Three articles for the second month of 2010. Arguably the first one isn’t really a scientific article as it’s about whether or not the so-called connoisseurs of fine wine actually can objectively evaluate the quality of different varieties of wine. The second article talks about the link between physical motion and happiness in humans and the last one covers a extremely cool way of modeling a transit network for cities.

The first article appeared in SmartMoney and draws information from a couple of different sources to show that even wine experts can have a tough time differentiating one wine from another. It cites a recent court case in France in which twelve wine producers were convicted of fraud for selling millions of gallons of fake Pinot Noir to American distributors over several years. What makes this case so surprising is that the fraud was not uncovered by any customer complaints but because French government officials noticed a discrepancy between the amount of Pinot Noir being exported and the amount actually produced in the region.

The article also cites an experiment performed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University. They told a group of twenty volunteers that they would be sampling a range of wines priced at $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90 per bottle and found that the volunteers consistently ranked the higher priced wine as being better. However the researchers were lying to the volunteers so that the same wine was presented twice at different prices. The volunteers couldn’t tell the difference and ranked the same wine higher when it was labeled with a higher price than when it was labeled with a lower price. The same result was obtained even when the experiment was performed on members of the Stanford Wine Club who would be expected to be more discerning connoisseurs of the beverage.

Now, I’m generally a teetotaler so I don’t pretend to know much about wines but this finding confirms some of the suspicions I’ve always had that much of the mystique around wine is just showmanship and wishful thinking. I don’t doubt that there are differences in tastes between various wines, but are the differences large enough to merit sky high prices? I rather doubt it.

The next article is from Miller-McCune and it cites an experiment to show how simple upward movements can lead to positive emotions. Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Katinka Dijkstra of Erasmus University, both from the Netherlands, asked subjects to talk about their memories while moving marbles. Some were instructed to make upward movements with the marbles while others were instructed to make downward movements. The researchers found that the subjects were able to recall positive memories more quickly when making upward movements and negative memories more quickly when making downward movements.

The article also links this to other research which demonstrate that usage of Botox, which fights aging by removing wrinkles at the cost of reducing the range of facial muscle movement, could lead to difficulty in processing the emotions links to the required facial movement. For example, if a Botox user finds it difficult to smile, it could lead to reduced happiness because of the strong link between the emotion and the facial expression. All this is part of the growing acceptance of a concept called embodied cognition, the notion that emotions are as much a part of the physical body and its movements, as the mind.

The last article appeared in MSNBC and covers a cool experiment led by Atsushi Tero from Hokkaido University in Japan. His team used a species of slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, a fungus-like, single-celled animal that can grow in a network of linked veins, to see how it would develop on a map built to simulate the geographic features of Tokyo and its surrounding areas. To do this, they placed oat flakes in various areas that were supposed to correspond with high-population cities around Tokyo and used areas of bright light, which the slime mould avoids, to simulate mountains and other geologically difficult areas.

What they found was that the slime mould developed in a way that closely approximates the real-world transport networks that human designers ended up building for Tokyo. This is pretty amazing when you consider that the mould doesn’t have a central organizing mind that is capable of looking at the entire network and deciding where to grow and where not to. Instead, it used an emergent approach, reinforcing the links that worked well to get to food and eliminating redundant ones. In some cases, the solution the slime mould worked out was more efficient than the actual network. Of course, it’s one thing to retroactively recreate an existing network and another to use this technique to create a future network. The question is who will dare to put slime mould in charge of a multi-billion infrastructure project?