Category: Science

The vast majority of us–even those who don’t take the longevity test discussed in the last post–are going to be around for the next four years.

How do we want to spend them?

Being very happy, of course!

So how do we do that?

In comes this year’s annual Pew Research Center’s happiness study, which surveys the population to find out who describes themselves as being "very happy," "pretty happy," or "not too happy" on most days.

It turns out that, overall, the population is 34% very happy, 50% pretty happy, and 15% not too happy (with 1% saying they couldn’t tell).

That’s good news in itself, but where the story gets interesting is looking at which groups within the populace are the most happy.

For example, Republicans are more happy than Democrats. (Big surprise, right?) But this isn’t just because there is a Republican administration right now. Republicans have had a happiness gap over Democrats ever since the annual survey was started back in 1972.

Conservatives (of either party) are happier than liberals (of either party).

People who go to church weekly are happier than people who don’t.

Married people are happier than single people.

People who live in the southern part of the United States are happier than those who live in the northern part.

And people also get happier as household income rises.

There are things that one can’t control that have bearings on reported happiness (health, age, sex, race, etc.), but within what one can control, it seems that the way to best fit the profile of the "very happy" people would be to adapt one’s lifestyle so that you become a married Southern conservative Republican church-goer who has done what is needed to ensure a good household income.

Of course, merely adapting your lifestyle to fit this profile may not make you happy. It may be that people who are natively happy are attracted to these things, rather than these things making people happy.

Or (more likely) it may be some of both. (For example, marriage might be a cause of happiness, while native unhappiness might be a cause of voting for a party that focuses heavily on grievances).

Just food for thought as you spend your next four years.

GET THE STORY.

No, this isn’t about a presidential election. It’s about something else: Longevity. As you may know, there are people who think that if we can live just a few years longer then developments in medicine and nanotechnology will enable us to live much, much longer than we do today.

But what are the odds that we’ll live through the gap? In fact, what are the odds that we’ll make it through just the next four years?

I’ve known for a while that it would be possible to go consult actuarial tables–the kind that insurance companies use–to get estimates of this kind of thing, but I’ve never done that.

Now someone has come up with a simple test in which you get points based on various factors, and the lower the number of points you get, the lower the chance of you dying in the next four years.

For example, being a man gets you two points right off the bat. Having diabetes gets you one point. Having cancer gets you two points. If you’re sixty to sixty four years of age you get one point (more points with more age). And so on.

The test has some limitations. It really isn’t designed for populations undre fifty years of age, for example, and the population that the study is based on may not be fully representative. The authors of the relevant paper–which appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association–also warn that you shouldn’t try to self-diagnose with this thing because there may be mitigating factors in your case that a doctor could point out to you.

Of course, by announcing the existence of this test publicly, many people will ignore this and do it anyway.

So,

GET THE STORY

and

TAKE THE TEST (IF YOU DARE).

I read an interesting article about a theory that holds that when we learn things our brains subconsciously replay these events in reverse order as part of assimilating the new information.

They’ve done studies that have shown that the hippocampus in mice brains does this when the mice are being taught something–like how to run a maze–and the mouse hippocampus apparently works similarly to the human hippocampus, so they suspect the same thing is going on in us.

If I understand it correctly, the theory is that the final moves of a sequence are often the most important for getting a reward (or avoiding a punishment) and so our brains place the most emphasis on those, rather than earlier moves we may do before we get to crunch time.

As a result, our brains focus first on the moves we must perform last.

The article doesn’t mention this, but this may explain why the Pimsleur Method works for learning languages.

Paul Pimsleur discovered that his language students learned better if they memorized words syllable by syllable–backwards.

For example, the Hebrew word for "four" is arba. The way you’d memorize that via Pimsleur is you’d have the syllable –ba repeated for you several times, followed by the syllable ar- repeated for you. Then you’d have the whole arba repeated.

I’ve found in my own language study that doing this seems to help. If I memorize words from the front to the back, I often can’t remember how the word is supposed to end. But if I memorize the word from the back to the front, I don’t have as much trouble.

Like I’m doing with that nice Croatian couple in my Friday night square dance group, whom I’m forcing to teach me bits of Croatian. The Croatian term for "Goodbye," for example is (phonetic spelling only; I’m doing this all aurally) dov-ih-jain-ya. When they taught me that, I locked on to the last syllable, -ya, and made sure I had it firmly fixed in mind. I was then able to retain this word not just for the rest of the night (so that I could surprise them with it when they left) but also retain it through to the next week and on to now.

Relatedly, I’ve also noticed that good square dance teachers make very sure, when they’re teaching a move, to make clear up front where you’re going to end the move. If students don’t have a clear idea of that and try to do just the sequence of steps and arm movements then they frequently end up out of place. So special emphasis needs to be placed on the end of the move in order for students to do it successfully.

(In fact, just last night in round dace class I had a problem because the instructors failed to communicate specifically where a move ends and it was messing me up until I asked them to clarify the ending.)

The story as a whole is quite interesting, so be sure to

GET THE STORY.

No this isn’t about Colin Wilson’s Lovecraftian novel The Mind Parasites. It’s about something else.

Suppose that there was a parasite that needed to get into the gut of a cat in order to complete its reproductive cycle.

How can this parasite get into the guts of cats?

Well, a good way would be by first infecting things that cats like to eat–like rats.

But cats don’t like to eat dead mice. They like to eat living ones.

So, if you’re the parasite, you want to do whatever you can to make sure that your mouse gets eaten before it dies a natural death and starts decaying.

The problem is that rats don’t like to be eaten by cats. In fact, they have a panic/avoidance reaction to cats. So strong is this reaction that the scent of cat urine produces a panic reaction (which human scientists use when they need to induce fear in rats) and they flee places cats have marked with cat urine.

If you’re the parasite, that’s no good for you. The rats have an inbuilt cat-avoidance mechanism.

But maybe you can disable it.

Let’s suppose that you form cysts in the rat’s body, including in its brain. Maybe you can turn off its panic/avoidance mechanism.

If so, then your rat will stop being afraid of places that cats have marked and will spend more time in places where cats hang out, thus increasing the chances that cats will eat them.

In fact, maybe you can get the rat to become attracted to the smell of cat urine, causing him to have a suicidal attraction to cats.

If so, good for you.

Now suppose also that you–this parasite–happen to also infect HALF of the human population.

And suppose that there is evidence linking you to schizophrenia in humans.

Is there such a parasite?

There is. It’s called toxoplasma gondii.

GET THE STORY.

MORE HERE.

Incidentally, the first story mentions several other behavior-altering parasites as well. It does not, however, mention one that I’m curious to know about.

A number of years ago I saw a documentary that talked about a parasite that infects snails and causes them to get eaten by birds. This parasite does two things: It makes the snail have a compulsion to crawl up onto the tops of leaves, so birds can see them, and it makes the snail pulse in weird colors–again to attract the bird’s attention.

If anybody knows the name of that parasite, please let me know.

Not that I have any snails I want to get rid of. It’s just hate not being able to remember the name of something so eerie.

A big CHT to the reader who e-mailed the following story.

It turns out that, after giving birth, mothers continue to have cells from their children in their bodies.

This was a shock to scientists, who figgered that the mother’s immune system would quickly (within hours) pick off any of the baby’s cells since they have a different genetic profile than the mother’s.

But it turns out that’s not the case. The cells appear to stay in her for decades (40-50 years).

And with each new baby that a mother has, she gets new cells from it that stay in her system and float around her bloodstream.

What are they doing in there?

There are three hypotheses, any of which (or some combination of which) could be true.

The "Bystander Hypothesis" holds that they aren’t really doing anything. They’re just bystanders.

The "Bad Hypothesis" holds that they may do damage to the mother, causing autoimmune diseases in some cases.

And the "Good Hypothesis" holds that they actually help the mother out, acting as a second (or third or forth or twelfth) repair system in the mother’s body.

It isn’t certain yet which hypothesis is true, but evidence for the Bad Hypothesis appears small and evidence for the Good Hypothesis is rapidly mounting.

For example: In the case of a woman who had contracted hepatitis it was found that cells from her prior children clustered around her liver in vast quantities and seemed to be functioning like normal liver cells, helping her out.

It may be that this is a form of natural embryonic stem cell therapy, with the baby’s cells morphing into whatever kind of cells mom needs.

Sweet!

Also, for mothers who have lost children to miscarriage (or abortion) there is also the fact that these babies’ cells stay in you as well and may be helping you out, decades after the fact.

Research is still being done, but one scientist (quoted in the audio story linked below) thinks that we’ll have the answer within five years.

GET THE STORY!

NOTE: Be sure to listen to the audio story and don’t just read the text one. The audio one contains a bunch more info.

‘NUTHER NOTE: The title of this post is not to be construed as dissing other research showing that pregnancy is good for you.

I am not a scientist. I don’t even play one on TV.

I am an artist.

I did have the interesting job of illustrating an archeological text once, though, and I worked for several years designing exhibits for a couple of historical museums, where I picked up a smattering of Earth Science (I know that Satan could not have made fossils, because fossils are cool). I really enjoyed my brief stint in scientific illustration and still have great fondness for the natural sciences.

For this reason,  irresponsible pseudo-scientific claptrap disguised as news reporting still rankles me, and I had to comment on THIS SENSATIONAL ARTICLE from FOX News (no less).

Setting the intellectual tone, we have the hysterical headline – "Unhealthy Earth: Global Warming Takes Toll".

The problem with this alarmist statement is in the assumption that if conditions on Earth are changing, that must be a sign that the planet is sick.

Listen, if that is the case, then the whole history of Earth is just one dread disease after another. If climate change = an unhealthy Earth, then the Earth has never been healthy.

Global temperature fluctuations are the norm. The only constant in geologic history is change. This change has been sometimes sudden and violent, sometimes gradual, but the one thing we can never reasonably expect is that the Earth should just stay the same. Environmental stasis is a utopian myth, and a uniquely stupid and dangerous one. Species have been going extinct since there have been species. Glaciers form. Glaciers melt. During the little ice age we have been in, glaciers have been forming. If the mean global temperature swings back upward, they will melt, as sure as God made little green apples. This can be taken as a sign of nothing except business as usual.

From a scientific perspective, all the hand-wringing over melting glaciers amounts to a misplaced and even neurotic nostalgia.

The article goes on to make temperate scientific observations like this;

"Some scientists say the receding glaciers, like canaries in a coal mine, are providing an early warning system for the Earth. They say human-caused global warming is making the sea level rise and can spawn floods — called glacier outbursts — brought on by glacial melting. "

Alright… first of all, any time you see an assertion that begins with "Some scientists say…" you need to remember, once you get to the end of the statement, to tack on the qualifier "and some don’t" (this is also true of the phrase "Many modern theologians think…", or "most modern scholars agree", or other such vaguely authoritative-sounding set-ups).

Secondly, this paragraph, by using the phrase "human-caused global warming" leaps from science to sheer propaganda. There is wide scientific debate on the extent to which human activity contributes to global warming, if it does to any measurable degree at all. It may be in fashion to blame SUVs or spray deodorant, but serious scientists are looking to volcanic activity, variances in the energy output of the sun, and a myriad of other natural causes as the prime sources of climate change, as has been the case throughout history. Can we nudge the atmosphere a little one way or another? Maybe, but the jury is still out. The assertion that human activity is behind climate change is a bald political statement, not a scientific one.

Not surprisingly, later in the piece we read;

"Some advocates say industry is largely responsible for global warming, and that large corporations should be held to their promises."

In case we doubt this assertion, it is backed up with weighty statements from Dan Becker, of the highly scientific and politically neutral Sierra Club. Nowhere in the piece do we hear from a scientist who might attribute global warming to natural causes, or who might see it as no cause for hysteria. Never do we even see the possibility that such a scientific viewpoint even exists.

I have come to expect a bit more from Fox News. Who wrote this screed? It sounds like something from a college news rag.

Should we use the Earth’s resources responsibly? Should we minimize pollution? Reduce waste? Be good stewards? Of course! But to help us do that we need good, reliable information, not junk science.

GET THE JUNKY STORY.

Y’know those southwestern paperweights that have scorpions encased in clear acrylic?

I used to have one of those when I was a boy.

It was cool, but creepy, having that scorpion there under the plastic–looking like it was poised to strike.

I’ll probably buy one again next time I run across one–probably at a place that sells knick-knacks in the desert southwest.

But I’ll make sure not to break it open.

Why?

You may have a LIVE scorpion on your hands.

Y’see: There were these paleontologiests in Utah (a rich site of dinosaur fossils) who were encasing a dinosaur fossil in plaster, and apparently they also encased a live scorpion in the plaster.

Flash forward fifteen months and they’re taking the plaster off the dinosaur fossil (with jackhammers), and out of one of the cracks wriggled the trapped scorpion.

It had been in there for over a year without food (insects), water, or air. (Well, maybe a little air was trapped in or seeped through the plaster.)

Turns out that scorpions can do this kind of thing. EXCERPT:

Scorpions, which eat insects, are capable of surviving for months without feeding or moving in a sleep period known as diapause, said Richard Baumann, a Brigham Young University zoologist.

Interestingly, a form of diapause also occurs in mammals, though only at the embryonic stage.

In any event, the scorpion thing is creepy, okay?

That’s a picture of the little guy who survived–at the bottom of a bucket after he was freed from the plaster.

He was later set free to go live out the remainder of his interrupted scorpion life in the wild.

Now, maybe the odds are low of getting and breaking an acrylic paperweight with a live scorpion in it.

But I’m not taking any chances.

GET THE STORY.

Incidentally, this puts a WHOLE new light on those SCORPION SUCKERS. Imagine what could happen while you’re licking one of THOSE!

Earlier I discussed the money tracking service of WheresGeorge.Com. It was meant as a lark by a bunch of friends, but now it’s being put to a serious purpose.

How’s that?

Well, dollar bills don’t just walk around the countryside.

Not unless it’s the walking money from the planet Ventura in the Legion of Super-Heroes, I mean.

Here on Earth, dollar bills go places because they are carried by people.

That means that if you can track the money, you can–kinda, sorta–track the people. The motions of money tell you something about the motions of people.

Which is why the serial numbers of bills can be used to catch criminals.

How else might such a "follow the money" approach be used?

How could it be put into the service of SCIENCE?

Well, how about this: If you understand more about the casual, random connections that people make as they move around then it could tell you something about things that people carry around with them and exchange with other people . . . like dollar bills . . . or germs.

And that is what some scientists are doing.

They’re using the Where’s George money tracking system to model human travel and interactions as a way of producing better models of DISEASE PROPAGATION.

GET THE STORY.

And, of course, if we have better models of disease propagation then we can better predict what diseases will do and come up with better strategies for fighting them.

YEE-HAW!

Go! Humans!

Fight! Those! Germs!

(Mr. Monk will be pleased.)

(Agent Mulder may not be.)

NOT!

Yes, yes. I know that you read headlines like

VATICAN SLAMS INTELLIGENT DESIGN

from know-nothing MSM sources.

The basis of these stories is a recent piece that appeared in L’Osservatore Romano that did slam intelligent design.

But there’s a problem.

L’Osservatore Romano is not Acta Apostolica Sedis. The latter, as its Latin name indicates, is a chronicle of the Acts of the Apostolic See. L’Osservatore Romano does not have the same status, nor do articles it prints.

John Allen clarifies:

One question that a number of American media outlets asked me this week: Is the L’Osservatore article an official Vatican statement?

The quick answer is "no," but as always with quick answers, things are a bit more complicated. The article was not issued by a Vatican dicastery or approved by the pope, and while L’Osservatore is informally known as the "Vatican newspaper," technically only the items in the "Nostre Informazioni" box amount to official Vatican releases. Yet the contents of the paper reflect attitudes and judgments at high levels, and in that sense provide a window onto what at least some Vatican officials are thinking [SOURCE].

The real story here is that churchmen are split on the subject of evolution. Some, such as Cardinal Schonborn, make the point that the Christian faith is incompatible with purely naturalistic conceptions of evolution. Others, like the author of the piece in L’Osservatore Romano, at least appear more open to purely naturalistic conceptions.

How this all shakes out we will have to wait and see. I suspect that PART of the dispute between the parties may turn out to be semantic. (But only part.)

However that may be, in neither case can such reports be accurately represented as "Rome’s" or "the Vatican’s" or "the Catholic Church’s" position on this matter.

NONE of them are official.

So the headlines you saw screaming "Church Opposes Evolution" after Schonborn’s essay in the NYT came out were inaccurate, and the new ones screaming "Church Opposes Intelligent Design" after the L’Osservatore Romano piece are inaccurate.

The reason for the inaccuracy, of course, is obvious.

The people writing the headlines are too dangerously unqualified to keep their jobs.

The first space probe to visit the planet Yuggoth (a.k.a. "Pluto") has just blasted off from Cape Canaveral.

GET THE STORY.

The planet will not arrive until 2015, so we have at least nine years of safety before the Yuggoth-spawn, the dreaded "Mi-Go," are contacted by the space ship, risking an interplanetary and even interstellar incident that may threaten the sanity and survival of the human race!

Here is what NASA will find when its optimistically named "New Horizons" mission reaches Pluto:

There are mighty cities on Yuggoth – great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad – yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges – things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids – ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.

But remember – that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters.

The Yuggoth spawn may already be aware of the New Horizons mission, for they may have directed their thought-currents toward Earth to induce our scientists to mount the mission in the first place, in hopes of making contact with mankind–on their own turf and on their own terms!

Indeed, it was through such a directed thought experiment that they first caused our scientists to discover their sinister planet!

Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system – beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as "Yuggoth" in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers become sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so.

It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system – unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us and cause it to be discovered – or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.

Indeed, their thought-currents may have also induced H. P. Lovecraft to write his story "The Whisperer In Darkness," from which the above quotes are taken–for he was working on the story at the time that Pluto was discovered and he immediately realized it was the dark Yuggoth that had inspired his literary creation:

Those wild [Vermont] hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race – as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth – and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants.

GET THE STORY.

What new policy do the Yuggoth spawn have in store for mankind?

We’ll find out in 2015!