Five articles this month, with an emphasis on the softer sciences.

• For a light start, this first one is a profile in The New York Times about a scientist who has spent his career on researching the topic of communication between animals of different species. The canonical example here is that when birds make noise, other animals in the forest are able to hear it and respond appropriately. One particularly cool example is how a squirrel is able to understand bird alarms about a predatory raptor in the air and make noises of its own that are acoustically similar to the original bird alarms.

• Staying on the topic of animals, this Washington Post article wonders why ants, which tend to move in dense, long trails, never experience any traffic jams. In fact, the scientists studying them discovered that the heavier the traffic, the faster the ants manage to move. Even if there’s an obstacle in their path, the ants that encounter it are capable of cooperating to move it out the way, allowing the ants behind them to proceed smoothly. Of course, ants have an advantage in that they can spontaneously spread out to more lanes as necessary which humans in cars obviously can’t do. But another reason is that they can feel the vibrations of other ants moving around them through their feet, thereby getting a better feel for the overall flow of traffic.
• Moving on to the subject of humans, this article from Bloomberg discusses about New Zealand is pioneering the use of statistical models to predict outcomes for poor families and targeting welfare spending appropriately. In a way, this seems mundane and only to be expected, but what caught my attention is how detailed the predictive claims they are able to make are, such as the likelihood of a parent in a family being eventually sent to prison.
• Next, we have an article from the Pacific Standard talking about how creative thinking may inspire unethical behavior. The experimental setup is pretty standard stuff and the upshot is that the more people are encouraged to be creative and to think outside of the box, the more that they appear to believe that the usual rules don’t apply to them.
• The last one isn’t a scientific finding but I thought it worth including anyway. It’s an article from Bloomberg covering efforts by oil billionaire Harold Hamm to exert pressure on researchers at the University of Oklahoma regarding studies linking fracking and earthquakes. Apparently he even demanded specific staff be dismissed from the Oklahama Geological Survey and that he be a part of the search committee for the director of the project. I’m not sure what sort of concessions the university gave him but it’s clear that they couldn’t just brush him off since he’s a major donor to the university. It’s not news about a discovery and it’s surely about science. After recently watching Cosmos and specifically the episode that excoriated Robert Kehoe’s efforts to defend the use of lead in gasoline, I thought it is important to highlight how similar efforts to waylay the direction of scientific research continue today.