Three million children in the United States take drugs for problems with focusing, and over half a million use antipsychotic medications.

Writing for Scientific American on May 14th, author John Horgan pointedly labeled this alarming trend as one of "science's ugliest experiments." He wrote:

American psychiatrists have been carrying out what is in effect an enormous clinical trial involving millions of children. Physicians are medicating children with stimulants such as Ritalin, antidepressants such as Prozac, anti-anxiety drugs such as Xanax, bipolar drugs such as lithium and antipsychotics such as Risperdal.

This perturbing situation is tied to a large rise in the diagnosis of conditions such as ADHD, autism, and other childhood mental disorders. Yet in all likelihood, our kids are not getting sicker, we're simply learning more about these medical conditions, and thus diagnosing them more often.


In 1994, new standards for identifying autism were released. Soon after, autism rates jumped from about one child in every 2,000-5,000 to one in every 100. And a recent Korean study shows the rate even higher, at one in 38! What's more, these rates will likely jump again soon. Dr. Allen Frances of the Duke University School of Medicine explains why:

The autism "epidemic" is set to spread further starting in May 2013, when the next revision of the diagnostic manual (DSM 5) will be published. The DSM 5 definition of an "autistic spectrum" will cast an even wider net, capturing many people now considered to be normal or to have another disorder. Their symptoms will not have changed - just the label.

It's good that more attention is being paid to disorders like autism, but many children are likely being wrongly diagnosed, and thus prescribed drugs with potentially adverse side effects whose long-term efficacy has yet to be substantiated.

This tendency to over-diagnose extends to ADHD. Two large studies, one conducted in the United States and another conducted in British Columbia, both discerned that the youngest children in their respective grades at school are far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Do many of them actually have the condition? Perhaps, but the likelier answer is no. They are simply younger and more immature than their other classmates.

And unfortunately, when the diagnosis is made, drugs are often prescribed all too easily, despite the fact that almost no studies have demonstrated their long-term effectiveness at improving peer relationships or easing behavior problems. Writing in the New York Times earlier this year, L. Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development, goes further:

...in 2009, findings were published from a well-controlled study that had been going on for more than a decade, and the results were very clear. The study randomly assigned almost 600 children with attention problems to four treatment conditions. Some received medication alone, some cognitive-behavior therapy alone, some medication plus therapy, and some were in a community-care control group that received no systematic treatment. At first this study suggested that medication, or medication plus therapy, produced the best results. However, after three years, these effects had faded, and by eight years there was no evidence that medication produced any academic or behavioral benefits.

Psychotropic medications are currently being prescribed wholesale to our nation's children. These drugs should be a last resort, not a first resort, especially when you consider that measures such as diet alteration and behavioral modification may be just as, if not more effective at treating certain conditions.

Growing up, I was always excited for summer because it meant that my birthday was approaching. I would usually have a party involving some kind of outside activity: camping in a tent or boating on the lake. In fact, research shows that your birth month may have many important effects on your childhood, besides just your choice in birthday party entertainment.

One study used mice to show winter babies may have a greater tendency towards neurological disorders like schizophrenia and seasonal effective disorder, possibly due to the amount of light during the season in which they first developed. Another study showed that people born in the winter seem to have more socioeconomic disadvantages, potentially because parents who can afford birth control are more likely to choose to have a baby in summer.

If you were born in the summer, the most immediate consequence of birth month is education--specifically entrance into kindergarten. Parents of summer babies have to make a tough choice: send their child to kindergarten at five so that they are the youngest in the class or hold them back until they are six so that they are the oldest in the class. Recently, more and more parents are choosing the latter.

The thing is, some parents (especially wealthy parents) hold their kids back simply to give them a competitive edge in sports and academics. For the 2006-2007 school year, about 7% of would-be kindergartners had parents who decided to hold them back another year. This practice is often called "redshirting," referring to a similar tactic used in college sports. As a summer-born child who started kindergarten at age five, I think "cheating" is a more suitable term.

It's true that redshirted kindergartners tend to perform better than their younger peers--at first. As the students get older, the gap quickly decreases and eventually disappears completely by eighth grade, if not sooner. While being older may be temporarily beneficial for older kindergartners, it has other unintended consequences for other students and the school system as a whole.

One side-effect of redshirting is how it changes students' perceived performance compared to their peers. According to one study, summer-born children sent to kindergarten at age five are more likely to repeat a grade or be diagnosed with mental conditions like ADD or ADHD. The researchers suggest that these trends may occur because the younger students they are unfairly compared to their much older classmates.
  
The study also showed that older kindergartners don't do better in school because of their age--they do better because they've had one more year to prepare for school. Therefore children from low-income families that typically don't invest much time in kindergarten preparation won't be helped by waiting another year. In fact, waiting for kindergarten may adversely affect these children. Not only will their families have to pay for an additional year of daycare, but if the students decide to drop out of high school they will have one less year of school under their belts.

Therefore, another unfortunate consequence of redshirting is that it widens the achievement gap due to socioeconomic differences. Students from low income families my seem academically inferior just because they are younger than the redshirted students. Even if the children aren't in the same classroom, there will probably still be a difference in test scores.

The funny thing is that summer birthdays are slightly more common than the other birthday months, which would imply that more parents have to decide whether to redshirt their kids. It doesn't take a wizard to figure out why there are lots of summer birthdays--simply subtract nine months and you'll find that these babies were conceived the dead of winter (when people are cold, bored, and stuck inside the house).

However, it may take a wizard to figure out exactly what to do about kindergarten competition and redshirted children. 

Photo: {{PD-US}}

You're running, running as fast as your legs will propel you. Three spectral figures chase after you, all of them hooded and cloaked. Jagged rocks and broken rubble litter the terrain. You're not sure how you got to this deserted, desolate cityscape, but you know you want to get out. Everything is so real. The dust below your feet crunches and gravel ricochets as you stampede across the tattered ground. The scene's colors are monotone, yet still eerily vibrant. Your pursuers are almost upon you. You can feel the scrape of their outstretched hands and hear the wheeze of their breathing. They've almost got you! You dodge to the side to escape their clutches and then...

...You wake up with your heart pounding and quickly whirl around to check for your pursuers. They're not there. Whew.

Vivid dreams are a double-edged sword. They can be extremely pleasurable, but they can also be terrifying to such a degree that they leave you mentally shaken and physically hyperventilating upon awakening.

Curiously, you may have noticed that drinking alcohol before going to sleep can produce a preponderance of dreams such as these. The evidence for this actually extends beyond the anecdotal. Allow me to explain.

Vivid dreams often occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a cycle characterized by quick, random movement of the eyes and elevated activity in the neurons of the cerebral cortex. We commonly spend about 20% of sleep in this cycle, the time spread over four to five separate bouts throughout a nightly slumber. The bouts of REM are short at first, and then grow longer in duration as sleep continues.

Intake of alcohol helps one to fall asleep faster, but it actually suppresses REM. Thus, someone who falls asleep under the influence will spend much of their slumber in slow-wave sleep, the stages right before REM.

But wait, if alcohol suppresses REM, and REM is they stage at which we vividly dream, then how can drinking induce vivid dreaming?  

Well, after four or five hours, your body will usually metabolize almost all of the alcohol in your system. Once this occurs, REM is no longer suppressed, and a "REM rebound" effect takes place. When our brains are deprived of REM sleep, even for only a matter of hours, they compensate by boosting the duration of REM sleep and increasing the ease at which we enter this phase.

During REM rebound, dreams can also be more intense. A 2005 study by Dr. Tore Nielson, director of the Dream and Nightmare Lab found that subjects deprived of REM sleep rated their dreams to be of higher quality.

And because this alcohol-induced REM rebound occurs during the latter half of our doze,and since we are easily aroused from REM sleep, we can often recall with lucid detail the vivid dreams from which we awake.

With this in mind, drink and dream at your own risk!

[It] begins in our sensory corridors... This emotional data funnels to the brain, exciting the left anterior temporal region in particular, then smolders to the surface of the face, where two muscles, standing at attention, are roused into action: The zygomatic major, which resides in the cheek, tugs the lips upward, and the orbicularis oculi, which encircles the eye socket, squeezes the outside corners into the shape of a crow's foot.

A smile is born.


Smiling, along with other facial expressions of emotion, appears to be innate, though this has actually been debated for some time. In 2008, a study of blind and sighted judo athletes brought some rather convincing evidence to bear. The researcher's analyzed over 4800 images taken at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games and found that both blind and sighted athletes utilized the same facial expressions in identical social contexts. Athletes that had won their matches were smiling, and those that were defeated displayed feelings of sadness with a down-turned mouth and raised inner eyebrows. The study demonstrated that even people who hadn't seen the correct facial expressions for certain emotions knew to use them.

Smiling may be innate, but it's actually a somewhat complex facial expression. Psychologist Paul Ekman of the University of California at San Francisco has cataloged seventeen different types of smiles! He's noted that smiles are highly dependent upon the expresser's base emotional state. Feelings such as embarrassment, happiness, deceit, and fear can all produce different variations of a smile.

The genuine smile, associated with contentment, is called the "Duchenne Smile." It's named for the French anatomist who discovered it, Guillaume Duchenne. This type of smile is not only thought to be an expression of happiness, it's also thought to engender the emotion, itself. In 1990, Ekman and colleagues Wallace Friesen and Richard Davidson found that "Duchenne smiles produced greater activity in the brain's left anterior temporal region, an area with clear connections to positive affect." A Ducheene smile is also accompanied by increased activity in the brain's reward circuitry. Thus, the combination of mirth and smiling almost seems to yield a positive feedback loop of positivity.

This effect has also been demonstrated in another, more "artificial" setting. In February 2009, scientists from Cardiff University administered an anxiety questionnaire to a group of 25 women, half of whom had been given botox injections that hindered their ability to frown. Writing for Scientific American, Melinda Wenner described their results:

The botox recipients reported feeling happier and less anxious in general; more important, they did not report feeling any more attractive, which suggests that the emotional effects were not driven by a psychological boost that could come from the treatment's cosmetic nature.

Smiling can also have other far-reaching effects besides just producing happiness. A study of 1,084 heterosexual men and women found that men consider women to be more attractive when they smile versus when they look proud or confident. Conversely, women considered men to be less attractive when smiling compared with when they adopted swaggering or even brooding poses.

Another study conducted by Dr. Paula Niedenthal found that humans may rely on mimicry to deduce whether a smile is fake or genuine. In the investigation, the research team showed pictures of people smiling to a group of student subjects, who were easily able to distinguish between the pictures of genuine smiles and fake smiles. Students were then asked to place a pencil between their lips. With the pencil inhibiting their ability to mimic, the students had a much more difficult time identifying types of smiles.

Smiling may perhaps be the most basic of all human expressions, but current research seems to show that it's much more than face value.

It's not a big secret that many Europeans are afraid of new, cutting-edge technologies. Microbiologist Dr. Anne Glover, the very first EU Science Adviser, affirmed this -- although she expressed it in a rather more diplomatic way in an interview with the journal Science.

However, there is reason for hope that things are about to change. On Monday, the European Food Safety Authority struck down a French ban on a strain of genetically modified corn produced by Monsanto. Their reason? "There is no specific scientific evidence, in terms of risk to human and animal health or the environment" to support a ban.

This is a really big step forward for a continent that, as of 2011, only had approved two genetically modified crops. (Compare that to 90 crops in the US and 28 in Brazil.)

The molecular biology community welcomes Europe to the 21st Century.

(This entry is cross-posted on the RealClearWorld Compass Blog.)

(Photo: Greenpeace)

The saying is complete rubbish of course. Humans judge people and objects on outward appearance all the time, and in some contexts, we're actually pretty good at it. For example, a study conducted in 2006 by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Santa Barbara found that women were very adept at judging a man's interest in children simply by looking at a photo of the man.

One setting where people often form preconceived notions about others is when driving. We take one look at the car's make and model, quickly observe driving style, and form our own rapid assumptions about the person behind the wheel. I often catch myself doing this. For example, I can't help but notice that the people who ride my rear bumper and blaze by on the freeway often drive BMWs, Mercedes, Lexuses, or other pricey vehicles, and those who are put-putting along at ten miles below the speed limit often drive minivans. From these observations, one (not me, of course!) might hastily deduce that the first category of drivers is comprised of rich, impatient snobs and the second category is made up of overly cautious wet blankets.


Personal anecdotes certainly aren't enough to make any definitive conclusions, yet I still wonder, can you really judge a person by the car they own and how they drive it?

One study, conducted in 2011 by researchers at Temple University, seems to indicate that its possible. By conducting over 400 behavioral surveys of men and women with an average age of 23.5, the researchers gleaned the following:

• People who perceive their car as a reflection of their self-identity are more likely to behave aggressively on the road and break the law.
• People with compulsive tendencies are more likely to drive aggressively with disregard for potential consequences.
• Increased materialism, or the importance of one's possessions, is linked to increased aggressive driving tendencies.
• Young people who are in the early stages of forming their self-identity might feel the need to show off their car and driving skills more than others. They may also be overconfident and underestimate the risks involved in reckless driving.
• Those who admit to aggressive driving also admit to engaging in more incidents of breaking the law.

Professor Ayalla Ruvio, the study's chief author, concluded that their findings support the notion of a strong link between cars and identity. Thus, our prejudgements of a person based upon their car and driving style may have some measure of legitimacy. 

This doesn't mean that we should be judging a driver by their car (because, let's be honest, it really isn't very nice), but it does mean that you don't have to feel quite so guilty when you crack a smile after watching this driver crash their Lamborghini.

One of your humble Newton correspondents (okay, it was me) was recently diagnosed with shingles -- that nasty, itchy, burning rash that only old people are supposed to get. Sure, your correspondent doesn't exercise as often as he should, and he doesn't eat exactly the way the Obama Administration wants him to, but overall, he's a relatively healthy 30-year-old. How could he come down with shingles? And what exactly causes shingles?

If you have ever had chickenpox, you are at risk of developing shingles. Chickenpox, a.k.a. varicella zoster virus, is a type of herpesvirus, specifically human herpesvirus-3 (HHV-3). Herpesviruses are famous for causing, you guessed it, herpes. And thanks to this television commercial, we know that moderately attractive people can take the anti-viral medication Valtrex to treat genital herpes... but there is no cure. (Or, as a microbiology professor I know once said, "Love is temporary, but herpes is forever.")

Why? Because herpesviruses set up shop in your nerve cells and never leave. Even after you clear the active infection, they hide in what is known as a latent infection. Every so often, the virus reactivates and reestablishes an active infection, often referred to as an "outbreak." People who have genital herpes regularly go through these active-latent cycles. (It should be pointed out that this active-latent infection model has come under serious attack recently.)

Being a herpesvirus, chickenpox behaves very similarly. After you clear the initial chickenpox infection, some viruses survive, forever, inside your nerve cells, and occasionally, they can reactivate. However, instead of causing chickenpox, they cause shingles. People in their 60s and older are most susceptible to shingles, and the average person (who had a prior chickenpox infection) has about a 30% lifetime risk of developing shingles.

But recently, scientists have noted that younger and younger people are suffering from shingles, and ironically, the chickenpox vaccine might be to blame.

It's hypothesized that people who have been previously infected with chickenpox benefit from being exposed to the chickenpox virus throughout their lives. For some reason, constant exposure to chickenpox might suppress shingles. But since children these days are being vaccinated against chickenpox, there is less chickenpox virus circulating in our communities. With less chickenpox around, those of us who were previously infected are no longer being exposed to the virus. And, for unknown reasons, this might trigger the latent virus inside our nerve cells to reactivate, causing shingles.

Is the hypothesis correct? Nobody knows. But if it is, then we can expect that more and more people in their 30s and 40s will succumb to shingles. So it might not be a bad idea to stock up on some calamine lotion, just in case.

I don't know about where you're from, but in Minnesota, dolphins are a pretty big deal. It might have something to do with how far we need to travel in order to see dolphins in the wild. Or it might just be that dolphins are really cool. Either way, you can imagine that when the Minnesota Zoo announced on Monday that our dolphins will be leaving for good, it was kind of a big deal.

The fuss was amplified by the fact that the Minnesota state government recently allocated $4 million to the zoo in order to refurbish the dolphin tank. In response to the uproar, the zoo's CEO, Lee Ehmke, later released a statement providing further explanation as to why the current dolphins have to leave and why there are no dolphins available to replace them.

Knowing I wasn't the only one still disappointed about the change, I decided to delve further into why our dolphin friends got the boot. After corresponding with Kevin Willis, the MN Zoo's Director of Bioprograms, I found out that the issue is a lot more complicated than I realized.

Willis said that the MN Zoo, belongs to a "Dolphin Consortium," which includes 25% of all U.S. facilities that house dolphins. Members of the Consortium work together to maintain a collective population of dolphins. Part of the Consortium's concern is to maintain genetic variance in the population.

"In brief, the Consortium is working to maintain genetic variation by preferentially breeding wild caught ("founder") animals to capture as much of their genetic (allelic) variation as possible," Willis told me. "We are also preventing the breeding of relatives using contraception and relocation."

As Willis explained, the Consortium's strategy involves loaning dolphins between zoos. That way every dolphin can be fit to a good social situation and can be bred to a genetically compatible mate. In fact, the two dolphins currently living at the Minnesota Zoo, Semo and Allie, aren't actually owned by that zoo.

While considerations of genetic variation didn't directly impact the MN Zoo's decision to send Semo and Allie away, genetic variation has impacted the zoo's past decisions.

A few years ago, the MN Zoo relocated the only dolphin they actually own, a female named Spree, to keep her from mating with her own dad. "She was on contraceptives so that she and Semo (her sire) would not produce an offspring, but of course we did want her to produce offspring. We moved her to a facility so that she could live with other females and not be with her sire," said Willis.

I think we all realize there are many reasons why incest is not a good habit for humans, but what exactly would be wrong with Spree getting together with Semo?

Willis explained that it comes down to heterozygosity, which is genetic variation at the individual level. "Inbreeding, the mating of related animals, results in a decrease in the heterozygosity of the offspring relative to the parents. That decrease in heterozygosity can lead to an increased incidence of congenital anomalies and poor health."

Heterozygosity often influences a zoo's decisions when breeding captive animals of all kinds. Unfortunately, some zoos intentionally breed relatives in order to produce offspring with rare features. White tigers, for instance, are so rare that they can only be produced through incest. As a result, many of these would-be majestic cats are born with less-than-regal deformities such crossed vision and facial deformities. Thankfully, in June 2011, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums published an official statement cracking down on this twisted practice.

Incest can even be a problem in wild animal populations, especially when meddling humans are involved. In Australia, Tasmanian devil populations have taken a dive due to a facial tumor disease. By hunting devils and killing them as pests, humans effectively exterminated a large chunk of the devils' genetic diversity.

The remaining devils were forced to inbreed, which gave them very similar immunological genes, leaving them open to the facial tumor disease. The disease is passed between devils through biting and is almost always fatal.

Moral of the story: no one, including animals, should breed with their relatives.  

Reading a scientific paper can, more often than not, suffice as a lesson in vocabulary. Scientists utilize a host of specialized jargon meant to describe in detail the intricate results of their work. For the most part, these terms merely serve to baffle the reader, but other times they invoke a more interesting response, one that goes a little something like, "You should be ashamed of yourself!" That's because some words used in science just sound dirty.

To weigh in on this trend, Newton contacted the fictitious Ms. Snooty McGrammarpants:

Perverted astronomers shouldn't be gazing at Uranus! Those grimy psychologists; how dare they study "crapulence?" And gross geologists; they try to tell us that subduction is the process by which one tectonic plate moves under another. Do they think we're stupid?

I, for one, won't stand for this vulgarity! "It's for science" is not an acceptable excuse!

Whoa there settle down, Ms. McGrammarpants. Scientists aren't out to pollute our vocabulary with indecent phrases. Allow me to clear the air around a few of these terms.

Formication. Not to be confused with "fornication," for one does not "formicate in bushes." The term is, however, used in medical settings to describe the sensation of insects crawling under the skin. Not too pleasant!

Mastication-Induced Arousal. Say that five times fast, just don't do it around your mother. However, if you choose to do so, just make sure that you hastily explain that the term actually is used to describe the beneficial cognitive effects of chewing.

Schist. If you're trying to cut down on your swearing, this might be a good word to adopt. Loudly exclaiming, "Oh, schist!" isn't profane at all. You're simply drawing attention to a group of medium-grade metamorphic rocks that are rich in lamellar minerals such as micas, chlorite, talc, and graphite.


Smegma. Okay, this may be the only naughty-sounding science word whose definition actually exacerbates the nastiness. Smegma is a combination of exfoliated skin cells, transudated oils, and moisture that appears on the male and female genitalia. As described by Fless, Hodges, and Van Howe in their aptly titled paper, "Immunological functions of the human prepuce:"

This natural emollient contains prostatic and seminal secretions, desquamated epithelial cells, and the mucin content of the urethral glands of Littré.

Ewwwww.

Antennating. Yes, yes, yes; I know it rhymes with penetrating and lubricating, but this term only illustrates how insects communicate by touching antennae. Think of it as shaking hands!

I hope you learned a little something from this list. I'm not sure, however, that it assuaged the repugnance of Ms. McGrammarpants. Oh well.

It's rare that I see something that simultaneously astonishes, horrifies, and humors me. Joss Whedon's recent genre-busting slasher flick, Cabin in the Woods, provoked this amalgamation of emotion, but a film like that doesn't come to theaters every year.

Then, the other day, I saw this report on my local news station that, for me, mixed the exact same cocktail of emotions:



For those of you not interested in watching the report, or its preceding advertisement, it covered the growing field of chiropractic care for babies. When watching the story, I was astonished at the fact that this is actually a profession, horrified at what was being done to the infant, and slightly humored because -- well -- it was a cute baby and it did some funny things in the video.

Now, I readily admit that I am not a fan of chiropractic care to begin with -- I firmly believe that it's a pseudoscience, as numerous systematic reviews have demonstrated. I also believe that there are better, less "woo" (thank you, Orac for the term) ways to alleviate the ailments supposedly treated with chiropractic care, by engaging in exercises that promote good posture and strengthen supporting bones and muscles, by seeking a trained, specialized physician with knowledge concerning the certain problem one is having, or by taking a Tylenol, for example.

However, despite my inherent bias against chiropractic care, I really have nothing against its use. A great many people appear to be satisfied or extremely satisfied with their manipulative treatments, so I see no reason to poo-poo on their placebo. If it works for them, great!

But, what I do find rather abhorrent is when innocent babies are exposed to this pseudoscience. The cartilaginous growth centers in the spines of infants are very vulnerable and simply should not be subject to spinal manipulation, no matter how gentle the manipulations may be.



I can abide chiropractic care when it is chosen freely by adults, but I draw the line when infants are involved. That's my opinion. What do you think?

Throughout history, humans have played diverse forms of hide and seek. From parents concealing Easter eggs for children to track down, to drug enforcement officers searching for illegal paraphernalia in a crack house, to a homeowner stashing away a lock box filled with valuables, all humans, at one time or another, engage in hiding objects or searching for them.

This actuality prompted University of Alberta researchers Eric Legge, Marcia Spetch, Andrew Cenkner, Vadim Bulitko, Craig Anderson, Matthew Brown, and Donald Heth to examine human hiding and seeking strategies in their study "Not All Locations Are Created Equal: Exploring How Adults Hide and Search for Objects," recently published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The researchers first aim was to examine the feasibility of utilizing virtual settings. To do this, they compared subjects' hiding and seeking strategies in both a real environment and a similar virtual environment, finding that strategies were nearly identical in both settings. Thus, the researchers determined that virtual environments can effectively simulate a real-world setting.


At this point, the researchers sought to delve a little deeper, specifically with regards to where humans are inclined to hide objects and where they tend to search for them.

In one experiment, the researchers asked subjects to examine a virtual setting and hide three objects in locations they thought would be most difficult for others to find. When subjects were searching for objects, researchers instructed them to select locations in the virtual environment that were most likely to contain a hidden object.

After conducting numerous trials with 394 participants, the researchers gleaned some interesting results. Most notably, they found that participants preferred different locations when hiding objects compared to when they were searching for them, despite the fact that the same subjects took part in both hiding and searching tasks. The researchers surmised that "people may apply a theory of mind and 'over think' where others might hide objects."

Overall, hiders tended to conceal objects in the center, "high visibility" areas of the virtual room, while searchers tended to be more drawn to look for hidden objects in dark or corner areas of the environment. Both searchers and hiders tended to avoid hiding or looking for objects near windows.

One limitation of the study was that it only took into account two environmental features, darkness and windows. Undoubtedly, other environmental characteristics, such as furniture, affect hiding and seeking preferences.

The researchers suggested that their methods be replicated in other varied settings, such as multiple-room or outdoor environments. They also indicated that their approach can be applied for further study in both police and military settings, such as when searching for improvised explosive devises or illegal contraband.

Citation: Legge ELG, Spetch ML, Cenkner A, Bulitko V, Anderson C, et al. (2012) Not All Locations Are Created Equal: Exploring How Adults Hide and Search for Objects. PLoS ONE 7(5): e36993. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036993

Hi, everybody; it's me, the Neutrino! Sorry I haven't taken time to speak with you lately, but I've been busy traveling at close to the speed of light. Oh what a wild ride it's been!


At first, I was rather surprised. Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity had stood untarnished for over a century, and now it seemed that I, the meager neutrino, had put a serious crack in its foundation. To be honest, I was skeptical that I had really traveled faster than light, but then the physicists at OPERA re-ran their experiment and discerned that I had once again broken the light barrier! Now even I was starting to get convinced.

Of course, my moment in the limelight abruptly ended in February when the scientists at CERN admitted that there appeared to have been some flaws with their original experiments. An optical fiber connection may have been faulty, and the oscillator used for Global Positioning System time synchronization could have been malfunctioning.

It's been over two months since this revelation, and it feels like I have been somewhat forgotten. Frankly, I'm feeling a little lonely, so I'm here to formerly introduce myself and say, "Hey! I'm still cool!"

First off, I come in three flavors that scientists are aware of -- electron, muon, and tau. (Note: Electron-flavored neutrinos aren't the same thing as electrons!) Tau is the biggest type of me by far -- about 3,500 times heavier than electron. Muon comes next; it's about 200 times heavier than electron. Overall, I'm very small relative to, well, most anything else in the universe. In fact, I'm so small that scientists didn't even think I had mass until 1998, over 42 years since I was formerly discovered!


Now that you know a little about me, if you don't mind, I'd like to mention some of my more interesting attributes. For instance, did you know that in every cubic meter of space, there are about 340 million of me? That means that there are approximately 30 million neutrinos like me inside every human being on Earth! (I hope this doesn't weird you out! I'm actually pretty harmless.)

Also, did you also know that I have no electric charge, and thus am not bound by electromagnetic forces? The only things that hinder me are gravity and the weak nuclear force. This may sound somewhat boring, but it means that I can easily pass through a lead wall or even the entire Earth like an animal walking through a watery mist! If that's not weird enough for you, I might even be my own antiparticle!

I've also been around for a long, long, long, long time. Physicists estimate that I came into existence mere milliseconds after the Big Bang!

Though my faster-than-light hype seems to have diminished, physicists are still conducting amazing research on me everyday! In March, researchers at Fermilab used me to send a message through the ground for the first time. I'm also being used at the South Pole to detect exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and other cataclysmic astronomical phenomena. 

Pretty cool, huh?

Recently, a certain virus has the scientific community in an uproar. The culprit, H5N1, is the virus that causes the bird flu. H5N1 is usually only transferred from birds to humans, but two teams of researchers decided to try and manipulate the virus so that it could theoretically be transferred from human to human.

The task turned out to be pretty simple, with only four mutations required to make the virus spreadable between ferrets (a commonly-used model for humans). The whole controversy arose when the researchers tried to submit their findings for publication. When it heard wind of the studies, the U.S. government became concerned that bio-terrorists could use the information to threaten public safety.

After much debate and deliberation, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, supported by the government, recommended that the articles be published without the important methods and data. Last week, Nature decided to publish one of the articles independently of the board's decision.

While the research community primarily deals with pathological viruses like H5N1, popular culture has come up with several additional uses for the microorganisms.  In fact, alternative uses for viruses are very prevalent in mainstream media and the entrainment industry. The question is, are the references based in science?

Computer viruses

Although the metaphor can only stretch so far, it seems that computer viruses are aptly named. Biological viruses are small pieces of DNA or RNA that are injected into living cells, while computer viruses are small pieces of software that latch onto an existing program or document. But both kinds of viruses lack the ability to replicate themselves, so they use their hosts' resources to replicate, spread, and cause harm to the host from the inside.

One important difference between biological and computer viruses is that computer viruses are man-made while biological viruses come about through natural selection. This means that biological viruses (like the bird flu virus) undergo mutations, while a computer virus code stays the same as it is passed between computers.

Continuous advances in technology might facilitate interactions between computer viruses and the human body. If implanted electronic devices, like pacemakers, were "infected" with computer viruses, the devices could cause harm to the people who have them.

Internet ideas "going viral"

The term "viral" actually came from another term commonly seen on the internet: "meme." When you see this term, you might think of internet memes like LOLcats, Philosoraptor, or Condescending Wonka. But actually there's a more general definition.

Essentially, theorists say that a meme is the most basic unit of culture. If you were to dissect culture down to its fundamental building blocks, you would find that its made up of many small ideas, which are called memes.

A theory called memetics came up when researchers decided to study the evolution of memes--or how memes behave like genes. Memes are spread from brain to brain in the same way DNA is spread by viruses. Like viral DNA, memes also change and evolve as they propagate, and if they don't keep spreading they might die. However, memetics has been contested by some who think the meme can't be categorized, and by some who say it deviates from the original idea of the meme.

Viruses in the movies

Basically, movies about viruses portray exactly what challengers to the bird flu article publications are afraid of. Movies like I am Legend, 28 Days Later, and Contagion, show what might happen if enemies used a viral plague to take over the world. Possibly because this catastrophe has never actually happened, movie-goers seem to be absolutely fascinated by the idea.

The most recent virus-related movie, Contagion, seems to have a firm basis in science. In an interview with io9, the movie's screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, tells how he relied heavily on input from virologist and epidemiologists from the Center for Disease Control. Some scenes in the movies were even shot at the CDC's facility.

In fact, the CDC seems to be doing everything it can to increase its popular appeal. Last year, a CDC blogger wrote a post about how to survive a zombie apocalypse. And actually, as the article suggests, a zombie attack bears a lot of resemblance to a virus outbreak.

So I would suggest reading up on the CDC's helpful tips, just in case we are overridden by zombies or (God forbid) virulent ferrets. 

Bacteria are everywhere; in, on and around us. They pervade every part of your day, beginning right from the moment that you wake up...

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP CRASH

The sound of your alarm clock being thrown against the wall is jolting to the senses, but it's still far more pleasant than the sound of the alarm, itself. In a daze on account of your sudden arousal, you scramble out of bed and examine the victimized clock. No lasting damage. Darn...

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, you smack your lips and wet your dry mouth with saliva. The sourness you taste is due to a build-up of bacteria at the back of your tongue. When awake, your saliva -- which contains a bacteria-killing enzyme called lysozyme --  restricts this growth. But when asleep, saliva production is significantly ramped down, allowing foul-tasting bacteria to grow relatively unchecked.

After freshening up in the shower and getting dressed, your thoughts turn to the rumbling in your tummy. Your appetite, which is often affected by the trillions of resident bacteria in your stomach, is ravenous.

Sifting through the pantry and refrigerator, you select a tasty combination of breakfast foods -- yogurt and granola -- and blend them in a bowl. Each spoonful of the delicious concoction delivers a dose of friendly probiotics, including Lactobacillus bulgaris, Streptococcus thermophilus, and Bifidus regularis. These, and other strains of bacteria, may help lower blood pressure, treat diarrhea, improve immune function, and potentially even provide a boost to your metabolism.


When finished with breakfast, you casually drop the dirty bowl into the kitchen sink, where it will accumulate countless numbers of bacterial residents by the evening. And when you use your worn kitchen sponge to clean the bowl at the end of the day, each milliliter of fetid water you squeeze out will contain up to ten million bacteria!

After breakfast, your next notable brush with bacteria will arise from your toothbrush. That's because every time you flush the toilet, it releases an aerosol spray of miniscule water droplets -- almost "like the Fourth of July" -- which can spread about 6-8 feet from the source. If your toothbrush is within range, fecal bacteria will latch on.

Fed, freshened, and fully attentive, you stroll out the door. A spring rain fell overnight, leaving traces of wetness on the ground and a musky, yet reinvigorating aroma in the air. That bracing smell is produced from the Actinobacteria that inhabit the soil, specifically a type of chemical called "geosmin".

After inhaling and exhaling a lungful of the crisp morning air, you head off to your next destination. Whether that destination is work, school, the grocery store, or pretty much anywhere, more bacteria will undoubtedly be waiting.

But don't be afraid, bacteria and humans have coexisted and competed for eons. It's just the world we live in.

April showers have given way to... May showers and thunderstorms. With all the electricity in the air, it is natural to ask, "Can I use this stuff to power my hairdryer?" Famous madman genius Nikola Tesla certainly pondered this idea.

It's commonly accepted that two things will survive the apocalypse: cockroaches and Cher. Cockroaches are believed to have survived on Earth for well over 300 million years (longer than the dinosaurs), can live without their heads for up to a month, and can withstand a 1,000 rad dose of radiation (more than ten times that of humans, though actually less than the forgotten flour beetle, which can survive a dose of up to 100,000 rads). As for Cher, after numerous plastic surgeries she has evolved into an indestructible, bionic super-life form more than capable of surviving till the end of eternity.

The noble cockroach and the cyborg Cher have comprised this mythical list of apocalypse survivors for decades, yet I wonder, is there something else we can add?


Last week, the above picture surfaced on message boards and blogs around the internet. It depicts a variety of fast food meals purchased a little over two years ago, each looking just as mouthwatering as the day the were served. This is somewhat staggering, but it's not quite as staggering as 2008's twelve year-old burger. These examples beg the obvious question: Can fast food survive the apocalypse?

The simple answer is no. Like the vast majority of organic matter, a hamburger will be either obliterated by raging torrents of fire, pulverized by monstrous tidal waves, or consumed by one of the Four Horsemen for a quick lunch before the ensemble finishes up wiping Switzerland off the face of the planet.

"The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons."                                                                           
                   
That weighty line may have been questionably true in 1992, but it's definitely true now. In 2011, humans were estimated to create and store approximately 1.8 zettaybtes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) of information! Whoa. That's crazy.

Yeah... so what the heck does that even mean? Well, it first requires a simple realization.

All that information you consume on your smartphone, your tablet, or your computer, it's not some immaterial, transfixing light show. What you see, it's real. It takes up physical space.

Almost all of the data that graces your glossy touch screen is stored in and transmitted from massive data centers all around the world. Trekking inside one of these computational behemoths is like taking a trip inside the brain of Technology, itself. All around you, fans whir and lights radiate a soft, otherworldly blue glow. The aisles upon aisles of rack-mounted servers are like the brain's lobes. Protruding cables connect the servers and fire blasts of information, like neurons.


It's difficult to calculate the exact number of data centers worldwide, but one estimate from Emerson Networks puts their number at 509,147. For some perspective, that means they take up 285,831,541 square feet of space, or about 5,955 football fields.

That may seem like a lot -- and it is -- but it could be a whole lot more. In the last decade, the storage capacity of the average server has increased 45 times!

But data centers don't just occupy space; they utilize an incredible amount of energy. In 2005, data centers consumed about one percent of the world's electricity, and required seventeen one-gigawatt power plants to remain operational.

Statistics like these currently beg the rapt attention of numerous companies building new data centers to meet the demands of Tweeters, bloggers, home moviemakers, Facebookers and e-consumers everywhere. 

Facebook recently opened its new data center in Forest City, North Carolina, and touts it as one of the most energy efficient in the world. Apple has announced plans for its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, complete with fuel cells and solar panels to supply about 60% of the facility's 20-megawatt energy demand. Data centers are also cramming larger and larger capacity servers into tighter and tighter clusters and making use of virtualization.

All of this is good news, because the world's total amount of computer data is on pace to double every two years. The future of our global society and economy appears to be based upon creating and consuming massive amounts of data. We're going to need to put it somewhere.

When you look at a letter or number, is there a specific color that comes to mind? Do you think of the same color each time you see the letter or number? If so, you may belong to a lucky fraction of the population with a neurological condition called synesthesia, which I suspect may be a superpower.

People with synesthesia (or synesthetes) have different brains from the rest of us mere mortals. They have extra connections between brain regions so that perception in one region can stimulate another. The effect, in my opinion, is amazing.

Although the color association with numbers and letters is probably most common, synesthesia can take may forms. Instead of color, some people ascribe personalities to written figures. Others syntesthetes get specific tastes in their mouth when they hear or read spoken language. As if that isn't cool enough, some people with synesthesia have crazy good memories and many are more artistic than the general population.

On a sweltering summer's eve lit faintly by the glow of the setting sun, there's naught more refreshing than a light summer rain. As dusk turns to dark, reinvigoration becomes relaxation as the soft pitter-patter of raindrops on windows ease the transition from wakefulness into a restful night's sleep.

What can we thank for picturesque moments of precipitation like this one? Give your gratitude to evaporation and cloud formation, but don't forget bacteria.

That's right, bacteria.

A growing agglomeration of research is now showing that bacteria whipped up into the sky by winds can play a central role in forming snowflakes, raindrops, and hail across the globe.

For years, atmospheric scientists have understood that precipitation is formed when microscopic water droplets from clouds latch on to tiny dust particles. The water freezes around these ice nuclei, which then fall to Earth as rain, snow, or hail. But increasingly over the past four years, scientists are finding that bacteria, often Pseudomonas syringae, frequently play an identical role as dust particles in producing precipitation.

One of these scientists is University of Wyoming professor Gary Franc. From Storm Peak Laboratory, resting atop 10,500 foot Mount Werner in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, Franc literally spends his days up in the clouds studying precipitation-causing bacteria at the source.

"I'm sure there's a whole ecosystem in the sky going on that we are just getting an inkling about," he recently told the Laramie Boomerang.

Franc has also built further upon the mounting evidence that these bacteria actually enable water molecules to solidify above their normal freezing temperature. The organisms accomplish this by using a special substance that binds water molecules in an orderly arrangement conducive to forming ice particles.

"Basically, these bacteria have proteins that line up water molecules that mimic the crystalline structure of ice," Franc told the Laramie Boomerang.

Franc, and other scientists like Montana State University's David Sands and Louisiana State University's Brent Christner, all believe that research into these "rain-making" bacteria may furnish knowledge that could eventually aid drought-stricken areas across the globe.

The research could also be used to modify the good old idiom, "When it rains, it pours."

Because when it rains, it occasionally pours bacteria.

(Image: Bob Jones, Geograph)

Mistakes, blunders, gaffes, errors: we all make 'em, scientists included. Mistakes aren't bad, especially when they occur in the pursuit of understanding. For in making them, something is learned, and a new path may become clear.

But touchy sentiments aside, some mistakes are incredibly humorous, which makes them rather enjoyable to expose. In addition, I think it's fair to say that any hilarity is exacerbated when the blunder occurs by a scientist. When learned marble men and women mess up, the results can provide a certain jocular satisfaction to us mere mortals.

Take, for example, the events of two weeks ago, where Chechen scientists were absolutely ecstatic when they discovered perhaps the largest dinosaur eggs ever found. Containing roughly 40 eggs, the cache was believed to date back around 60 million years. The scientists tempered their excitement to some degree, however, saying that they were "90% sure" of their discovery.

This reservation proved to be wise; because two days later, a prominent Russian paleontologist examined the evidence and said that the eggs weren't eggs at all... they were rocks. Which, I suppose, is a pretty easy mix-up to make.


Scientists examining un-fossilized remnants of life have also been known to commit comical blunders. In 1996, a world-class team of scientists was assembled to study whether mad cow disease had infected British sheep at the end of the 1980s when they were fed the same contaminated feed as cattle. After five years of research and £217,000 spent, the team concluded their work when they discerned a monumental discovery: They had been mistakenly examining cow brains instead of sheep brains the entire time. Whoops.

But enough picking on poor scientists, after all, there are many grander and better-known scientists to jape at, like Carl Sagan! In 1983, Sagan, one of the most respected scientists and educators of the last century, co-authored an article in Science on the dangers of nuclear winter. The piece reported that a nuclear war would create a huge plume of dust, effectively blocking out the sun and sending the Earth spiraling into an ice age. But seven years later, Sagan penned another article in Science, this time admitting that the conclusions of his earlier article were flawed. As it turned out, an all-out nuclear war could probably only reduce average temperatures by up to 36 degrees in the northern climes. As Judith Newman jokingly remarked in Discover Magazine, "The chilling effect, in other words, would be more of a nuclear autumn."

Scientists' gears of thought are constantly grinding in the search for knowledge and the quest to make the world a better place. Mistakes have been, and will be, made along the way. Some of these are minor and can easily be made light of. For example, educational researchers at the University of Saskatchewan once used a logo of three-interconnected cogs to symbolize cooperative learning and how students can work together. The irony here is that three interconnected gears won't move -- they'll be deadlocked and static. Not exactly a great metaphor for learning.


But other scientific mistakes are major and consequential. The Challenger explosion and Fukushima-Daiichi come to mind. From these, we must learn, adjust, and advance, not languish in a state of fear and uncertainty. After all, as the Greek thinker Plutarch once said, "To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future."

How is this possible when we humans can barely travel a few miles without getting lost? We have known for years birds are able to sense and follow the Earth's natural magnetic field; this is the very same field that makes compasses work. (Compasses being those old-fashioned GPS units that don't bark orders at you.) Research published in the past week shows that some migratory birds have specific neuronal pathways in their brains that are highly sensitive to magnetic fields. This then, is the brief answer: they map the earth by its magnetic field.

Bugs like ants, bees, wasps, and termites are about as ubiquitous as they come. They're everywhere; on the ground, in your food, within the walls of your house eating away your floorboards.

So what is it that makes these eusocial insects so darned  annoying successful? Actions such as cooperative care of young and participation in common defense are two key contributors, but there is another, not quite so apparent behavioral trait that plays a big role in these creatures' prevalence. It's their advanced "undertaking" behavior -- in other words -- how they treat their dead.

Over time, eusocial bugs have developed sophisticated responses to dealing with their deceased mates. This is vital to the health and fitness of the entire colony because it guards against the spread of dangerous pathogens.

These undertaking behaviors were the focus of a recent study appearing in the online open-access journal PLoS ONE. In their study, "Do Termites Avoid Carcasses? Behavioral Responses Depend on the Nature of the Carcasses," researchers Kok-Boon Neoh, Beng-Keok Yeap, Kunio Tsunoda, Tsuyoshi Yoshimura, and Chow-Yang Lee of Universiti Sains Malaysia and Kyoto University brought four different species of subterranean termite into the lab and examined their responses to the introduction of termite carcasses in varying forms of putrefaction.

Previous research demonstrated that termites tend to be necrophobic in nature -- they avoid dead bodies, but the new study found that termites engage in numerous, complex behaviors in handling their dead, not all of them exactly very ceremonious.

When worker termites detected a carcass introduced by researchers, their first response was to immediately evacuate the area and recruit other, unexposed workers to return to the site and examine the carcasses.

Once this action occurred, behaviors varied distinctly between the separate species of termite. Two of the species swiftly returned to the site, where they immediately began grooming the carcasses. The researchers theorized that termites groomed the carcasses to discern the viability for cannibalization, as many of the groomed carcasses were dragged off and consumed.

Other termite species were slightly more "respectful" of their dead, electing instead to bury the carcasses by walling off the locations where they were discovered.

Adding to the complexity of their behaviors, the cannibalization-prone termite species consumed freshly deceased carcasses and chose to bury those that had been dead for longer durations of time, usually 3-7+ days. For termites, necrophagy -- feeding on carrion -- serves as an excellent source of dietary nitrogen, but this act has to be appropriately carried out, because consuming older carcasses potentially infected with pathogens and overgrown with fungus would be hugely detrimental to the colony's collective health.

Over time, humans have established highly advanced methods of handling our deceased in a respectful and sanitary fashion. Examining termites' sophisticated, albeit slightly less reverent undertaking behaviors, goes to show how ecologically essential these behaviors truly are to highly social and population-concentrated species.
 

Citation: Neoh K-B, Yeap B-K, Tsunoda K, Yoshimura T, Lee C-Y (2012) Do Termites Avoid Carcasses? Behavioral Responses Depend on the Nature of the Carcasses. PLoS ONE 7(4): e36375. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036375