Three articles this month and all of them have something to do with biology. The first one is about how some chimpanzees in Africa have learned to recognize and disable traps laid by humans. The second is a statistical analysis of divorce rates sorted according to occupation. The last one is less of a formal article and more of a blog post. It’s about the unexpected benefits of being exposed to, well, human semen, of all things.
The chimpanzee article is from the BBC and talks about a groups of chimpanzees in the rainforests of Guinea who appear to have learned how to identify traps laid by human hunters and safely disable them without getting hurt in the process. They appear to be aware of how the different components of a snare trap come together and know which parts are safe to touch and which parts are dangerous. This has explained the observation that chimpanzees in that area rarely get injured by traps.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (September ’10) →
Four articles this month and it’s a pretty mixed bag. The most controversial article of the bunch is one that links autism with wealth, but the one drawing a link between human intelligence and disease rates in different countries comes a close second. Then, there’s the highly speculative paper that offers a new model of the universe that abandons the familiar Big Bang. Finally, just for fun, there’s one article talking about a cheap and effective way of deterring thieves from stealing your car.
Autism, disease of the rich?
The precise causes of autism is as yet unclear and it doesn’t help matters that there’s a major anti-intellectual movement that attempts to link the disease to vaccination. This post on Neuroskeptic points out that autism appears to be more common in rich countries than poor ones, which is odd, but might be explained by the fact that many cases of autism in poor countries might simply be undiagnosed. A new paper however attempts to correct for this ascertainment bias and it discovered that not only were incidences of autism more common in richer countries, they were also more common among richer people in rich countries, independent of ethnicity.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Jul ’10) →
I’m not sure why Marginal Revolution only just now linked to a Guardian article from 2003, but it’s still a seriously good read. The dolphin in the article was trained to help keep her pool clean by bringing any waste paper that falls into her pool to the keepers for a reward. Over time, one of the dolphins learned to trick the humans. Instead of immediately giving a big piece of litter to her keepers, she would hide it and only tear off small pieces to give to a keeper each time one passed, thereby earning more fish as a reward.
What’s even more impressive is that since she has also been trained to bring gulls (I’m not sure if they’re dead or alive at this point) that fly into her pool to the humans in return for a reward, she learned to keep some of the fish that she’d been given. Once the humans went away, she used the extra fish as bait to lure gulls to fly into her pool to catch them so that the humans would give her more fish for the gull. The rest of the article is filled with similarly fascinating anecdotes.
Science-fiction of course has long been full of stories about dolphins being intelligent, the entire plot of the fourth Star Trek film being the most obvious example. But this article lead me to thinking back to opinions of people like Australian SF author Greg Egan, who believes that our current treatment of some animals amount to human rights violations that will one day be recognized as a historically shameful era of our species.
It’s official because a report from the Ohio State University has concluded from a study of 219 US graduates and undergraduates that students who use Facebook had a significantly lower grade point average than those who did not.
FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.
The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.
Of course, this is a ridiculous assertion because it basically boils down to the same thing: students are easily distracted from studying. If it weren’t for Facebook, the students would probably be playing video games, or partying or doing something else.
Or check out this alternative explanation from Chris Matyszczyk:
But I have a suspicious and entirely unscientific feeling that all this research may tell us so far is that bookwormy, people-uncomfortable types do well in school tests.
So nothing’s changed, right?
The unexamined life is a life not worth living