Category: Science

The air conditioner is one of them.  Count inadequate sleep and medications as well.  Michael Blowhard piles on.

Here’s a sentence you don’t read very often.

Radioactive scorpion venom a safe cancer cure.

and this was pretty cool:

Bacteria made to sprout conducting nanowires.

Hat tip to Boing Boing Blog.

1. Here is the story.

2. Your English is better than you think.  But on incorrect uses of "hopefully" I will not cede ground.

3. Some books do better in paperback.

4. A Delta list of best barbecue restaurants, based on reader input, via Bob Lawson.  The Virginia selections are weak plus they left off Lockhart, Texas altogether.  It is a better list for the South proper.

5. Jane Galt on deficits, and also on "unfair competition," do go send her some compliments in return…

6. Gorbachev on Bush and Putin.

Take The Big Here Quiz, via Jason Kottke.  I got about five right out of thirty-four.

Nominal variables matter, even when we are deciding how much to eat on our plates:

To test [the unit bias], the researchers left a bowl of M&M sweets in the
hallway of an apartment building with a sign that read “Eat Your Fill:
please use the spoon to serve yourself”. Some days they left a
tablespoon-sized scoop, other days they left a quartercup scoop that
was four times as big. Passers-by could obviously help themselves to as
little or as much as they wanted regardless of which spoon was
provided, but on average, 1.67 times more M&M’s were taken on the
days the big scoop was left compared with the tablespoon-sized scoop.

In
another experiment, the researchers found that, measured by weight,
significantly more pretzels were taken by passers-by when a
complimentary bowl of 60 whole pretzels was left in an apartment
building, compared with when a bowl of 120 half-pretzels was left. And
it was a similar story when either a bowl of 80 small Tootsie rolls (an
American snack bar) or a bowl of 20 large Tootsie rolls was left in an
office building.

In other words, throughout the study, people
took more food when the unit on offer was larger. “Consumption norms
promote both the tendency to complete eating a unit and the idea that a
single unit is the proper portion”, the researchers said.

Here is further information.  There is a lesson for macroeconomics in here, somewhere.

The technologies of mass agriculture, including genetic engineering, prevented the mass starvation of humanity in the last century.  But today most of humanity lives on just 12 plant species and some scientists are worried that a lack of variety may prove our undoing.  Some types of banana, for example, have already been wiped out or are threatened (Snopes is more cautious but verifies the basic facts). 

To protect our seed patrimony is the goal of the Svalbard International
Seed Vault.

The high-security vault, almost half the length of a football field, will
be carved into a mountain on a remote island above the Arctic Circle. If the
looming fences, motion detectors and steel air-lock doors are not disincentive
enough for anyone hoping to breach the facility’s concrete interior, the polar
bears roaming outside should help….

Its precious contents? Seeds  —  millions and millions of them  —  from
virtually every variety of food on the planet.

Thanks to Carl Close for the pointer.

In species where females are promiscuous, there is a big conflict of
interest between males and females over the amount of resources each
child should get. The father of one child probably won’t be the father
of the next (or even of others in the same litter), so his genes —
which he passes on to the child — should evolve to try to get more
resources for his offspring. Genes that come from the mother,
meanwhile, evolve to suppress this effect, so that all her offspring
aren’t fighting each other for resources. In species where females are
monogamous, in contrast, male and female interests are more or less the
same, since the same male is likely to sire many litters with the same
female.

In humans, mice and other mammals of our sort, the
activities of the placenta are — ready for this? — largely controlled
by the father’s genes. Now consider what happens when certain close
species try to mate. Female deer mice are much more promiscuous than
female oldfield mice, so a male deer mouse’s genes are predicted to
fight for resources much more than a male oldfield mouse’s genes would.
Consistent with this, when a male deer mouse mates with a female
oldfield mouse, both placenta and fetus become huge, and the mother
often dies. Any fetus that manages to be born is one third bigger than
babies from either species usually are. When the oldfield mouse is the
father, on the other hand, the pregnancy is much less risky for the
mother — but the baby is a runt.

…female chimpanzees are much, much more promiscuous than human females.
So, assuming you could get fertilization, here’s my prediction: if the
chimpanzee were the father, the pregnancy would be extremely dangerous
for the mother. Probably, few pregnancies could be carried to term. Any
children that did result would be huge. In contrast, if the human were
the father, the children would be small, and both mother and child
would be more likely to survive.

Tyler, Alex, Alex’s wife Monique, Bryan (Caplan), Ilia (Rainer) and I had a fun conversation on Thursday.

A standard story says that women like cads for short term relationships, to get good sex (i.e., genes), and dads for long term relationships, to get security and comfort (i.e., resources to raise kids).  Of course some men are good in both roles, but most men are thought to be better at one role than the other.

Woman always want both sex and security, but they seem to prefer "bad  boy" cads more when they are young, and dads more when they are older.  Why?  We were looking less for proximate psychological causes and more for functional explanations.  We came up with these four theories:

1.  Young women must practice having relationships, in part to discover the distribution of guys out there and their own ability to attract guys.  This requires short term relationships.  But it is not clear why these should be more with cads rather than dad candidates.  And this would predict young women avoid sex when practicing, to avoid having kids.  This theory applies to better to young teens than to young women.

2.  Instead of having all her kids with a dad, many women may have enough negotiating power to get a dad to support her even if she has one kid with a cad.   Dads object less to supporting a cad kid created before they met, as a cad kid created during their relationship suggests that it won’t be the last.  A cad kid early in life can be written off to the "foolishness of youth," and she can credibly claim that she didn’t intend for this to be a cad kid; she had hoped the cad would be a dad.

3.  Girls more than women expect parents to help with their mistakes.  A young woman expects a cad kid to be cared for not by a dad but by her parents and extended family.  Since parents die eventually, older women are less likely to have such support available.  This theory predicts that women without living parents would be less attracted to cads, all else equal.

4.  Young people have stronger incentives to signal than older people, since they are still forming long term attachments, and want to attract the best partners.  Young women compete to attract cads in order to signal their attractiveness and social power, and having sex with cads helps to attract cads.   Women compete more for cads than for dads because cad quality is easier to see in young men – it can take many years to reveal who are the best resource providers.  This theory predicts young women have less interest in private unobserved relationships with cads.

The truth is probably a mixture of these theories.   But some are probably more important that others.

TC: Here are related posts on the topic.

"Up until now, people thought that [shyness] was mostly related to
avoidance of social situations," says co-author and child psychiatrist
Monique Ernst. "Here we showed that shy children have increased
activity in the reward system of the brain as well."

Why this
would be the case is still not clear. "One interpretation is that
extremely shy children have an increased sensitivity to many types of
stimuli–both frightening and rewarding," says Guyer. There are other
possibilities as well, says Mauricio Delgado, a psychologist at Rutgers
University in Newark, New Jersey. For example, increased activity in
the striatum may help shy children cope with the anxiety of stressful
situations, although not enough so to help them overcome their shyness.

…Because shy children
appear to be more sensitive to winning and losing, they may experience
emotions more strongly than others, putting them at risk for emotional
disorders such as anxiety and depression. On the flip side, shy
children may experience positive emotions such as success very
strongly, helping them succeed…

OK, that is from scans of only 32 people, 13 of them shy.  But that is actually more than usual for such a study.  Here is the link.  Here is Jonathan Rauch’s famous piece on being an introvert, well worth reading. 

Chris Masse sends me further neuro links, here and here.  Here is a recent neuro study on how women react to erotic images.

My colleague Bryan Caplan does a great Magneto impersonation, "You are a god among insects.  Never let anyone tell you different,"  is one of his favorite lines.  You figure it out.

In anycase, Bryan and others may enjoy this cool article on implanting tiny magnets under your skin thereby creating the ability to sense electomagnetic fields. 

He sliced open my finger with a
standard scalpel, inserted a tool to make a gap for the magnet, and tried to
insert the magnet in one nonstop motion. The insertion didn’t work, and he
widened the cut and tried again. This time it worked, and he closed the cut with
a single suture. The suture was the most painful step — an indicator that the
cold "anesthetic" had worn off. The process took less than 10 minutes. My finger
was slightly swollen and sported a blue, knotted plastic thread.

When we were done we sat in Haworth’s living room. He brought out a magnet
and handed it to me. I brought it near my finger and felt the magnet move for
the first time up against the raw inside of my finger. I startled visibly, and
Haworth grinned. "Welcome to your new sense," he said.

Here is part one in the Ubermensch series.

Hat tip to Kottke.

The image on the left (click to expand) from June of 2002 shows Porta Farm in Zimbabwe, a settlement of 6,000 to 10,000 people.  The image on the right is the same area today.  Does it help to explain if I say that the residents were opponents of Mugabe’s regime?

The images are from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Kottke has further links.  Note, once again, that David Brin was correct.