Category: Science

Research has shown that bosses tend to crack
more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the
presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of
women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around
women, while laughing louder when in a group of men.

Read more here.

Here is the best short discussion I have seen to date.  You can follow intelligent rants on this issue on Autism Diva.

Type in your zip code and look at it here.  Here is my mother’s night sky.  Here’s mine at home, if only Fairfax did not have so much light pollution…

Thanks to Eric Rasmusen for the pointer.

If there is life on Titan, we might know soon.

BoingBoing serves up a menu of extremes.

Earlier I wrote, "We will soon need a new word for people who eat meat but not animals."  Most of the suggestions I got were awful (no, not your suggestion that was great).  Seriously, thanks to everyone who wrote.  Here are a few that I thought especially interesting.

From Brock Cusick, synthetarian.   I like it but I fear that synthetic still has negative connotation and we want a word that will be adopted by those who practice it.

From Chris Rasch, Cultivore, Cultivarian or Ameglians (scroll to Dish of the Day.)

From Travis Corcoran, Soylent-atarians.  Also good but a mite obscure.

In the end my choice is for VeggieTechie or VT, as in I’m a VT (also good for putting on restaurant menus).  Thus in the hopes of scoring a Google cascade:

Definition: VeggieTechie – a person who eats vegetables and synthetic meat but not meat harvested from an animal.

In the meantime AntiGravitas has another question, Is it cannibalism to eat vat-grown human meat?

Relative to seat belts, maybe not.  Read Levitt and Dubner on this question.

Laurie David, comedy developer turned environmental activist, writes in the Huffington Post:

Last week at the G8, President Bush restated his favorite global
warming canard: that mandatory curbs on fossil fuel pollution will “cripple the U.S. economy.”

WELL, WHAT DOES HE THINK GLOBAL WARMING WILL DO TO THE ECONOMY!?!?
 
I wish there was an even bolder bold on this computer to emphasize how
insane this logic is. Non-stop flooding, killer heat waves, energy and
food shortages: what will these do to the economy?

Actually Laurie, and PGL of Angry Bear who links to David, the best study of the issue indicates that global warming is most likely a net benefit to the US economy.  Carbon dioxide and greater temperature makes plants grow faster.  The author, Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn writes:

Climate change is likely to result in small net benefits for the United States over the next century. The primary sector that will benefit is agriculture. The large gains in this sector will more than compensate for damages expected in the coastal, energy, and water sectors, unless warming is unexpectedly severe. Forestry is also expected to enjoy small gains. Added together, the United States will likely enjoy small benefits of between $14 and $23 billion a year and will only suffer damages in the neighborhood of
$13 billion if warming reaches 5C over the next century. Recent predictions of warming by 2100 suggest temperature increases of between 1.5 and 4C, suggesting that impacts are likely to be beneficial in the US.

Speaking personally, I have undergone a greater shift in mean temperature by moving from Canada to the US than will occur in 100 years of global warming and I like it!  My fellow Canadians, still stuck in the frozen north, will be glad to know that in the future they too can have warmer temperatures without giving up their prized health care system.

For the developing world the effects of climate change are most likely negative but not so negative that further development – combined with some modest changes in first-world technology, such as greater use of nuclear power – is not the best solution.

Reading this made me sad:

Early detection [of a bomb] can backfire because of the grisly fact that human beings act as human shields.  "There is a trade-off between crowd size and crowd blocking," says Prof. Kaplan.  A large, dense crowd puts more people in harm’s way, but "the probability of being exposed to a bomb fragment declines exponentially with the size of the crowd."  As a crowd flees, there are fewer people near the bomber to absorb the fragments (as when a soldier falls on a grenade) and more people, unshielded, farther away.  Simple geometry shows that you can hit more people at a radius 20 feet from a bomber than you can five feet from him…The same effect occurs if people throw themselves to the ground  That minimizes each person’s exposed area, but also at the expense of decreasing human shielding.  For bombs with 500 or more fragments (in Israel, 1,000 is typical), "hit the deck" can raise rather than cut casualties.

That is from The Wall Street Journal, 8 July 2005, by Sharon Begley.

First, there has been no such ban.  While some aid agencies and NGOs have discouraged DDT spraying, the reality is less brutal than polemics sometimes suggest.  Tim Lambert has an overview of the evidence.  Here is a good follow-up post called Eritrea cuts malaria rates by switching away from DDT.

The best place to sell magazines could be in the gym locker room, according to a study which found that pheromones in male sweat makes men opt for a manly read.

Men under the influence of androstenol – a pheromone found in men’s underarm sweat – find men’s lifestyle magazines to be more attractive and are more likely to purchase them than those not exposed to the pheromone, suggests the research.

Here is the full story.

You yakkers will drown out ET:

Using cellphones on aeroplanes could drown out faint radio signals from space, astronomers are warning. They told a US agency considering lifting in-flight restrictions on cellphones that special devices should be installed on planes to limit damage to research if the regulations change…

Cellphone use on planes "could be a disaster for us", says Michael Davis, director of projects at California’s SETI Institute, which searches for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and former chair of the NAS committee. "We have incredibly sensitive radio telescopes – even a single cellphone on a single plane 100 miles away could cause pretty serious damage", he told New Scientist. It would exceed recommended "noise" levels by 10 times.

That is partly because cellphone signals from planes are not blocked by trees or buildings as they are on the ground, allowing them to travel straight into astronomers’ telescopes. "Putting cellphones in a plane is like building a cellphone tower 40,000 feet high," says Davis.

Here is the full story.  And we all know that ET, rather than tricking us into producing malevolent self-replicating spawn, will instead tell us how to solve the Riemann Hypothesis, right?

A woman’s genetic make-up accounts for at least a third of her ability to climax during sex, say researchers, and may even account for as much as 60%.

Here is one good summary.  Here is further discussion.