Plants, Animals, and Dolomite: Natural Investigations

Dolomite involved in archaeological prank. A site originally thought to be a lost city near the Greek island of Zakynthos turned out to be a weird quirk of geology. Julian Andrews from University of East Anglia has found that the paved floors, courtyards, and colonnades observed underwater were naturally occurring formations and not evidence of a vanished civilization.

"Golden Rice" sucks, but don't blame environmental activists. This genetically modified food was supposed to be a big deal back in the year 2000, and has been described as a "promising idea backed by good intentions." Glenn Stone, of Washington University in St. Louis, has published an article discussing the current state of Golden Rice efforts, and it doesn't seem as promising in its current state — but the shortcomings are not the fault of anti-GMO activists.

Do shy moms make better moms? If those moms are wild boars, and there is plenty of food available, then the answer is yes. Finally, a team from the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at the Vienna University of Veterinary Medicine has answered the boar-related questions that we've all been asking about motherhood, food availability, and porcine aggression. Detailed, multi-year work involving personality indices and variable feeding regimes has definitively concluded that the answer is: "It depends."

The wonders of nature, explained by slap-wrap bracelets. The exploding seed pods of popping cress, a common garden weed, are able to function because of unique cell wall geometry that is present in its seed pods. Derek Moulton, of the University of Oxford, explains that it's the same geometric forces that are at work in toy slap bracelets. Previously, scientists thought that the explosive shatter of popping cress was due to the differential contraction of the inner and outer layers of the seed pod as it dried; they were wrong.

Big Business, Small Business, and Not-For-Profit Business Research

Exciting developments from the business world. Here's some of the latest research:

Protip for banks: Don’t over-invest in mortgages. Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay at University of Warwick has done some research into Chicago during the great depression; the city had the highest urban bank failure rate at the time. Chicago’s real-estate boom led to a banking sector bust, although I’m sure that couldn’t possibly happen again.

Please don’t wait for the next available register. Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management has found that cashiers take longer to ring up customers when they’re all queued up in the same giant line, while they work faster when each cashier is responsible for their own line of customers. Note the part where they admit that “faster” does not equal “better service.”

“Affordability” is in the eye of the beholder (or voucher holder). Researchers from researchers from Florida Atlantic University, the University of Texas, Arlington, and the University of Utah have found that “affordable housing” is not very affordable when you add in the cost of getting to your job.

You don’t have to be crazy to be an executive at a nonprofit organization, but it helps. NC State University research has found that nowhere near as many of them retire “voluntarily” as had been previously assumed. Be sure to read the quote from the guy saying that the only people who take executive roles are the ones who are too naïve to understand what a disaster it’s going to be.

Natural disaster? Entrepreneurs to the rescue! Trenton Williams of Syracuse University has found that entrepreneurship “serves as a vehicle for generating positive social outcomes.” In some situations, survivors of natural disasters can alleviate suffering and generate transformational change for residences experiencing chronic poverty by creating their own businesses.

The "Moving Target Defense" (MTD) system, as envisioned by Kansas State University's Scott DeLoach and Xinming Ou, has a computer network automatically change its configurations and settings to deter hackers. It sounds like a great idea, and good for security, until you think about the types of computer networks that will end up using it:

Our robot overlords.

 Seriously, haven't we done enough already to make things easy for the machines that will one day rise up to enslave us? This is like those movies where the hero is all, "WHY DIDN'T YOU BUILD AN OFF SWITCH FOR YOUR DOOMSDAY DEVICE?!"

It's all fun and games, and safely in the realm of the theoretical, until someone actually designs a working model. The problem is that KSU got a million-dollar grant to spend the next five years figuring out how to make it work. I'm sure this will end well.

Some Jobs More than Others

Let's face facts: Robots are the future. For real this time. Beyond automated assembly lines, we are going to see robots in more and more human-facing roles (and people are looking especially closely at Japan on this one, since they have an older population that vastly outnumbers the working-age population, and someonething is going to have to care for them.)

So, the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study on how effective these robots are going to be in interacting with people. Sounds reasonable. After all, there's no point in blowing an entire R&D budget on Robot Guidance Counselors (that's robots doing the job of guidance counselors, not guidance counselors for robots, by the way) when it turns out that people would rather get life advice from a rolled-up newspaper.

It turns out that robots may have a future in the nursing industry. Grief counselors, not so much. Interestingly enough, subjects responded differently to the exact same robot contact depending on what they thought was happening. People who thought that the robot was cleaning their arm responded much more favorably than people who thought that the robot was trying to "comfort" them.

What does this mean for the sex robots of the future? too early to tell, but there may still be hope for them in certain specialized fetish niches.

(And I demand some recognition for the fact that I made it all the way through this post without changing their "Touched by a Robot" press release title into a "Touched by an Angel" joke!)

Forced Out?

A study from the University of Haifa has asked whether early retirement is as optional as it appears. According to their data, most people take early retirement options because of workplace pressure. However, their data set was taken from men who had taken early retirement from government companies that became privatized, which makes me wonder how applicable it is across the entire workforce.

I'm not saying government employees are lazy and terrible at their jobs (because plenty of other people are saying it), I'm saying that I can see where a profit-motivated corporation would look to trim its workforce as much as possible. That's probably the source of the pressure cited in the study. Is this kind of thing really happening in companies that aren't making a dramatic shift in managment and objectives?

The ideal put forth by Sigal Naim, who carried out the study, is that "everyone would be able to continue working based on his or her abilities and desires." He goes on to suggest a removal of mandatory retirement ages. That's all well and good in theory, but what happens in reality, when elderly workers who are well past their prime insist on bitterly clinging to jobs that could be used to lower the nation's unemployment rate?

Do they have oil in Iowa?

Iowa's the corn state, right? I think it's the flat state where Napoleon Dynamite was set, but I'm not too strong on the geography in that region. I know Idaho is potatoes, but when I think of U.S. oil reserves, I know the big players are Texas and Alaska, and I don't think that Iowa contributes much.

It figures that the non-oil-rich states would be the ones working hardest on oil alternatives. After all, there's no incentive to come up with a scientific development that might undermine one of your state's big industries. Anyway, the point is that Iowa State University has come up with an organic asphalt that doesn't require petroleum to produce. They're testing it on one of their bike paths.

I'm happy about the idea, because even if I don't completely embrace all the "peak oil" hysteria, I still think it's important to use renewable resources. Non-renewable resources, by definition, have to run out sometime, after all. An Iowa bike path is a small start, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it catches on.

Are Kids Worse Off, or Just More Honest?

This press release from the American Psychological Association has me questioning what they're actually trying to say. I mean, the headline is that college students are "exhibiting" more severe mental illness these days. But does that mean that they're suffering from more severe illness?

What I'm getting at is that just because more college students are reporting (and seeking help for) mental illness now, isn't it possible that there were just as many students in the past who suffered in silence? Let's face it: there's a stigma attached to mental illness, and I think that the current prejudice against mental illness and the people who admit to suffering from it is not nearly as pronounced as it has been in years past. So it's all well and good to call it something like "a shift in the needs of students seeking counseling services," (as John Guthman, director of student counseling services at Hofstra University calls it) but isn't it possible that this is something that they have consistently needed but were afraid to ask for?

Maybe I'm getting wound up about nothing, but I have serious problems with the language used in large parts of the APA's press release. "More students are coming to college with pre-existing mental health difficulties"? Sounds to me like another way of saying "they were like that when they got here!"

KSU does NOT have a gambling problem.

I repeat, KSU does NOT have a gambling problem. I cannot stress that enough. They're just really interested in sports odds.

In a study reminiscent of something from Guys and Dolls or any story that involves hustlers hanging around racetracks with "can't fail" systems, a Kansas State University professor says that there's a way to predict the outcome of some college football games. And it's not the heat, it's the humidity. Well, the contrast between humid and arid regions.

Apparently, this economics professor found that teams from humid regions end up getting their butts handed to them when they play in arid regions. Bookmakers take note. After all, the study was about ways to make the market for sports betting "more efficient," so I'm glad that someone gets to benefit from this state-funded research work, even if it's not starving orphans, cancer victims, or war amputees.

"All Hands on Deck!"

"Screw that, I'm getting mine!"

At least, that's how the exchange goes in "disturbed ecosystems," according to Georgia Tech Researchers. They were looking into whether organisms all try to work together when their ecosystems are under assault, or if it's dog-eat-dog business as usual. It's probably an area of study that's going to be of relevance for quite a while (I'm looking at YOU, gulf coast!).

It was panic in the petri dish as biologists exposed microbes to acoustic disturbances. They looked at how many were killed off when they were in disturbed environments, how many were killed off when they were competing with other organisms for the same resources, and how many were killed off when competing for resources after their environment was disturbed. Rather than both populations of competing organisms declining equally in the third scenario, one group would wipe the floor with the other.

To rephrase that, creatures that are neck and neck in an environment where they have to fight each other to survive no longer remain neck and neck when their environment gets unusually dangerous. That's when the men are separated from the boys, and one group curb stomps their opponents while they're most vulnerable. This is bad news for species diversity, especially when you consider all the ecosystems that we're disturbing...

And this, boys and girls...

Is why we don't get attached to any one particular ideal, mindset, organization, or whatever. I mean, when it gets right down to it, is there anything out there actually worth dying over? Okay, fine, possibly the allies in WWII ending the holocaust, but examples are few and far between.

The University of Texas at Austin has been looking into extremism, and what people are willing to die for. They describe people willing to die for other members of their group as "fused," which is an interesting way of looking at it. Personally, I think it's commendable to be willing to sacrifice yourself to save others regardless of who they are, but this study focused on what people would do for members of their "group" versus people outside of it.

The bottom line? Spainards want Americans dead. That's only a slight exaggeration, but the gist of it is that Spanish college students (who were studied for the project) were more willing to die for people inside of Europe than they were for people outside of it (specifically, America). There were also some interesting follow-up questions about who would be willing to die so that terrorists would get killed that raise some interesting ethical questions and insights into the nature of extremism.

Hopefully, I'll never be in a situation where I face a choice like that in real life.

Being a Moose Must Suck

Putting aside the problems of not being able to enjoy things like television and the internet, you'd have to spend cold winters outside and worry about getting killed by hunters or inattentive drivers. And then you'd have to be constantly eating to support yourself, considering that moose can weigh around 1,000 pounds. Now imagine what it would be like if you had arthritis. Ugly, right?

It looks like scientists at Michigan Tech are also thinking about what it would be like to be a moose. Unsurprisingly, they also think it would suck, but for different reasons. They're worrying about osteoarthritis.

I can see that. I can only imagine how bad joint pain is when you weigh ten times as much. That's a lot of stress to put on bones. According to them, malnutrition early in life leads to the bone and joint problems later, so I guess their next project should research how they can get moose to eat healthier.

Weed, but not Marijuana

Weed science. Sorry, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, Cornell University is only studying that unwanted crap that grows in your garden, but at least they're taking it to the next level. It's part of their horticulture department.

Cornell is so stoked about studying weeds that in two weeks, they're holding a contest. This "world series of weeds" is supposed to cater to those with "a special interest in weed science" (again: no stoners). The contest involves four categories: identifying weeds, identifying herbicides, calibrating sprayers, and solving farm problems. A whopping 105 students have already registered!

Does anyone else think that this level of specialization is funny? I bust on soil scientists a lot, but the whole field seems kind of nuts. Making your living by studying dirt?

Beating Dead Horses and What People Want

So I guess that Indiana University got the rights to some video clips of speed dating in Germany, and they are mining that data just as hard as they possibly can.

As previously reported, Indiana University combed through the footage trying to figure out if speed daters who appeared interested in their partner would indicate genuine interest when they filled out the card at the end of the date. The findings announced that women were tricky and men were easy to read, (but this may only apply in Germany). Building on that dramatic breakthrough, Indiana University looked at the footage again.

Their shocking new finding? You will look to the opinions of others to determine whether or not someone is hot. I'll give you a moment to collect yourself. After all, who would have thought that things are more attractive when it looks like someone else wants them?

To summarize: research subjects found people more attractive if they watched a video of someone else finding them attractive first. That, and Indiana University needs to do something besides watching old clips of German speed-dating sessions.

How come rich people get all the safety?

It must be nice to be able to afford not to die in a car accident. Actual science from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences shows that car safety features do a better job of protecting rich people. (And by "do a better job of," I actually mean "are present to.")

For their study, they went around and compared vehicle safety features like crash test ratings, air bags, etc. They cross-checked this information with ZIP codes, and compared how much money people were earning in that ZIP code (median income) to how safe their cars were. Care to guess the results?

That's right, the rich people had the safer cars. The researchers point out that usually the cutting-edge safety features are installed as optional (and pricey!) components on high-end cars. Later, as their effectiveness has been proven, it eventually "trickles down" and becomes standard features in all cars, regarless of their price point.

Still, it must be nice to be able to afford better protection against injuries from car accidents.

Your Love of Crabs Will Kill Us All

Congratulations, University of Alabama at Birmingham. Your research into blue crabs is going to poison the environment and kill us all. Sorry, what I meant to say was that UAB has made an exciting new discovery about a potential food source, and I'm sure that nothing could possibly go wrong!

People eat blue crabs. People only eat blue crabs when they're molting. Molting season happens only the spring and early summer. UAB scientists want to make blue crabs molt on demand so that they can be eaten year round.

I see their point. You can start setting up blue crab operations all along the coast and it will create jobs and make more food available. But is it really a good idea to force those kinds of changes? Especially when you consider that factory farms raising salmon are little more than floating ocean pens; how do you keep this chemical you're giving to the blue crabs from getting into the ocean at large? And then what happens once it starts affecting organisms in the wild?

Oh, I'm sure it'll be nothing to worry about.

Hey, Doctors! Time to Feng Shui it Up!

So, the Mayo Clinic conducted a study to see how patients were affected by the rooms where they met with their doctors. (Not the exam rooms where they run all the tests on you, the rooms where you actually sit and talk with your doctor about what's wrong with you and what might go wrong with you.)

It was an okay test, I suppose. It turns out that in "experimental" setups where patients sat next to their doctor and looked at the same computer screen during the consultation, patients were more engaged in their treatement and received a better quality of care. That seems like kind of a no-brainer; if you give patients a chance to get involved with their own treatment, they will. (I imagine that this new setup for doctors is a pain in the ass, though.)

I don't think that the study went far enough. Sure, patients and doctors do well when side by side facing a computer screen. What about on roller skates and facing a computer screen? Or when suspended over a shark tank and facing a computer screen? What if the computer screen is replaced with a medical textbook? An informational documentary on molluscs? An angry badger with a toothache? Inquiring minds want to know! For Science!

Chicks Are Inscrutable

And that's not just my opinion. It's backed up by science. Outside observers are better at reading the intentions of men than they are at figuring out what women are thinking.

Indiana University conducted a study where observers watched clips from speed-dating interactions and were asked whether or not the participants were interested in each other. Neither men nor women were particularly effective as observers when it came to figuring out which daters were interested. However, the speed-dating men were easier to "read," and both male and female observers were able to figure out whether the interest on their part was genuine. Speed-dating women were more deceptive, and misled observers as to whether or not they were interested more frequently.

There were some other interesting side notes to this study. For one thing, there was no difference in accuracy on the observers' part whether they viewed a full 30 seconds of interaction or only 10 seconds (Hi there, Malcolm Gladwell!).

The other point worth noting was that while the observations were conducted in Indiana, the actual speed-dating sessions were conducted in Germany. So as far as we know, it's only German men who are transparently easy to read.

Born Leaders (Gossips/Flirts/Wallflowers, etc.)

According to studies, your role in (and the size of) your social network is a function of your genetic code. Whether you're the central hub in a network of interconnected acquaintances or an outlier with a few friends who don't know each other, your position is apparently predicted by your genes.

To get these results, they studied fraternal and identical twins. The identical twins had the same number of people who knew them as friends, and those friends had an equal chance of knowing each other. Fraternal twins had social networks of differing "shapes," with different numbers of friends and a varying likelihood of whether or not those friends knew each other.

Almost as interesting as the unsung breakthrough itself is the ability of the professors involved to milk a concept for all the sweet, sweet grant money that they can get their hands on. That's right. Research into social networks should sound familiar for good reason--these same two professors from Harvard Medical School and UC San Diego were in the news previously for using grant money to research how social networks spread happiness.

I wish I had paid more attention in school. Then I'd be able to get people to pay me for spending all my time on myspace thoroughly researching social networks like these two professors.

Science Fiction? Media Hype? Both?

The University of Maryland got me all excited the way they were casually throwing around words like teleportation, but it's not as cool as you'd think. For one thing, it's only occurring one atom at a time, which isn't very useful for Star Trek style transport. It also turns out that they're not moving atoms, they're moving information from one atom to another.

They think it will help with Quantum Computing, which is supposed to be the Next Big Thing in computers, all smaller, faster, and more sophisticated than the current systems that are limited by the physical properties of their construction. I remain nonplussed. After all, assuming that they do manage to construct a working quantum computer, I don't think I'll personally see the effects of one for decades. The first quantum computers aren't going to be cheap, and I've never been an early adopter of new technology.

Oh, and the information? Yeah, it's up to 90% accurate. That's right, even if they do find a way to apply this to teleporting people, you've got a 1 in 10 chance of winding up with your index finger where your big toe should be and your teeth trading places with your fingernails. Good times.

Silent Killers: Now with More Silence!

That's right, flying robot killers from the future are going to be more silent than ever before! That's robots who fly and kill people, not flying people who kill robots, by the way.

Georgia Tech is working on making our unmanned aerial drones quieter, so that they will be tougher to spot. Short-term thinking says that's a good idea, because we'll be able to spy on today's enemies more effectively.

In the long term, we're already developing more efficient aerial predators based on the design of prehistoric killing machines. It's bad enough that they'll be harvesting our own organs to hunt us down and kill us more effectively, now they'll be able to do it without giving us any warning.

It's going to be a dark future, indeed.