Discoblog » What’s Inside Your Brain?

The Strange German Disease Called “Kevinism”: Can a Lame Name Mess Up Your Life?

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:33:50 +0000

Young German Kevins are a few decades behind the U.S. trend.

Another day, another crazy German noun: Kevinismus, which basically means, “You’re named Kevin? Sucks to be you.” According to a study of interactions on the German dating site eDarling, online daters don’t even bother to click on the profiles of users with names that seem foreign and gauche to German ears, like Kevin. The authors suggest that this online neglect due to their unpopular names mirrors lifelong social neglect, which is also responsible for making Kevins smoke more, get less education, and have lower self-esteem.

That all sounds quite dire, but we’re gonna have to bust out the “correlation does not imply causation” card here. While exotic baby names may seem like a disease that most commonly afflicts celebrities, in Germany it’s really about the other end of the economic spectrum. An article on Kevinism [note: this article contains a lot of German] in Die Welt quotes sociologist Jürgen Gerhards, who asserts that Anglo-American names (Mandy, Justin, Angelina to name a few more) are a lower-class phenomenon. It seems that no one has actually crunched the numbers to prove that, but jokes like “Only druggies and ...

Go Ahead and Gossip—Science Says It’s the Right Thing to Do

Valerie Ross — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:58:36 +0000

He did what? Innnnteresting…

Thorough scientific study has revealed that lots of supposed vices can have surprising upsides: alcohol, sex, caffeine. Thanks to UC Berkeley researchers, we can now add another so-bad-but-oh-so-good habit to the list: Gossip, their new study suggests, can be a selfless act of public service.

Surreptitiously passing along the news that someone has behaved badly—what’s technically called “prosocial gossip”—can relieve stress, as well as warn others to regard the rule-breaker with a wary eye, the researchers say. (The study didn’t look directly at other forms of gossip—rumormongering, telling lies, anything said to a confessional cam on reality TV—so make of that what you will.)

In one experiment, the scientists found that people’s heart rates spiked when they saw one of two people playing a game cheating, but calmed again when they had the chance to jot a note, middle school-style, to the next competitor about what they’d seen. “Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip,” one of the researchers said in a statement—scientific confirmation of that scratching-a-lingering-itch feeling of relief we get from clucking our tongues ...

Why We Love the Crap We Make, or The Grand Unifying Theory of Regretsy

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:30:08 +0000

Handmade! And priceless!

Your grandma’s day-glo knitted sweaters are proof: People love the stuff they make, even when what they make is a disaster. It’s a weird little corner of human psychology studied by behavioral economist Michael Norton, who dubs it the IKEA phenomenon, having observed in his own studies that people love the IKEA boxes they assembled themselves more than the identical IKEA boxes assembled by some other dude, and that people consider their wretched origami animals valuable works of art while others call them “nearly worthless crumpled paper.” He speculates that it may be the pride of accomplishment that makes people behave this way, or some warped sense that anything that took more work to make is inherently better.

But anyone who’s wasted a perfectly good Saturday working on a BEKVÄM can tell you that it ain’t love or pride that keeps you from throwing that thing out the window—it’s the fear of having to do it all over again. No, forget IKEA: a better name for this quirk of the mind is the Regretsy phenomenon. Etsy is an online marketplace for people selling handmade objects; Regretsy is ...

6 Servings of Thanksgiving Science: Ideal Turkey Diet, Black Friday Sales Tricks, Turkey-Phobia…

Valerie Ross — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:17:23 +0000

It’s almost Thanksgiving here the US. Before you tuck into your stuffing, pumpkin pie, and cranberry sauce, save a little room for a big helping of science. Here are a few of our favorite Thanksgiving science stories from around the Internet, detailing the research behind fattening turkeys, giving thanks, post-holiday shopping, and more:

Discovery News takes a look at what turkeys have for dinner before becoming dinner. Typical feed pellets are made of, among other things, “soybean meal, animal by-products, [and] distillers’ grains.” But a professor at the University of Missouri has developed ”the Missouri Ideal Turkey Diet,” carefully designed turkey food that costs 8 to 10 percent less than typical feed pellets while packing the same nutritional punch. Yum. As you think about what you’re thankful for this year, the New York Times offers one more thing to add to your list: the very act of giving thanks is good for you. Even a little bit of gratitude, scientists have found, makes people happier and healthier. If you’re thankful for health and happiness already, you’ve got the start of a nice little feedback cycle there. And if you’re not feeling particularly grateful, as ...

From “Freedom!” to “Brains!”: Shift In Zombie Narrative Reflects Zombie-fication of Society

Douglas Main — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:01:02 +0000

Life is pretty simple for a zombie. You just wander around and try to eat people’s brains. But it wasn’t always so. In the uncorrupted early years of zombie narratives, zombies were typically the undead slaves of voodoo priests, and their primary motivation was to cast off the yoke of dark magic and rebel against their leaders. For example, the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie (1932), features a heroine who’s bewitched by a voodoo master (ominously named Murder). When she finally triumphs over him and he is pushed off a cliff, she reverts to her normal, non-zombie self.

No longer. Nowadays zombies have no real motivation. (When polled as to their life purpose, nine out of 10 zombies replied, “Braaaaaiiiiinnnns!!!”)

At least one researcher thinks the shift in the zombie story, beginning in the late 1960s, reflects a greater change in society. ”With no voodoo master, today’s zombies have no clear controller to turn against and free themselves from,” says researcher Nick Pearce. “That means there are no effective plans for resistance and no hope for the future. Zombies may well be popular today because they speak to a similar ...

To Golf Like the Pros, Pretend You’re Using Their Clubs

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:02:37 +0000

All that golfin’ mojo is just oozing into that club…

Houses where Shakespeare stayed. Shirts saints wore. Shoes worn by famous athletes. It’s not very hard to convince people that something—beauty, saintliness, prowess—leaks from a famous person to the objects they used. But while magic is still not scientifically valid, you can apparently get something from such relics—if you believe.

A new study reports that people who are told that the golf club they’re using belonged to a pro athlete actually putt quite a bit better than people who are just told that the club is a nice one. The researchers split forty-one college students who had golf experience and had followed the PGA tour into two groups, and told one group that their putter had been used by pro golfer Ben Curtis. Out of 10 putts, those subjects sank 1.5 more putts than the control group, on average.

How exactly this happens is an interesting question, and the researchers lay out several possibilities. They knew that people who picture themselves doing well on a task and being in control tend to do better than people who haven’t, and it’s possible that ...

Sexy Ad Campaign Targeting Monkeys Makes A Splash

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:21:17 +0000

“Advertising for monkeys” is just too good a phrase to pass up.

Even since ads created for a study investigating whether monkeys respond to billboards debuted at the Cannes Lions ad conference, the headlines have been flowing freely. We learn Yale primatologist Laurie Santos and two ad executives came up with the idea at last year’s TED, after Santos gave a talk on her experiments showing that monkeys that learn to use money are as irrational about it as we are.

Ad firm Proton has now developed two billboards to hang outside capuchin monkeys’ enclosures, and the researchers plan to see whether they will prefer one kind of food, or “brand,” over another when it is shown in close proximity to some titillating photos, including a “graphic shot” of a female monkey exposing her genitals and a shot of the troop’s alpha male with the food.

Once the monkeys have been exposed to the ads for brand A, scientists will see whether they show a preference for it over brand B, which won’t be supported with a campaign. In essence, they’ll investigate whether sex sells for monkeys. Brand A will be ...

Lots of Debt Makes Young People Feel Like They’re in Control

Valerie Ross — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:27:13 +0000

Money can’t buy happiness—but debt might just be able to rent you self-esteem, a new study suggests.

Being in the red seems to boost the self-confidence of people in their early-to-mid twenties, the researchers found. Using all sorts of data—financial, psychological, educational, you name it—collected every two years from 3,000 young adults as part of an enormous national survey, they were able to pick out this pattern: The more credit card debt and college loans young adults had, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt in control of their lives.

Even when the researchers took starting self-confidence into account—young people with higher self-esteem might be more willing to take out loans in the first place, for instance—the pattern remained. It’s not clear cause and effect, since the researchers couldn’t make some of the kids go into debt and the others say solvent, but it does suggest that being in debt may actually improve self-esteem.

Um, what? Are these people’s bills somehow way more fun than ours?

Part of the effect is due to the fact that debt, especially school loans, are an investment the future, the researchers hypothesize. You’ve got to spend money ...

Science Takes on an Important Question: Is the Mommy Cat Really Hugging the Kitten?

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:28:29 +0000

First, before you do anything else, watch the above video. Awwww! The twitching wee feetsies! The mommy cat drawing her baby closer!

When that little number when viral this week, the folks at National Geographic wondered, once the initial cuteness wore off, how much of this “hugging” business was just us anthropomorphizing? How are we to know that mother cats don’t embrace their kittens before, I don’t know, eating them alive or something? And what about repostings claiming that the twitching kitten is having “nightmares”? What’s the deal here?

So they asked a scientist.

First of all, says Dr. Nicholas Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, we obviously can’t know what the kitten’s dreaming. But sleeping cats show brainwave activity similar to that of sleeping humans, and the kitten appears to be in rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, which is thought to be when the brain consolidates recent events and is also when humans dream. The twitching paws are the result of biochemical changes during REM sleep, when production of serotonin, which activates the body’s bigger muscles, is shut down, while all the little muscles responsible for delicate motion at your extremities ...

Scientists to Nightclub Owners: For Happier Customers, Cover Up Pit Stink With Delicious Fragrances

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:16:11 +0000

“Refreshing” orange scent perked dancers right up.

Air fresheners aren’t just for Grandma anymore.

Dutch scientists suggest that as smoking bans mean club-goers can now smell all the nasty beer, puke, sweat, and so on in nightclubs, owners may want to spritz their businesses with “carefully selected fragrances [that] can enhance dancing activity, improve the overall perception of the evening, and improve how nightclub goers rate the music as well as their mood,” as a press release puts it. In true scientific fashion, the researchers then went clubbing to test their hypothesis.

Their scents of choice were peppermint, orange, and seawater (?), dispersed via fragrance machines into three different clubs popular with students. The researchers observed the levels of dancing on the dance floor and afterwards waylaid 849 club-goers with questionnaires. Did they have a good time? How was the music? How were they feeling?

The researchers found that the scents got people to dance more and upped their mood and attitudes about the clubs compared with scentless trials, and that each of the three smells had the same effect, which was somewhat unexpected—they’d thought that peppermint would be invigorating, orange soothing, and seawater neutral. Nevertheless, they ...

Scientists Describe Five Phases of Quarter-Life Crisis, Recommend the Experience

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:40:49 +0000

Are you in a rut? Is it time to take life into your own hands? Are you ready take a time out to find yourself, and start over?

Are you 25?

It may be your quarter-life crisis knocking, say psychologists studying the phenomenon of 25–35-year-olds having a come-to-Jesus about where they’re going in life after having barely left the starting gates. Given the ambitious list of life to-dos many not-yet-disillusioned people give themselves (build killer start-up, and nab the corner office, and travel the world, and have kids, and be faithful to childhood dreams), it’s probably not too surprising that the phenomenon seems to be widespread among a certain class of people. Let’s come right out and say that like affluenza, this is not likely to be a problem outside the wealthier parts of the world.

In a study presented at the British Psychological Society meeting this week, researchers distilled the five key phases of the quarter-life crisis (via New Scientist) from a survey of 50 volunteers who’d had them:

Phase 1 – A feeling of being trapped by your life choices. Feeling as though you are living your life on autopilot.
Phase 2 – A rising ...

Dear Humans, We Want Your Brains. –Neuroscientists

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:45:53 +0000

The UC San Diego Brain Observatory would like your brain, please. Especially if you can provide a detailed life history—or, best-case scenario, have already had your biography written—and are just a little strange in the head. Can’t feel fear? Can’t form memories? Can’t smell? These are traits of the people the Observatory already has on its rosters (they have 20 brains and 7 still-living donors), but director Jacopo Annese of UCSD is looking to recruit 1,000 more prospective donors over the next ten years. Apparently one brain he’d love to get his custom-made brain-slicing machinery on is Donald Trump’s: The guy’s had an unusual life, he explains to Bloomberg News, and with more than 15 books and a reality show to his name, he is nothing if not well-documented.

The Observatory is the outfit that made news in 2009 when it added the brain of H.M., a famous amnesiac who could remember only the last 20 seconds, to its collection. (The slicing process, which took two days and was streamed live, was watched by 400,000 people.) Established to study how ephemeral characteristics like personality, memory, and emotion are reflected in the physical structure ...

If the Catastrophic Weather Events Don’t Get Us, the Irrationality Might

Valerie Ross — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:24:27 +0000

What global warming?

What the weather’s like affects some people’s beliefs about global climate change, a new study found: On hot days, they’re all over it, but on cold days, they’re not so sure.

This is not impressive, people. It’s called “global,” meaning not just what you personally felt when you walked out the door this morning. “Climate” also means something different from “weather”, and “change” could mean things will get warmer, colder, or just plain different. On unusually chilly days, these climatically labile folks are 0 for 3.

If only that was the worst of it. A string of studies have shown that people are comically bad at consistently thinking, well, anything when it comes to climate change. Even miniscule differences in what we’re up to at the moment or how we’re asked can have a big effect on what people think of climate change and what they’re willing to do to help. Here are five more ridiculously simple things that get people to change their minds:

What’s on TV. I’m sure you all remember the 2004 hit film The Day After Tomorrow, in which global warming throws Earth into a new ...

DARPA Wants to Train Soldiers to Be the Life of the Party—With Video Games

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:59:41 +0000

Take a look at the guy standing alone next to the punch bowl at a party and it’s clear: meeting new people can be pretty challenging.

And while parties can be tough for some, it’s even more difficult to integrate and interact after being deposited on the other side of the world in a completely new culture.

Being a suave, talkative ambassador for your countries is difficult under these circumstances, and the nerds at DARPA decided that soldiers could use a lesson in what they call “basic human dynamics skills.” They’ve decided that our soldiers just aren’t smooth enough and could use lessons to turn them into the ultimate conversationalist.

Wired’s Danger Room blog reports on the DARPA announcement:

“After such training,” the agency adds, “soldiers will be able to approach and engage strangers in unfamiliar social environments, orient to unfamiliar patterns of behavior, recover from social mistakes, de-escalate conflict, rigorously practice transition in and out of force situations and engage in the process of discovering and adapting to previously unknown ‘rules ...

Researchers Say: Fill Your Bladder To Clear Your Mind

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:11:59 +0000

Before you make any life-altering decisions in the future, you may want to guzzle a few liters of water. At least, that’s according to new research that found that people with water-filled bladders are better at making decisions about their future—a finding that not only counters common sense, but also flies in the face of past psychological consensus.

Lead author of the study published in Psychological Science, Mirjam Tuk, a scientist at the Netherland’s University of Twente, landed upon this unique research topic after she drank too much coffee during a lengthy lecture. As the coffee made its way to her bladder, she asked herself a question: “What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?” And with that start, she devised an experiment to test whether people’s ability to control their bladders allowed them to better control other desires.

To test this, she had volunteers either drink five cups of water, or sip a tiny bit of water from five different cups, and after 40 minutes, she assessed the self control of each group by asking them a series of questions. The participants had to choose ...

Scientist to Research Subject: Really, You Have 3 Arms

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:03:03 +0000

One day you might not have to ask someone to lend a helping hand–because you’ll have a third arm of your own. At least, that’s a possible application of a mental trick scientists performed on 154 healthy volunteers: These men and women were made to feel as if they had three arms.

To pull off this ruse, the researchers placed a prosthetic arm next to a volunteer’s two real arms, and they touched the subject’s right hand and the rubber hand in exactly the same place at the same time. Because the taps were synchronized, the volunteer’s brain was tricked into feeling them both. According to Science Daily:

“What happens then is that a conflict arises in the brain concerning which of the right hands belongs to the participant’s body,” says Arvid Guterstam, one of the scientists behind the study. “What one could expect is that only one of the hands is experienced as one’s own, presumably the real arm. But what we found, surprisingly, is that the brain solves this conflict by accepting both right hands as part of ...

More Proof That We Live in the Future: Mind-Controlled Cars

Patrick Morgan — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:30:20 +0000

Driving a car using only one’s thoughts is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It may not be ready for commercial use, but scientists have successfully completed a road test of the world’s first mind-controlled car.

Created by researchers at the AutoNOMOS labs of Freie Universität Berlin, the technology uses commercially available electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors to detect four different patterns of brain activity, which a computer translates to “turn left,” “turn right,” “accelerate,” and “brake.” The road to this achievement was long, as AutoNOMOS says on its website:

After testing iPhone, iPad and an eye-tracking device as possible user interfaces to maneuver our research car named “MadeInGermany”, we now also use Brain Power. The “BrainDriver” application is of course a demonstration and not roadworthy yet but on the long run human-machine interfaces like this could [have] huge potential in combination with autonomous driving. For example when it comes to decide which way you want to take on a crossroad while the autonomous cab drives you home.

The research car was formerly a wholly computer-controlled car, but was re-engineered to be thought-powered. In the new navigation system drivers control ...

Triumph: Fake Astronauts Walk on Fake Mars!

Patrick Morgan — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:59:56 +0000

The simulated eagle has finally landed, and today, two men have walked upon the red sands of fake Mars. This jaunt along a sandpit in Moscow, the latest episode in the Mars500 project designed to test human endurance, gives the cosmonauts a respite from their past eight months of windowless confinement.

As the BBC reports:

“We have made great progress today,” commented Vitaly Davydov, the deputy head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, who was watching a video feed of the two men. “All systems have been working normally.”

Organized by Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, the Mars500 project seeks to better understand how humans would endure the psychological and physical effects of the isolation and confinement necessary for a real mission to Mars. The ’500′ in Mars500 indicates the mission’s time frame–the organizers estimated that it would takes 250 days to travel to Mars, and then allotted 30 days for surface exploration before a 240-day return trip. (Technically, the project’s name should be Mars520.)

The six crew members have been conducting experiments during their mission, which began last June, and ...

Feeling Guilty? Just Give Yourself a Little Pain…

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:47:33 +0000

It turns out self-flagellating medieval monks had it right (sort of): there’s nothing like good, old-fashioned, self-inflicted pain to cleanse your conscience, according to the latest research.

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, led by psychologist Brock Bastian, wanted to see whether feelings of guilt diminish with pain. To test this, they split a group of 62 volunteers into three groups and asked two of the groups to write about a scenario in which they rejected another person; the control group was asked to write about a non-guilt-ridden encounter. After assessing their guilt via a questionnaire, they had some volunteers dip their hands in warm water and others to dip their hands in ice water. Finally, the researchers assessed the subjects’ guilt levels once again, as well as their self-reported pain levels. As New Scientist reports:

Participants who had written about rejecting another left their hands in the ice bucket for longer than those who had written about a normal interaction. They also reported more pain – regardless of how long their hand was in the ice. Crucially, participants who placed their hand in ice later had less than half as much ...

U.S. Spies May Soon Make Smarter Decisions, Thanks to Video Games

Patrick Morgan — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:02:05 +0000

Even U.S. intelligence agents make decidedly unintelligent decisions at times. So it may not come as a surprise that the government is willing to invest in any project that could help agencies spot and correct their own decision-skewing prejudices–even if that project is a video game.

Dubbed “Sirius,” the anti-bias project is the brainchild of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a government agency whose mission statement might as well have come from a spy novel: to invest in “high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.”

One of those overwhemlming advantages: clear, bias-free thinking. That’s why computer scientists, gaming experts, social scientists, and statisticians will descend on Washington, D.C. in February to discuss the program. The focus of the Sirius project is on “serious games,” or educational video games. As IARPA reports:

A Serious Game could provide an effective mechanism for exposing and mitigating cognitive bias…. The goal of the Sirius Program ...

Ping Pong Night at the Museum: Grab Your Paddle and Talk Science

Shannon Palus — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:56:52 +0000

It wasn’t your typical American Museum of Natural History crowd: yesterday evening, a handful of kids and the standard science nerds were joined in the Hall of Ocean Life by ping pong aficionados.

Five ping pong tables—courtesy of co-host SPiN ping pong club—were set up in the hall for the event, “This is Your Brain on Ping Pong.” The evening included time for guests to practice the sport, as well as a panel discussion moderated by museum icthyologist Melanie Stiassny.

The evening’s attempts to connect ping pong and science were, well, a little weak. Stiassny ran through a brief history of life on Earth, with references to the sport dotting her speech like product placements: 500 million years ago the first organisms with nervous systems are on the scene—hey, you need a spinal cord to control a ping pong paddle! “Clearly evolution has a purpose, and that purpose is ping pong,” said Stiassny.

One panelist was legendary actress Susan Sarandon, perhaps most beloved for her role as Janet in Rocky Horror; she’s also an investor in SPiN. Why does she think SPiN is so popular? Sarandon claimed that ...

I Like Your Genes… Let’s Be Friends!

Patrick Morgan — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:41:04 +0000

Whether we’re making them or receiving them, first impressions can have big consequences. Our initial gut feelings transform strangers into potential friends, acquaintances into future partners. And according to some scientists, that initial whiff of personality is tied to genetics.

Looking at data on friendships and genetics from both the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Framingham Heart Study, scientists noticed two trends: people with a genetic variant linked to alcoholism tended to flock together, while those with a genetic variant tied to metabolism and openness to new ideas tended to stay away from each other.

TIME quotes lead researcher James Fowler of the University of California-San Diego:

“This might be the first step towards understanding the biology of ‘chemistry,’ the feeling you have of … whether you like or dislike a person [almost immediately],” Fowler says, noting that this can affect both romantic connections and friendships. “We might choose friends not [only] because of social features we consciously notice but because of biological and even genetic features that we unconsciously notice.” In turn, the friends we have could then affect the potential partners we meet.

Although the researchers analyzed six genetic markers, only two of ...

Silence a Shrieking Dental Drill, Cancel the Fear?

Eliza Strickland — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:32:24 +0000

For certain people, there’s one sound above all others that strikes fear into their hearts and makes them want to run screaming for sanctuary: the high-pitched whine of a dentist’s drill. Presumably dentist-phobes fear the noise because it’s associated with the rotten part of a tooth being drilled away, but experts say the noise itself triggers a strong reaction. According to ABC News:

“It’s been demonstrated that people’s blood pressures rise as soon as they hear the sound, even if they’re not sitting in the chair yet,” said Dr. Mark Wolff, professor and chair of the Department of Cariology and Comprehensive Care at the New York University College of Dentistry.

So how to help these unfortunate souls? Researchers have come up with an idea: cancel out the shriek of a drill to cancel out the fear. After ten years of development, dental engineers now have a prototype device ready, and they’re looking for investors to bring the invention to a dentist office near you.

The system starts with a microphone positioned near the drill, which converts its distinctive whine to a digital signal. A digital signal processor then analyzes the ...

Aflockalypse: The Media Goes on Apocalyptic Overdrive

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:14:18 +0000

Since Monday’s news that a few thousand birds fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve over Beebe, Arkansas, the world has gone a little crazy with talk of the “aflockalypse”: the mass bird deaths that have been documented worldwide.

Bird die-offs have been reported in not only Arkansas but also in Italy, Sweden, Louisiana, Texas, and Kentucky. Die-offs of other animals, including thousands of fish in Arkansas, Florida, New Zealand and the Chesapeake Bay have also been noted, while dead crabs washed up on UK shores.

Causes ranging from UFOs, monsters (our personal favorite), fireworks, secret military testing, poison, shifting magnetic fields, and odd weather formations have been blamed for the deaths, but researchers are saying these types of die-offs are normal. It’s simply a coincidence that a few big ones happened right around the new year–and once the global media started paying attention to wildlife mortality, we saw examples everywhere.

BoingBoing quotes Smithsonian Institution bird curator Gary Graves on the Arkansas bird die-off that got the conspiracy theory ball rolling:

He ...

Power Balance: Our Product Is Backed by “No Credible Scientific Evidence”

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:07:42 +0000

In a completely shocking and unexpected turn of events, the company behind Power Balance wristbands has officially admitted that the product isn’t backed by any scientific studies–and that the company’s advertisements were misleading. And right after the holographic technology to improve “balance, strength and energy” was named CNBC’s Sports Product of 2010!

Did you catch that? That was sarcasm. And while we here at DISCOVER may have our own opinions, the product was endorsed by SHAQ (whose name is also spelled in all caps). SHAQ, how could you lie to us after we supported you through the Kazaam! days?

Power Balance claims that the holograms (which are exactly like the ones in your credit cards) embedded in their wristbands or pendants have some sort of “energy flow” which can be manipulated to “resonate” with the body’s natural “energy flow.” In quotes in the Daily Mail, Power Balance co-founder Josh Rodarmel explains how they “work”:

“Everything in nature has a set frequency. The body has a frequency and things which cause negativity to the human body – ...

Which Celebrities Are Science-Illiterate Whack Jobs? Find Out Here

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:31:30 +0000

Every year, the Sense About Science group puts out a list of some of the most egregious blunders made in science and medicine during the past 12 months. But they’re not talking about surgeons’ errors or the research mistakes of lab workers; instead, SAS focuses on celebrities who adopt fad diets and bogus healing remedies, and then spread the nonsense around the world.

In 2010, many celebrities–including David Beckham, Robert De Niro, and Shaquille O’Neal–jumped on the “Power Balance” sports fad (don’t actually go to that website, it will make you stupider). This absurd system suggests that plastic bracelets and pendants with holograms will optimize the body’s natural energy flow because they’re “designed to resonate with and respond to the natural energy field of the body.”

Sigh, I suppose we actually have to say this: There is no way a hologram could change your athletic ability. The website doesn’t even try to explain the company’s “science.” But just so we cheapies don’t all go around strapping our credit cards to ourselves before a long run, Michael Blastland responded to a claim from Shaq ...

You Go, Girl—Female Students Who Bike or Walk Do Better on Tests

Jennifer Welsh — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:48:50 +0000

One more reason to dust off that bike: in a study of Spanish high schoolers, girls who biked to class scored better on school tests than those who commuted in a car or bus.

About 65 percent of the teens participating in the study (1,700) said they rode a bike or walked to school. When the researchers looked at the girls’ performance on tests of cognitive ability, they saw that active commuters averaged 53 points, about 4 points higher than girls who came by motor vehicle. And the longer their commute, the better the correlation, explains Reuters:

Girls whose active commute lasted longer than 15 minutes did better on the tests than girls who walked or biked for less than 15 minutes on their way to school—a sign the relationship between active commutes and test performance is real, [lead researcher Francois] Trudeau said. Indeed, the effect persisted even after the researchers accounted for age, body weight, social and economic status, and activities outside school.

Researchers think ...

Year’s Best Peer Review Comments: Papers That “Suck the Will to Live”

Jennifer Welsh — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:29:29 +0000

Peer review: love it or hate it, it’s an integral part of every scientist’s life. The reviews are usually kept secret, but the editors over at Environmental Microbiology like to give a little back during the holidays, and have gifted the internet with a list of some of their favorite quotes from peer reviews done this year:

Our referees, the Editorial Board Members and ad hoc reviewers, are busy, serious individuals who give selflessly of their precious time to improve manuscripts submitted to Environmental Microbiology. But, once in a while, their humour (or admiration) gets the better of them. Here are some quotes from reviews made over the past year, just in time for the Season of Goodwill and Merriment.

Here are some of our favorite catty reviewer quotes from this year’s list:

This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future. The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, ...

Mother’s Fatty Diet Makes Baby Monkeys Afraid of Mr. Potato Head

Jennifer Welsh — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:49:44 +0000

What monkey mothers eat has a large impact on how skittish their offspring act in stressful situations like stranger danger–or the presence of a Mr. Potato Head in their cage.

According to researchers, even normal monkeys find the toy’s large eyes to be “mildly stressful.” But baby monkeys from mothers who were fed a high-fat diet (over 35 percent of calories from fat, modeled after a typical American diet) had a much stronger reaction to an encounter with the spud man, and also spazzed in the presence of an unknown human.

The study, presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, found that in stressful situations, the female offspring were more anxious and the males more aggressive, explains LiveScience:

The babies of the moms on the fatty diet were overwhelmingly more freaked out by the toys and stranger, the researchers found. That was especially true of female monkeys, which were reluctant to approach the toys (although they responded eagerly to food). The male offspring of fatty-diet moms were more likely to behave aggressively, threatening the human intruder in the stranger test, ...

Movie Soundtracks Use Animal-Like Sounds to Tug on Your Emotions

Jennifer Welsh — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:29:36 +0000

You might not be able to pick them out, but in the hectic noisiness of a movie’s battle scene there are a few primordial sounds of distressed animals. These types of sounds are used by audio engineers, knowingly or not, to elicit emotional reactions from viewers, researchers have found.

The research, published in Biology Letters, studied the films for the presence of “nonlinear” sounds, which are frequently found in the animal kingdom as cries for help or warning signals. Our ears are tuned to pick out these types of sounds and our brains are primed to respond to them, which made Daniel Blumstein wonder if they were also being used to evoke emotion. Wired’s Brandon Keim explains:

The harshness and unpredictability of these sounds is thought to be a vocal adaptation fine-tuned for quickly capturing a listener’s attention. And if that’s true, then “we might expect them to be also used by film score composers and audio engineers to manipulate the emotions of those watching a film,” hypothesized University of California, Los Angeles biologist Daniel Blumstein and his Biology Letters co-authors.

The ...