Best. Methodology. Ever.
by Ethan on April 29th, 2009
Dr. Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth in the UK, has found some, er, interesting ways to study human’s visceral responses to our thoughts and emotions. Specifically, she’s recently headed up two studies on the link between moral judgement and disgust. As I understand it (and I mostly don’t, as there are no plants or fungi involved), her work suggests our sense of morality is closely tied to, perhaps evolved out of, our sense of disgust. Which, when you think about it, makes sense–morality is deeply ingrained in our psyche, it had to come out of something less abstract, and we’re often viscerally disgusted when faced with something morally repugnant. The trick, though, is separating the two.
And that’s where the fun starts. In order to separate respondent’s moral judgment from their sense of disgust, the research team came up with sets of moral conundra to present to participants, while physically grossing them out in a variety of effective, but morally neutral ways. For example:
A team led by Simone Schnall asked students walking outside on a college campus to answer questions about scenarios like this, rating them on a scale of 1 (extremely immoral) to 7 (perfectly okay). The catch was that they had rigged a trash can near the experimenters’ desk with fart spray. Some respondents read and rated the stories in the presence of a mild stink (four sprays of fart scent), some had a strong scent (eight sprays), and a lucky third group completed the experiment with no scent at all.
See kids, science is fun! In addition to using lab-grade fart spray, they tried a variety of other ways toset off subjects internal gross-o-meter: having them answer the questionairre in a dirty, sticky office piled high with empty pizza boxes, making them watch a ‘disgustng’ movie first, or asking them to recall a disgusting memory. They all worked–when people were grossed out, they judged the charachters in the researcher’s morality thought-experiments more harshly.
And what were these fictional people up to? Breaking and bending a wide variety of taboos: keeping money from a found wallet, filming people without their consent, killing one person to save 5, having children with their cousins, and masturbating with kittens. Yes, I said masturbating with kittens. As in:
Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?
Needless to say, folks who had just been fumigated with canned fart were in no mood to be lienient toward hypothetical kitten fetishists.
Adorable Bioluminescent Puppies will Haunt your Dreams
by Ethan on April 23rd, 2009
Researchers in South Korea have cloned a beagle, complete with an added gene that makes the dog glow bright red under UV light. Why? Well, it’s mostly a proof-of-concept; bioluminescence genes are commonly used as markers in genetic research, since they’re fairly easy to work with and can be added without interfering with other cell functions. Head researcher Byeong-Chun Lee (his name may be familiar, as he was caught falsifying results in other cloning studies) says this is the first step toward engineering dogs that are better subjects for human disease studies. Which, frankly, sounds a lot less cute than glow-in-the-dark labrodoodles. 
Increased CO2 Fuels Poison Ivy Growth: I Guess We Kinda Had This Coming
by Ethan on April 23rd, 2009
So, when I first learned about global warming in 3rd grade or so, I figured it just meant that everywhere on Earth would get a little hotter. That was bad enough, since I grew up in the southeastern US where summers were already hot enough to make the backs of your hands sweat, and snow was a rare treat.
Of course, it’s not that simple–”Global Warming” got renamed ‘Global Climate Change” for a reason. Rising sea levels, coral reef bleaching, droughts, unusually cold winter storms, bizarre urban tornadoes–there’s a whole cornucopia of ripple effects, many of which are obvious in hindsight, but weren’t at the top of the common-sense list of things global climate change might do.
Now we can add healthier, itchier poison ivy to the shit list:
…carbon dioxide is, basically, plant food. I’m told that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere affect different plants in different ways, but poison ivy is definitely one of the winners of global warming. For this unpleasant little weed, more CO2 seems to mean more growth.
…not only is poison ivy growing fat and happy on the spoils of our carbon emissions, but that plants getting more CO2 also produce more, and stronger, levels of urushiol—the toxin that makes the ivy so darned appealing to begin with.
All I have to add is: That fucking sucks.
When Science meets Drinking
by Ethan on January 12th, 2009
Man, this made me happy. Spagghetilogic got bored over the holidays, and fed a bunch of cocktail recipes into PLYLIP to get a genuine phylogenetic tree, treating each ingredient as a gene or marker. What’s interesting is that there are a couple of cases of convergent evolution, mimicry, and so forth.
To wit:
Note that you can make out several different “kingdoms” of drinks after a close look at the tree. I can make out the Gin kingdom, the Orange Juice kingdom, and the Amaretto kingdom, for starters. Then we have the outliers, like a 110 in the Shade, which nobody in his right mind would drink. These are the platypuses and slime molds of the drink world.
Makes me wan to mix up a bunch of these to study their, err, gross morphology.
Bees like drugs too
by Ethan on December 26th, 2008
So, apperently, if you give honeybees cocaine, they will go back to their hives and totally bullshit about how great their latest pollen find was, via waggle-dance.
Also, the strongest pot has gotten about 3 times more potent in the last 20 years, but it hasn’t come close to the 30x increase in potency former drug czar John Walters tried to claim in 2002, presumably to scare aging hippies into believing today’s super-weed is a <i>totally different</i> and <i>way more dangerous</i> drug than the ‘reefer’ of which they have fond, blurry memories.
More Fawning over Political Appointments
by Ethan on December 26th, 2008
Ok, I promise this will be the last one. Probably.
Anyway, the scientific gossip mill (yes, there is one, so stop snickering) has it that Obama will appoint John Holdren as his top scientific adviser. From Wired Science:
Holdren, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and former director of the Woods Hole Research Center, is best-known for his outspoken views on climate change, energy and government.
“The ongoing disruption of the Earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable,” he wrote in October in Scientific American. “To achieve a better-than-even chance of not exceeding that figure, human emissions must start to decline soon, falling to about half of today’s level by 2050 and further thereafter.”
Lookin’ good. He’s all over environmental policy, and he at least says serious stuff about climate change. Plus, he should have an easier go of it that this poor bastard had under Bush. (also, what is it with presidents picking laser experts for high-level policy jobs? Is it just because lasers are badass, or is there some sort of relevence I’m missing here?
Snowmen Gone Wild
by Ethan on December 26th, 2008
This is utterly off-topic, but I did really enjoy the Smithsonian’s history of snowmen as pop-cultural icons for smoking, drinking and advertising laxatives. Be sure to check out the accompanying photo gallery for plenty of images of happy children assaulting snow-cops. Consider this my official holiday post.
h/t Boingboing.
Midnight Regulations: Not just for HHS Anymore
by Ethan on December 20th, 2008
Though Bush had done enough damage with the Amish Busdriver Rule (h/t Rachel Maddow), barring hospitals from booting workers who refuse on religious grounds to to the jobs they were hired to do? Well, there’s more. Cara at Feministe has a whole round-up of other on-the-table changes, including gutting the endangered species act, allowing coal mines to dump into rivers, upping logging, fucking up family medical leave, allowing more domestic spying, and paring back limits on lead and other pollutants.
This is fucking bad, folks.
Bloggers 1, Evolutionary Psycology 0
by Ethan on December 18th, 2008
Thomas at the Yes Means Yes blog has the tidiest take-down I’ve ever seen of human sexual selection psudoscientific fairytales, and mainstream media reposting thereon:
I give you this. Apparently, men are “hardwired” to spend to attract mates because, somehow, some pre-consumer society behavior that developed before agriculture magically transmogrified directly to behavior at the mall. And the scientists are in no way simply imposing a “just-so story” on their observations. At least not any more so than is standard in their field.
This is worthless in and of itself. People who don’t understand science tell us something about the findings of a discipline that is pseudoscience.
The intro, though, is what cracked me up:
We all know the stereotype: the “goldthrower.” The guy who spends profligately looking to attract female partners, whether he can afford it or not.
Wait … did you miss that one? Me too.
But we all know what a “golddigger” is.
But, while we’re neologizing, (look! I verbed!), I’d like to cast my vote for ‘goldflinger’ instead. I think it comes closer to matching the indignity implied by ‘golddigger.’
It’s not like there’s no value in trying to suss out how humans pick who we make babies with, or how that’s shaped human evolution. But there seem to be a couple big flaws in the reasoning the researchers (or the journalists reporting, to be fair, I can’t seem to find the original journal article anywhere handy) apply to modern dating, let alone the way they assume that human mating strategies have remained fixed, with only the tactics shifting to match current culture.
I mean, really, who believes that sleeping with more people equals having more babies these days? Shit, the more people I sleep with, the more careful I am to avoid makin’ the babies. And I’m sure lots of women and men are out there doing the same–using condoms like flac jackets when we’re single, letting the BC slip when having a kid would be more of a surprise than an accident. Second, assuming that today’s conspicuous consumerism is directly decended from cave men giving cave women cave jewlery to get in their cave pants is, well, fucking stupid. In a society where women gather the large bulk of everyone’s calories, gifts of food would be more of a gesture than a survival aid. Money didn’t exist for the bulk of human history. And today, men who get laid more buy what, supposedly? Doesn’t say. Gifts for women? Fancy status-symbol possessions for themselves? Paying off medical bills? Supporting their aging parents? Student loans? Supporting their meth habit? Don’t those things sound kinda…different to you, in terms of whether or not someone’s spending to get laid?
Good News and Bad News
by Ethan on December 13th, 2008
Bush is trying to tack a loophole onto the Endangered Species Act on his way out the door. Meanwhile, Obama’s (likely) picks for Secretary of Energy, head of the EPA, and the new ‘Energy Czar’ position suggest we’ll be seeing a science-and-reality-ward shift in environmental and energy policy. If anyone out there has a time machine, please go ahead and fast-forward to Jan. 20th before Bush can do any damage.
(And thanks to Rachel Maddow for dubbing the proposed HHS regulation the Amish Busdriver Rule: extending freedom of religion to protect folks who take jobs and then refuse on religious grounds to do tasks central to that job.)