I haven’t been as up to date as I should this month, but nonetheless I have three articles. The first and the most exciting one is the announcement by NASA confirming the presence of water on Mars. Now, we’ve had indirect evidence of water for a while now, but this is the first time that a robot, in this case the Phoenix, has actually tasted it by melting a piece of ice. The next step will be to bring it to even higher temperatures to try to find any traces of carbon-based compounds.

The Economist presents an overview of the phenomenon known as the endowment effect. This refers to the tendency of humans to value things more when they actually possess it themselves as opposed to when they are offered an abstract choice between two items. For example, when experiment subjects are asked whether they value a chocolate bar or a coffee mug more, they might value both equally, but when someone is actually given one of the objects and is then asked to trade it away, he or she ends up valuing it more. This effect is especially interesting to economists because it means that humans do not value things consistently and rationally.

According to a study conducted by the Stanford University, it is actually possible to observe this effect in the brain and the pattern and location of the effect suggests that it works by enhancing the salience of possible loss. Other researchers have tried to overcome the effect by teaching chimpanzees to trade and discovered that the strength of the effect in them depends on the salience of the object to the chimpanzees’ evolutionary roots, so that toys have no effect but food has a strong one. As The Economist notes, unerstanding this effect would have important influences on the study of economics. Bonus for quoting Gail Wynand of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead in opening the article.

Finally a story in the New York Times (registration required) deals with a scientist who uses hookworms to seek a cure for allergies. As someone who occasionally struggles with bouts of skin allergy, I know that it’s an autoimmune response to stimulation due to an overly excitable immune system that unnecessarily sends antibodies to attack non-existent threats. David Pritchard at the University of Nottingham noticed while doing field work in Papua New Guinea that the natives who were infected with hookworms did not seem to suffer as much from allergies. He theorizes that since the immune system naturally acts to expel parasites such as the hookworms, the hookworms might have evolved a way to switch off or turn down the immune systems of its hosts in order to keep from being destroyed.

After experimenting on himself, Dr. Pritchard secured approval to infect 15 test subjects with allergies with 10 hookworms each, with another 15 as a control group. He found that those with the hookworms produced lower levels of the chemicals associated with inflammatory responses than those in the control group and reported little discomfort despite being hosts to the worms. So far, this treatment isn’t officially sanctioned but already some of those who seek a respite from their allergies are trying it themselves.