Recent Interesting Science Articles (March ’09)

Since my last entry in this series was a bit light, here are four articles for this month. Two are from The Economist, with one of them on how physics might help answer an age-old philosophical question and the other on how appearances count for more than we think. Of the remaining two, one is from CNN on a novel use for the laser technology originally conceived for the Star Wars anti-missile program and the last one is from the BBC on yet another piece of news “proving” that playing games is good for you.

The philosophy problem to start with. The question is no less than whether or not reality exists when we’re not looking at it, and if it exists, does reality behave in a different way when we’re not looking than when we are? Drawing on the theoretical work of Lucien Hardy who proposed a thought experiment whereby a pair of matter and antimatter particles could meet but do not mutually annihilate themselves under the condition that the interaction remains unobserved, two independent teams of physicists successfully performed the experiment as described. So it seems that people can indeed tell whether or not someone is honest just by looking at his or her face.

One difference was that instead of using matter and anti-matter particles, they used the polarisation of pairs of photons that were linked to each other through quantum entanglement. The two teams observed many interactions of the photons while being careful to avoid gathering enough information from any one set of interactions that might lead to definitive conclusions about what was happening for that particular set. Meaningful information was then gleaned by pooling together all of these partial sets of data. What they found was that the total count of photons was inconsistent. There were more photons than there should have been in some cases and fewer in others. Most surprising of all, in some cases, there were a negative number of photons present. The conclusion was that by inferring than directly observing, they’ve found that reality does exist when we’re not looking and it behaves in very odd ways.

The next article from The Economist concerns the much maligned subject of physiognomy, which is the science (and art) of predicting an individual’s character from his or her face. As most of us are probably willing to admit by now, physical attractiveness is, like it or not, a fairly good predictor of general success in life. This one goes beyond this and covers research done by Jefferson Duarte of Rice University in Houston, Texas on whether or not it is possible to predict someone’s creditworthiness based on physical looks.

This was made possible by the recent growth of peer-to-peer moneylending sites on the Internet. Borrowers post information on themselves including their credit ratings and history and how much they want to borrow while potential lenders browse the site and decide how much they’re willing to lend to who and at what interest rates. Using photos provided by the borrowers, Dr. Duarte was able to call on workers to assess their creditworthiness based on their appearance and estimate the percentage probabilityof their paying back a small loan.

What he found was that not only did the assessments match the credit ratings and histories of the borrowers, they were also accurate once other variables from beauty to race to obesity were controlled for. Furthermore, when the data was compared to records of actual loans extended, he found that those that who had been rated as being untrustworthy by his team were more unlikely to have successfully obtained loans and even when they did, had to pay higher interest rates than the norm. All of which goes to show that you can indeed tell whether or not someone is honest by looking at his or her face.

The third article for today is fine-tuned for my wife who just hates mosquitos. That’s because it deals with a laser gun designed to kill millions of them in a matter of minutes. The article claims that it was developed by some of the same people who worked on the Star Wars missile defence project of the 1980s but I don’t think that’s worth much because that project was entirely theoretical and countless numbers of people must have been involved in one way or another. Still, this one sounds pretty cool as it’s supposed to be installed on lamp posts surrounding a village as a sort of tower-based defence network. The sensors mounted on it would detect the audio frequency of the mosquitos’ beating wings and send a laser beam to toast it.

Personally it seems to me that if a village were rich enough to afford something like this, it should be rich enough to regularly clear the surrounding area of mosquitos using more conventional methods, like spraying insecticides and destroying the stagnant pools of water where their larvae hatch. Bonus points to these guys for having the chutzpah to say that mosquitos are unimportant to the larger ecosystem and the only good mosquito is a dead mosquito.

Finally, gamers have yet another reason to rejoice because a joint research team from Edinburgh University and the Medical Research Council has concluded that people with quick reactions tend to live longer. They obtained this result by measuring the reaction times along with a variety of other factors of more than 7,400 people back in the 1980s. Now twenty years later, nearly 1,300 of them are dead, allowing them to sort out which characteristics are shared by those who died. The single largest factor was smoking, which made an early death three times more likely. The next one was measured reaction time, with the slowest ones being 2.6 times more likely to die an early death.

The explanation isn’t that people with faster reaction times are better at avoiding accidents, but that faster responses seem to correlate with higher levels of intelligence. Even other factors like alcohol intake, blood pressure and body weight ranked behind reaction time in predicting how likely someone would die early. Since gamers tend to have faster reaction times, then it stands to reason that we’re both smarter and more likely to live longer, no?

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