lewis has resulted in a bulletproof, skin-like material that has been fabricated from silk threads produced by a genetically modified silk worm. And the ultimate point of this exercise in left brain/right brain cooperation? To someday create a synthetic human skin and artificial tendons and ligaments. Read more on this fascinating development over at PhysOrg.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Saturday Night Fever
The article above is from the 
According to a new scientific paper, cancer might actually be a newly evolved species of parasite based on the fact that the cells depend on their hosts for food, but otherwise act independently and to the detriment of their host.
What movies make you cry? When I saw The Champ during its initial theater run, I did not expect to cry, but I did, and so did everyone in the audience. Watching 9-year-old Ricky Schroeder begging his father not to die was just too much. When researchers Robert Levenson and James Gross began looking for a trigger that would ethically induce sadness in volunteer test subjects, they searched for the most sure-fire tear-jerking film ever. It took years, but they found The Champ.
I love scientific studies. I read study reports before reading study reports was my job, and I continued afterward just for kicks. In the piles of new innovation and breakthroughs, though, there always seem to be a few that make me wonder why the topic warranted study at all—sometimes, it seems, science sets out to confirm the obvious. Here are a few such results, in no particular order.
What’s that you say? Chicks dig the swagger? We like the dark, broody type? Yes, we know. But, in case there was doubt, a 
If people are talking smack about you, chances are they probably see you differently than they see others. I mean, duh, right? Think about it: you probably see between dozens and hundreds of people in a given day, but you don’t notice them all. If, however, a person is preceded by a bit of bad gossip, your brain will pick him or her out of a crowd. But why? To determine whether someone is a friend or foe, according to Science Now.
Huh. Really. This is one of the least surprising no-brainers in this list, I think, for no other reason than I can’t imagine a situation in which the opposite (or anything like it) might be true. But it’s not the snotty nose or hiccuping wail that makes men hightail it for the door–it’s the smell of your tears, woman.
Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner are both New York-based ad execs who attended a TED Talk in 2008 revealing the economic sense of capuchin monkeys. The pair teamed up with Laurie Santos, the Yale University primatologist who gave the 
Researchers have discovered that only four percent of galaxies have similar qualities as our own Milky Way. I guess every galaxy really is a snowflake.
To help us understand earthquakes after the big one in Japan, Smithsonian has republished an article about how scientists study earthquakes of the past to predict and prepare for future quakes. Past disasters left clues behind, like dead cedar trees in Washington state.
Some monkeys have enough self-awareness to realize when they don’t know an answer, and will tell us if we make it worth their time. It appears that uncertainty is not an exclusively human trait.
Shannon Keith and Gary Smith started the Beagle Freedom Project to find new homes for beagles that have been used for research. They named their first rescue dogs Freedom and Bigsby, and videotaped the beagles’ first brush with the great outdoors. Be warned that the video, while not graphic, may be disturbing and you’ll want to have a hanky handy.
Stanford University has an ongoing study of how children learn language. Part of that study is how they learn color names. They found it to be difficult for a lot of children -in fact, their parents worried that they might be colorblind!
Cracked looks at studies that have compared the amount of time people spend watching TV and the differences between those who watch a lot and those who don’t. The results show that watching more TV over years make folks more likely to commit violent acts, gain weight, and have short attention spans. But the news isn’t all bad.
Abstract
This classic article, by E. Robert Schulman is from the airchives of the Annals of Improbable Research. Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
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