Four articles this month and only two of them are the human nature stuff that I usually like to link to. One is an invention that I’d honestly wondered myself if it would work. The last one is not really a scientific article. Instead, it’s one person’s attempt to create art using technology and to illustrate a fundamental biological process at the same time. We’ll go with the human nature stuff first.
The first one comes from PsyDir and covers a question that many people are no doubt curious about: is there any link between genetics and religious fundamentalism? The paper in question took data from a national survey in the US to look for data about variations in religiosity between identical twins and non-identical twins. The paper also tried to sort out influences caused by the family environment that would be shared by siblings and the environment outside of the family.
A bit of a slow start for the year in terms of science news so I’ll have to make do with some softer research articles. All three of the articles are about human psychology. First a short one about how chess grandmasters use their brains. Next, one about how men and women respond to stress differently when under the effects of caffeine and finally an odd look at how having a name that with starts with a letter at the end of the alphabet influences human behavior.
The first article is from New Scientist which talks about how Merim Bilalic at the University of Tübingen in Germany used an MRI machine to look at the brains of various chess players while they were looking at images of geometrical shapes or identifying whether certain situations in chess amounted to a check. Half of these were just novices and the other half were all internationally acknowledged grandmasters.
Three articles for the last month of 2010. Two of them are arguably about psychology. The other one is about a weird way of getting rid of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. We’ll start with that one first.
Bacterial infections that are increasingly resistant to currently available antibiotics is becoming a prevalent problem, especially in many hospitals where the bugs are able to attack patients already weakened by disease. This article from The Seattle Times looks at a way to treat one of these superbugs, known as C-diff, which can cause severe diarrhea in patients. Affected patients can use an expensive course of antibiotics to kill the bug but this also kills all of the other benign bacteria in the patient’s gut and after that C-diff can still come back.
Three articles this month, one on an amazing new implant that allows the blind to see, albeit in low resolution, one on a way of treating auto-immune disorders that I’d long suspected would work, and one about which sorts of people think the most like an economist. Let’s start with the eye implant first.
Using technology to let the blind see again has long been one of the staples of science-fiction, perhaps one best exemplified by the character of Geordi LaForge of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember being amazed a few years back when scientists successfully gave a very crude form of sight to some blind people by essentially using feeding the input of cameras to nerve receptors on their chests. But as far as I know, this is the first example of an actual artificial eye implant.
By now, I suspect that almost everyone will have seen the videos of burgers and fries from McDonald’s taking a suspiciously long time to rot. The suggestion is that McDonald’s packs tons of chemicals and artificial preservatives in their products to prolong their shelf life, incidentally also making them very harmful to eat. The Burger Lab, a food blog who was also behind a massive effort to deconstruct the precise composition of McDonald’s fries and make them at home, has punched a hole in this theory.
After an extensive series of tests, he finds that, yes, McDonald’s burgers do indeed take much longer to rot than other burgers, but the reason isn’t due to chemical preservatives. It is primarily due to the large surface area of the burger compared to its volume, causing it lose moisture rapidly. Since the meat is sterile to begin with, this makes it very hard for mold spores in the air to establish a foothold. To further prove his point, he performed another experiment in which the burger was stored in a plastic bag designed to retain moisture, and found that the McDonald’s burger does indeed rot normally in this case. Check out his extensive blog post for more details.
Only a couple of articles this month as I’ve been distracted by other stuff. Both happen to be about biology and more specifically about females. The first one deals with the attraction of the color red. Psychologist Daniela Kayser of the University of Rochester and her team conducted a study in which heterosexual males were separately shown photos of the same moderately attractive woman. Half of the participants were shown a photo in which the model was wearing a red shirt. The other half were shown the same photo, except that this time her shirt was green. The men were then asked to select five questions out of a total of twenty four provided that they were told would be sent to the woman.
The team found that the men who saw the woman in red tended to choose more intimate questions. In a follow up study, another group of men were shown the same photos but this time they were tricked into believing that the woman would be coming into the room with them and they were instructed to arrange the two chairs in the room. The men who were shown the photo of the woman wearing red chose to put their own chair closer to where they thought the woman would be sitting. Apparently, it works for men too as the team has also found that men wearing red were rated by women as being more attractive and of higher status.
The Nobel Prizes are generally considered to be one of the most prestigious awards in the world but depressingly few people are able to name the winners of the various categories. Compare this to the likelihood of people being able to name past and present Oscar Award winners or how readily sports fans can recite the entire histories of major sporting events. When it comes to the Nobel however, even experienced bloggers who write frequently about economics can get the name of the Nobel laureate in economics wrong, as Steven D. Levitt pointed out recently.
So I thought that listing this year’s winners and summarizing their accomplishments would make for a worthy blog post. We’ll start with the Nobel Peace Prize, which despite being the least objective and most disputed of the different categories, is easily the most well-known among the public. It is also the only one of the prizes to be judged by a Norwegian committee instead of a Swedish institution. Whereas the other Nobel prizes are traditionally awarded only many years after the original breakthrough to ensure that it is real and confers genuine benefits to humanity, the Peace Prize is occasionally awarded only to send a political signal or to encourage someone who is deemed to be on the right path but hasn’t really done much yet, as last year’s award to Barack Obama demonstrated.