Blogs / Discoblog

For anyone other than their parents, infants can be a bore. Beyond cooing, crying, and absorbing their world babies are all sleep and bodily functions. But deep inside those cute, fuzzy little heads, infants are performing scores of staggering statistical feats. Bombarded with a bewildering range of sounds since birth, they possess mechanisms that scour these signals for statistical regularity, allowing them to emerge with something quite astonishing: an understanding of spoken language.

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Bad at remembering names? What if all you had to do to remind yourself was center a crosshair on a person’s face and his name-perhaps even his Facebook profile-would pop into your field of view?

Engineers at the University of Washington have pushed our technologically primitive world closer to this Terminator-esque dream of augmented reality: They’ve manufactured contact lenses that contain electronic circuits and red LEDs-and taken pretty sweet pictures of rabbits showing them off. (more…)

When you look at a picture of Paris Hilton, don’t you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, as if all pain were leaving your body? If so, you have something in common with male mice, for whom looking at a picture of the tabloid queen has a painkilling effect.

But if you’re more like me and looking at a picture of the heiress gives you the heebie jeebies, you’ll feel better once you hear researchers’ explanation for this analgesic effect: The scientists suspect that the picture of Paris is really just stressing the mice out. They think she’s a predator (with those stilettos, they’re probably right). And when mice get scared, pain takes a backseat to their more important survival instincts. The reason the effect is only seen in male mice is that females don’t sweat it as much. Other research backs this up: In a number of situations, girl mice don’t seem to respond as strongly to threatening stimuli.

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As someone who has a much better systemizing faculty than color-perceiving faculty (I’m red-green color blind, which does have its advantages), I admit to having had some trouble synchronizing my names for certain hues with everyone else’s names for them.

So I’m a big fan of this online color-naming application that some nice Web developer has opened up to the world, including us color dissenters. The app lets you pick any of 17 million color combos from an 8-bit color wheel, like the ones used in graphics programs, and then tells you which of 1,500 esoteric names applies.

If you’re curious, cadet blue is 9EACC2, while gull gray is right next door at 9BA5B5.

“Group Therapy Helps Men with Impotence“

No, this isn’t about the medical use of wild orgies. “Most men feel comfortable in the setting of group therapy because they can share their difficulties with other men who have the same problem,” according to the author of a recent paper on group therapy for impotence.

“Most people only wonder about the easiest and most rapid way to reach remission of erectile dysfunction,” Melnik said. “Group therapy takes more time than using medication, but in some cases dealing with psychological aspects is fundamental to achieving a successful outcome and maintaining the results.”

Someone bust out the bongos…

Newsweek has an interesting gallery of drawings of near-death experiences by the people who experienced them. (Click under “Crossing Over” in the upper-right to launch the gallery.) The drawings are from The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences, which is coming out in October.

Jane Bosveld’s recent story in the hallowed pages of Discover looked at the latest scientific research into NDEs, OBE (out-of-body experiences), and various other quirks of the human soul.

There is a widely held belief that women, those chatty creatures, utter far more words per day than men. Last year in her book The Female Brain, psychology professor Louann Brizendine tossed out the figures 20,000 (womanly words) versus 7,000 (motes of manly monologuing), which became a kind of informal consensus. As with much Men-are-from-Mars psychologizing, there was never much data to back up what was essentially an old wives’ tale.

Last week, Science published a paper by some researchers who finally looked into the matter and delivered what one hopes—though suspects will not be—a knockout blow to this rumor. In the study’s fairly large (though admittedly homogenous) sample group, both men and women said about 16,000 words per day.

Just a few days before the media blitz over the debunking paper, The Times of India published an earnest, credulous opinion piece that not only accepted the soon-to-be-disproven rumor but tried to explain exactly why it is that women speak so much more than men: because they do more manual work and they have more cells dedicated to emotion and communication. Judging by what we know now, this logic train must have been derailed by terrorists before it ever left the station.

I do admit that giving The Times this booby prize is a bit of a raw deal; many publications repeated the exact same theory before. But this was one magnificent flourish of bad timing.

(Some publications deserve credit for trying to debunk the rumor last fall.)

The US military is using specialized robots to disarm improvised explosive devices. With the bots providing such an important use, perhaps it’s not surprising that the soldiers can get attached to the little life-savers:

“Sometimes they get a little emotional over it,” Bogosh says. “Like having a pet dog. It attacks the IEDs, comes back, and attacks again. It becomes part of the team, gets a name. They get upset when anything happens to one of the team. They identify with the little robot quickly. They count on it a lot in a mission.”

The bots even show elements of “personality,” Bogosh says. “Every robot has its own little quirks. You sort of get used to them. Sometimes you get a robot that comes in and it does a little dance, or a karate chop, instead of doing what it’s supposed to do.” The operators “talk about them a lot, about the robot doing its mission and getting everything accomplished.” He remembers the time “one of the robots happened to get its tracks destroyed while doing a mission.” The operators “duct-taped them back on, finished the mission and then brought the robot back” to a hero’s welcome.

I would have scoffed at this reaction just two weeks ago, but I recently was at a friend’s house where we watched a Roomba clean the floor for about half an hour. At one point it got itself jammed between a chair and a counter, and we were quickly emotionally drawn into the li’l guy’s plight. It took the robot about 5 minutes to escape, at which time we celebrated. Heartily.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman surveyed walking speeds in cities around the globe. Singapore, Copenhagen, and Madrid were the speediest urban centers, with pedestrians in all three pounding out 60 feet in under 11 seconds. New Yorkers took a full extra second to cover the same distance–a respectable showing for the US, but us New Yorkers’ ranking of 8th overall was lower than I expected.

Walkers in Bern, Switzerland, and Manama, Bahrain, took a leisurely 17 seconds and change to saunter 60 feet, while in Blantyre, Malawi—the slowest city surveyed—even an expansive 30 seconds wasn’t quite enough time to make it to the finish. Good for you, people of Blantyre. At least somewhere in the world, people are stopping and smelling the roses (or whatever lovely endemic flowers might line the streets there).

Even more interesting, the researchers compared their results to a similar survey from the early 1990s and found that on average, walking pace around the globe is now 10% faster than it was then. Unfortunately, this trend hasn’t yet reached the guy who gets out of the subway in front of me every morning.

Check out the full list of 32 cities and their time scores here.

via itv

NBA referees are a bit racist, according to a study written up in the New York Times today—white refs call more fouls on black players, and vice versa. The study found that under the eyes of three white refs, “black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent)” than when judged by black refs. And apparently this little shift makes an appreciable difference: for each additional black starter, a team’s winning percentage in any particular game would drop by one point. “The team with the greater share of playing time by black players during those 13 years won 48.6 percent of games — a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season,” says the Times.

This is an interesting proposition, and not entirely surprising, based on common sense and much of our understanding of race and psychology. But I’m a little skeptical about any study that tries to perfectly pin down such a extremely complicated action with statistics.

To remove any potential bias from their data, they corrected for “the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.”

Do they really think they can quantify a basketball player’s assertiveness through his stats to the point where they can see such an exacting difference? How do they know what exactly what coaches say to their subs about fouling? Any way you slice it, you can’t tell everything about a player by his stats, particularly in a sport where numbers are so notoriously unimportant (as opposed to, say, baseball).

On Friday, the New York Academy of Sciences rounded up four science all-stars at the Academy’s new downtown home and let them loose on some of the hottest topics in their respective fields. In case you missed it, here are the highlights:

1) Blame it on my genes

Columbia professor of psychiatry and law Paul Appelbaum tackled the messiness that results when law and genetics mix. Consider that some genes seem to show a correlation with aggressive behavior, particularly when they occur in combination with environmental factors (like child abuse) that might promote aggression. These findings, Appelbaum says, “have opened the eyes of people in law and criminology to the importance of behavioral genetics.” Specifically, some defense lawyers realized that genes might be a viable excuse. Think of the insanity defense: “Our legal system excuses people from culpability if they have an impaired ability to control their behavior,” Appelbaum explains.

So could testing positive for a genetic predisposition to violence protect defendants? At least for now, probably not. In a triple murder trial where this defense was attempted, the scientist testifying acknowledged that while the defendant’s genetic makeup was associated with aggression, in the end he still had a choice of whether or not to kill three people. But with more and more genetic information becoming available, Appelbaum now wonders whether genetic testing might be dropped as a defense and adopted as a rationale for harsher sentencing. After all, if violence is in your genes, you might not respond to remediation and could be more likely to strike again. Future criminals might want to think twice before pointing the finger at their DNA.

2) Evolving culture

Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett took a broad look at the evolutionary innovations that allowed humans to develop culture, and how culture in turn can affect our evolution. How is it, he wondered, that humans went from a minor primate accounting from 0.1% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass 10,000 years ago to 98% of that total today (including our livestock)?

He argues that humans have benefited from what he calls “cranes”: evolutionary “speed-ups” that make evolution itself more efficient. While the physiological changes in our brains were important, he says that the real key to human dominance came from the division of labor made possible by the coevolution of language and culture. “Big brains are as much an effect as a cause of culture,” Dennett says. A lot of biologists focus on the transmission of genes, but the transmission of information is crucial, too: “Mother nature is not a gene-centrist. Biology isn’t all about genes.” He calls cultural transmission (which occurs most extensively in species with long, parented childhoods) “the second information highway.” When optimized, it’s possible for rogue cultural variants to start being transferred horizontally, from person to person (rather than vertically, from generation to generation). “Primate brains got invaded by ideas to die for,” which he says include religions, political and economic systems, justice, and freedom, among others. “Now that they had these infected brains, they could start thinking outside the box.”

While other species may have a form of culture, he says, we seem to be just about the only one whose members are often happy to dedicate their lives to culture rather than maximizing reproduction. “Probably the single most important factor in lowering human fertility is higher education,” says Dennett (only half jokingly). “Reproductive fitness is not what matters most to us. We’ve evolved other values that we care more about.”

3) Is national security sick?

Science journalist and Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow for global health Laurie Garrett explored the relationship between emerging diseases and national security, with an emphasis on how politics seem to trump preparedness when it comes to planning for an epidemic and dealing with the international ramifications. The risk of diseases like avian flu is transnational, yet the federal government puts the responsibility for dealing with disease outbreaks at the feet of states and individual communities. “Threat is globalized,” she says. “We’re all sharing a microbial world that was once distinctly separated. Now, an outbreak somewhere else can be here overnight.”

Garrett points to avian flu as a threat with implications not only for public health but for foreign policy. “Rich countries would have any tools there were to deal with an outbreak. They would deny them to the rest of the world and deal with the foreign policy fallout afterward.” Such tensions are already coming into play: in 2006, Indonesia decided to stop sharing strains of the virus with other countries for research, a collaboration crucial for tracking the flu’s evolution. “They government had just had enough,” said Garrett. “They realized, ‘You guys are going to go off and make vaccines and treatments against these viruses. But where’s the benefit for us? Where are the vaccines and the Tamiflus for the poor people here?’ ”

China’s response to SARS provided a chilling example of what happens when a nation is caught off guard by an outbreak: communities cordoned themselves off from one another, cities were locked down, and travel was restricted by mandatory fever checkpoints and detention of symptomatic individuals. “Think about America,” Garrett implored. “How would we be different? What is different about our capacity to respond to a pandemic?”

4) About those extra dimensions…

Columbia string theorist Brian Greene discussed the story behind how we found ourselves confronted with “the stunning possibility that our world has more than the three dimensions of space that we see around us,” when our everyday observations make it so obvious that up-down, left-right, and back-forth are all we’ve got. Unfortunately for our wimpy human minds, 3D just doesn’t cut it in the mathematics of string theory, the controversial field attempting to forge a union between the otherwise-incompatible physics of the itty-bitty (quantum mechanics) and the rest of the universe (general relativity).

Greene says, “We believe this theory is capable of uniting these laws for the first time in the history of physics, and it requires more dimensions. The math fell apart if the world has only three, but at ten dimensions of space, all the math problems go away.” Theorists have suggested that the extra dimensions may be curled up too small to be detectable in normal experience. “These tiny dimensions may hold the answers to some of the deepest questions physicists have pondered for a long time,” he explains, like the fundamental parameters (the mass and charge of the electron, the strength of gravity, etc.) that seem to be just right for making the universe work.

Exactly what is this string theory business, you might ask? DISCOVER readers competed to explain just that in a video contest last month. Check back soon to see the winner selected by Brian Greene, but in the meanwhile, you can learn more here.

This is great: take this nifty series of listening tests and in 15 minutes you objectively find out how acute your sense of pitch is. The third test determines if you have a weak sense of rhythm, which is known to be linked with bad dancing. (No word on whether this is “objectively” connected with success in one’s social life, or lack thereof. And when a computer starts criticizing your social life…)

I scored a 66.7 on the first test, the one on tone deafness, which was pretty much average. Then I got a 4.8 on the pitch accuracy test — that means that at 500Hz (near the B below the C above middle C), I can discern two tones that are 4.8Hz apart. (Half tones are about 29Hz apart at that pitch, so this is a small but appreciable gap.) Interesting to see that the 6Hz tones sound very different to me, while the 3Hz tones sound almost exactly the same. That placed me at only the 13th percentile. I blame my poor relative performance on the probability that this online quiz is overrun with musical geniuses — they wrecked the curve!

Having realized long ago that I didn’t have a great ear (my high school chorus teacher can attest to this), I took this as no great surprise. That’s fine, I thought — I’ll really shine in the rhythm section. But it was not to be. I scored a 68%, placing me at the 31st percentile.

Despite my vaguely depressing results, I really like these tests. It’s fascinating that you can sit down and in 15 minutes find out something about how your ear and brain work. Also interesting to think that people can have such different experiences of similar stimuli. Auditory acuity is largely a natural, unchangeable characteristic of a person (at least an adult). Not to get too Brave New World, but I wonder if it could actually be helpful to test people’s hearing to see how well they can, say, learn to play the violin. Maybe if my chorus teacher knew about my tin ear, she would have been a little more understanding of my flat singing — or maybe she never would’ve let my hopeless self even in the doorway.

As fast and powerful as these listening tests are, they can’t quite match color blindness tests. I remember sitting down for my first such test in elementary school, and about a minute in, the nurse pretty much knew: my red cones are a bit strange.

In 2000, University of Chicago behavioral economist Richard Thaler trumpeted that economics was finally moving “From Homo Economicus to Homo Sapiens“—that is, dropping the outdated assumption that people are robo-beings who always know what exactly they want and pursue those desires perfectly rationally (think Spock from Star Trek). Six years later, even after psychologist and outsider Daniel Kahneman stumbled the field of economics and walked off with their Nobel Prize, much of the field continues to go on ahead as if the psychologists had never kicked over one of their central pillars. (Thaler, who’s next in line to win a Nobel for behavioral economics, actually realized his optimism was misplaced, pointing out several reasons why psychological factors will “trap me into thinking that other economists will agree with me—20 years of contrary evidence notwithstanding.”)

Tim Harford’s recent article claiming that people are not really being altruistic when they give to charity relies heavily on this antediluvian thinking. For example, he says that anybody that gives money to charity should give it all to the one project that they think would do the most good, because if it does the most good with your first dollar, it’ll do the most good with your second, and your third, and so on (as long as you’re not actually giving a Gates-ian amount that could actually end the problem entirely). And because most people don’t donate this way, they must not really care about their donations actually doing good, he says. This of course ignores the fact that giving money is not only a transfer of funds but also a statement of support, one that is understood by the giver, the receiver, and everyone else, seemingly, that’s not practicing narrow-minded economics. And even if we accept that one-cause giving is the most rationally effective way to give, it’s plainly obvious that people very often do not maximize economic effectiveness—even when it would be to their own advantage. That’s the whole point of behavioral economics! The well-documented 35-year history of these ideas seems to have sailed right by without troubling Harford’s analysis a bit.

He also says people should almost never do charitable volunteer work but instead just work more and use the money to hire people for do-gooder work. “A Dutch banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours’ worth of his salary, but that wouldn’t provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?” Harford’s off-hand coarseness reflects well how pre-behavioral economics misses the human dimension of humans. Mightn’t the folks eating at the soup kitchen be happy that professional people are volunteering to help in addition to people who are professional helpers? Couldn’t the banker be affected by her experience at the soup kitchen and donate money to a political campaign that eventually had even greater power to improve the lot of poor people?

But if you’re hoping to find a piece on the economics of Vulcan charity, look no further.

For those out there who dream of being a little more manly, be careful what you wish for. A new Yale study reports that excessive testosterone kills brain cells. Neurons in lab dishes treated with large doses of the hormone for just a few hours began committing the cellular suicide known as apoptosis. The study used concentrations higher than those normally found in the body, but steroid abuse is known to increase testosterone to dangerous levels. Neuronal death may explain the behavioral changes seen in some steroid users. As one author puts it:

Next time a muscle-bound guy in a sports car cuts you off on the highway, don’t get mad — just take a deep breath and realize that it might not be his fault.

(Honestly, I always suspected that certain drivers’ noggins were full of kamikaze brain cells.)

Just in case women weren’t feeling smug enough reading this, the researchers ran a similar trial with estrogen and discovered that it may be “neuroprotective,” resulting in less cell death. And another recent study found that treatment with progesterone—a hormone involved in the menstrual cycle—improves survival among brain injury victims. So for gals who have bemoaned our wildly fluctuating female hormones since puberty, take heart: they may wreak havoc with our bodies, but they do a brain good.

Late-breaking addition: Check out these Data articles on the relationship between testicle size and brain size in bats and the toxicity of testosterone.

The latest installment of Horganism looks at an IEEE Spectrum article about Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory about how autistic people are “merely the extreme of a continuum on which all of us reside. In this view, autism is a difference not in kind of thinking, but in degree.” The trait he’s talking about is “systemizing,” or how much a person focuses on “those aspects of the world that form regular, repeatable, law-governed patterns”—like watching Wapner at the same time every day and freaking out if that doesn’t happen. Autistics are extreme systemizers, he says, and autism is more common among men because they are more systemizing than women, on the whole.

I think Baron-Cohen’s emphasis on a gradual spectrum of systemizing is smart, but I also share Horgan’s general skepticism about big claims on human genetics. And when you get to the second page of the Spectrum article, you can see where Baron-Cohen has stumbled into the stereotyping-humans pitfall, and is now hurtling toward the sharpened wooden sticks of truth (a punishment that might be levied by Borat, who’s played by Sacha Baron-Cohen, Simon’s cousin). He says that since men are on average more systemize-aphilic (not -phallic, mind you) that means that autism represents “the extreme male mind.” This is not just a throwaway quote; on page one of his book The Essential Difference, Baron-Cohen writes, “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”

Let’s look at an elucidating comparison. It’s well known that men are, on average, taller than women. Does that mean that the five-foot-eleven-inch Famke Janssen (where she’s from they call it 180 centimeters) represents “the extreme male body”? And Danny DeVito, barely five feet with his fancy Italian shoes on, represents “the extreme female body”? (For extreme systemizers who don’t notice such gossippy, plebeian details, the answer is no.)

The problem with Baron-Cohen’s reasoning is that he’s taken one trait that differs between two groups and started talking like—and seemingly believing that—the trait is what defines the difference between two groups. But just as there’s more to physical sex differences than height, there’s also more to mental sex differences than systemizing. I think this kind of slip-up is all too common among people who are convinced that genes and/or sex is destiny and are always looking for the nut (pun intended) of the difference between men and women. In fact, another camp of Men-Are-From-Mars-type scientists insists that the real difference between men and women is that men are more aggressive. So which is it?

Logic demands that these camps can’t both be right about la difference—and in fact neither one is. There are natural mental distinctions between men and women, but they are complicated, subtle, and varied. Anyone who sums up the differences in one neat sentence is over-simplifying—but it does make a good story, don’t it?

People have been probably been wondering if money brings happiness ever since Croesus, a king in what is today Turkey, had a mixture of silver and gold pounded into bean-shaped ingots 4,000 years ago. Only over the past few years has the subject become a scientific hot topic. And the results, as far as I can tell, are… (drum roll)… somewhat muddled. One argument that has gained considerable prominence recently is that more money does make you significantly happier if you’re living in poverty, barely squeaking by, but additional income past that has negligible happiness benefits.

Not so, says a new study (pdf) that tracked ten thousand British people over the course of several years and focused especially on 116 who won big lottery payouts (over 1,000 pounds; mean of 4,300 pounds) during that time. One strength of the study is that it followed the winners themselves for two years after they won and also included data on the same people from the two years before the wheel of Fortuna rolled their way; the researchers may have avoided confounding factors that needle at other studies, such as those that compare people at different income levels (happiness might affect income), those that look at people who are given raises (change in status along with change in income), etc.

The study finds that big pay-offs increase people’s happiness by an average of 1.4 points on a 36-point scale, as measured by a standard questionnaire. By comparison, the most dramatic effect on someone’s happiness is being widowed, which on average produces a 5-point drop. Whether being widowed is 3.5 times more intense than winning the lottery — and therefore worth negative 15,000 pounds — is a question only an economist would address. (And the bonus is in no way enough to justify Terrell Owens’ heartless publicist saying he had “25 million reasons why he should be alive,” referring to his contract.)

Lest we think this ends the debate, there are some mysterioso findings in there, too:

• Lottery wins yield these happiness benefits only 2 years after the windfall.
• In the same year that people win, their happiness actually decreases by .6 points. The dreaded grabby-brother-in-law effect?
• High-income people got twice as many happy points from winning as did low-income people! Maybe that’s why they work high-income jobs.
• Big winners gained .7 happy points the year before they won. One wonders if this is a statistical fluke, but does that raise a red flag?

As a big believer in behavioral economics, I wonder if the effects have more to do with human idiosyncracies than the actual amount of money that is objectively gained. Is it possible that the happiness gains are due not to having more money but to the feeling of being someone who won money — someone that God and/or luck is smiling upon?

(Thanks to AB for the tip.)

The University of Bath put out a press release about some research suggesting that motorists leave less berth for cyclists with helmets than those without, which presumably increases the chances of a crash. “This study suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely in the first place,” says the researcher, traffic psychologist Ian Walker, who was in two crashes while doing the research, both during the half when he was wearing a helmet. Helmet boosters didn’t like these dirty lies from Bath, and predictably — perhaps accurately — said the things are still worth it.

As for why drivers give the helmeted less room, Walker says it’s because they think bicyclists wearing helmets are more experienced, skilled, and predictable, so they can get closer without hitting them. At the risk of crossing a real traffic psychologist (I’ve heard they can trick people into driving into trees), I’d suggest a different explanation: drivers are consuming the safety that bicyclists gain by wearing helmets. I.e., they feel that the bicyclists with helmets are relatively safe in the event of an accident, so they don’t need to worry much about hitting them.

This “risk compensation” is often seen in people who get access to new safety measures and then start doing more dangerous things, e.g., better skydiving gear -> more dangerous dives, seat belts -> more dangerous driving, better AIDS drugs -> more unsafe sex, sunscreen -> more sun exposure and potentially more skin cancer, etc. The bicycle example is a little different in that in the other cases, people “consume” their own safety benefits, whereas motorists are consuming someone else’s increased safety — a rare case of risk compensation/moral hazard. (Which is particularly galling considering that decent road bicyclists only need helmets to protect themselves from cars.) Of course, judging by how people sometimes change when they get into a driver’s seat, it might not be that surprising.

The NY Times has a story on a really fascinating finding: People who are feeling guilty have an increased desire to literally wash their hands, presumably to figuratively wash their hands of their wrongdoing.

The researchers had one group of students recall an unethical act from their past, like betraying a friend, and another group reflect on an ethical deed, like returning lost money. Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, either a pencil or an antiseptic wipe. Those who had reflected on a shameful act were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe.

Very interesting to consider how the washing-your-hands metaphor ties in with an underlying human mechanism for purging guilt. I suspect that some ritualized types of guilt dumping (like this metaphorical type) are also instinctual. Is confession (either lay or religious) a natural way to clear your conscience? And what about the eating — e.g., taking the Eucharist or, say, inhaling a pint of Ben and Jerry’s?

But perhaps more importantly, did the researchers feel guilty for holding a study where the prizes were a pencil or an antiseptic wipe? Thanks a lot, doc. (Thanks to EZ for the tip.)

Update — God cleans, too: “But who can endure the day of his coming? And who will stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like launderer’s soap” Malachi 3:2