Sexy red one, male brain zero

Now I have even less to say when someone tells me men think only with the trouser titan.

Red Enhances Men's Attraction To Women, Psychological Study Reveals

 

Psychologist Daniel Niesta holding one of the images used in the study. Participants were asked questions including: "Imagine that you are going on a date with this person and have $100 in your wallet. How much money would you be willing to spend on your date?"' (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Rochester)

ScienceDaily (Oct. 28, 2008) — A groundbreaking study by two University of Rochester psychologists to be published online Oct. 28 by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology adds color—literally and figuratively—to the age-old question of what attracts men to women.

Through five psychological experiments, Andrew Elliot, professor of psychology, and Daniela Niesta, post-doctoral researcher, demonstrate that the color red makes men feel more amorous toward women. And men are unaware of the role the color plays in their attraction.

The research provides the first empirical support for society's enduring love affair with red. From the red ochre used in ancient rituals to today's red-light districts and red hearts on Valentine's Day, the rosy hue has been tied to carnal passions and romantic love across cultures and millennia. But this study, said Elliot, is the only work to scientifically document the effects of color on behavior in the context of relationships.

"It's only recently that psychologists and researchers in other disciplines have been looking closely and systematically at the relationship between color and behavior. Much is known about color physics and color physiology, but very little about color psychology," said Elliot. "It's fascinating to find that something as ubiquitous as color can be having an effect on our behavior without our awareness."

Although this aphrodisiacal effect of red may be a product of societal conditioning alone, the authors argue that men's response to red more likely stems from deeper biological roots. Research has shown that nonhuman male primates are particularly attracted to females displaying red. Female baboons and chimpanzees, for example, redden conspicuously when nearing ovulation, sending a clear sexual signal designed to attract males.

"Our research demonstrates a parallel in the way that human and nonhuman male primates respond to red," concluded the authors. "In doing so, our findings confirm what many women have long suspected and claimed – that men act like animals in the sexual realm. As much as men might like to think that they respond to women in a thoughtful, sophisticated manner, it appears that at least to some degree, their preferences and predilections are, in a word, primitive."

To quantify the red effect, the study looked at men's responses to photographs of women under a variety of color presentations. In one experiment, test subjects looked at a woman's photo framed by a border of either red or white and answered a series of questions, such as: "How pretty do you think this person is?" Other experiments contrasted red with gray, green, or blue.

When using chromatic colors like green and blue, the colors were precisely equated in saturation and brightness levels, explained Niesta. "That way the test results could not be attributed to differences other than hue."

In the final study, the shirt of the woman in the photograph, instead of the background, was digitally colored red or blue. In this experiment, men were queried not only about their attraction to the woman, but their intentions regarding dating. One question asked: "Imagine that you are going on a date with this person and have $100 in your wallet. How much money would you be willing to spend on your date?"

Under all of the conditions, the women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors. When wearing red, the woman was also more likely to score an invitation to the prom and to be treated to a more expensive outing.

The red effect extends only to males and only to perceptions of attractiveness. Red did not increase attractiveness ratings for females rating other females and red did not change how men rated the women in the photographs in terms of likability, intelligence or kindness.

Although red enhances positive feelings in this study, earlier research suggests the meaning of a color depends on its context. For example, Elliot and others have shown that seeing red in competition situations, such as written examinations or sporting events, leads to worse performance.

The current findings have clear implications for the dating game, the fashion industry, product design and marketing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081028074323.htm

more ironies: skin moisturizing cream makes skins dryer

hmm, expected i guess? just like taking medicine, or painkillers, the more you take, the less your body is adapted to it.

Skin Creams Can Make Skin Drier

ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2008) — Many people have noticed that as soon as you start using a skin cream, you have to continue with it; if you stop lubricating, your skin becomes drier than when you started. And now there is research to confirm for the first time that normal skin can become drier from creams.

Izabela Buraczewska presents these findings in the dissertation she is publicly defending at Uppsala University in Sweden on October 24.

The findings in Izabela Buraczewska’s dissertation confirm what many have suspected: creams can make the skin drier. She has studied what happens in the skin at the molecular level and also what positive and negative effects creams have on the skin. Her research shows that differences in the pH of creams do not seem to play any role.

Different oils were also studied in a seven-week treatment period, but no difference was established between mineral oil and a vegetable oil. Both oils resulted in the skin being less able to cope with external stresses. Treatment with a more complex cream compound, however, resulted in more resistant skin with no signs of dryness.

Tissues samples taken from the treated skin areas also show that the weakening of the skin’s protective barrier can be tied to changes in the activity of certain genes involved in producing skin fats, among other functions. The conclusion is that the contents of creams impact these effects on the skin. This knowledge enhances our potential to develop creams that reinforce the skin’s protective barrier in a positive way, without making the skin drier. Such creams would mean that various groups of patients with dry skin, for example eczema and ichthyosis, could enjoy a better quality of life.

“My findings show that creams differ and that knowledge of the effect of various ingredients is important for us to be able to tailor the treatment to various skin types,” says Izabela Buraczewska.

Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council) (2008, October 23). Skin Creams Can Make Skin Drier. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 24, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/10/081022101500.htm

twitter?

right, was in a state of "I'M BLOODY PISSED WITH THE SCHOOL EMAIL FOR MAKING ME CLICK 700 TIMES JUST TO DELETE MY INBOX" when i decided these kinds of rants shouldn't go on my blog since its so "high and mighty and so educational" and stuff. technically this shouldn't even be here -.-

alright.. stuff like this shall go on my twitter instead. XD

ok. since this IS supposed to be educational, i'll just throw in a couple of food for thought.

these giant magnets are smaller than i thought... =/

Ancient microbes made giant magnets

Magnetic fossils show how climate change creates new extremes.

Ashley Yeager

Scientists have unearthed giant magnetic fossils, the remnants of microbes buried in 55-million-year-old sediment. The growth of these unusual structures during a period of massive global warming provides clues about how climate change might alter the behaviour of organisms.

Some bacteria, both living and fossilized, contain magnetite — magnetic iron oxide crystals — that the organisms are thought to use to navigate, orienting themselves along the magnetic field lines of the Earth. But the new fossils are "unlike any magnetite crystal ever described", says Dirk Schumann of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Schumann and his colleagues found the fossils in sediment taken from a borehole in Ancora, New Jersey. The team dissolved the sediment in water and used a magnet to extract magnetite, which they then studied under the electron microscope. They found that the magnetite crystals contained oxygen isotopes that showed they were of aquatic origin.

Here be giants

Most of the fossils were "giants" in the world of magnetite producing microorganisms, says Schumann, up to eight times as large as those previously seen. Some were up to 4 micrometres in length. Even the shapes, like spear heads and elongated diamonds, were forms that have never been seen before in the magnetite structures of fossils or living organisms. The team reports its findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.¹

Scientists know of no microorganisms that create such large or oddly shaped magnetite crystals. Schumann says that the newly discovered crystals must have come from eukaryotes — a more complex form of life than the bacteria from which most previous magnetite crystals are thought to have come. "That's a convincing argument, and these new fossils are very intriguing," says Richard Frankel, a retired California Polytechnic State University physicist in San Luis Obispo, who studied magnetite-loving bacteria.

The giant microbes may have been using their crystals for orientation. It is also possible that some used the spear-like crystals as coats of armour, says co-author Robert Kopp of Princeton University in New Jersey. A type of living snail, discovered near deep-sea vents in the Indian Ocean, uses a similar material for protection. The snail grows iron-sulphide scales over its foot, from which it can excrete toxic sulphides.

Perfect climate

The sediments in which the crystals were found dated back 55 million years, to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. This was a time period stretching tens of thousands of years, during which Earth's global temperature spiked abruptly by around 5–9° Celsius.

This suggests that major changes in climate made the conditions perfect for bigger microbes to start "loving" iron oxide, says earth scientist James Zachos at University of California, Santa Cruz. The finding backs predictions that the ecology of the coastal oceans will change in unexpected ways as temperatures rise with current global warming, he says.

To pin down the function of the crystals, the team will search for modern microorganisms that make magnetite structures of the same sizes and shapes. They might find them in tropical oceanic shelves fed by energetic river systems, such as the Amazon, where the amount of reactive iron is twice that of delta environments such as New Jersey's coast. This will tell scientists "a lot about the conditions that allowed these structures to grow in the first place", says Kopp.

• References

  1. Schumann, D. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci doi: 10.1073/pnas.0803634105 (2008).

Again, women takes the backseat in research front..

Who cares about eggs and ovaries when you can get the same from sperm and balls?

We have more too! XD

Human Testicles Yield Stem Cells

Brian Handwerk  for National Geographic News

October 8, 2008

Scientists have derived potentially therapeutic stem cells from adult, human testicles—a development that may eventually make new medical treatments possible while avoiding moral dilemmas. Stem cell generation for individual therapies could address a wide range of ailments, including Parkinson's disease, leukemia, and spinal cord injuries. So far, the most versatile human stem cells have come from embryos—fertilized eggs—that critics say should not be used in scientific research because they are potential humans.  (Read about the stem cell divide in National Geographic Magazine.)  Study co-author Thomas Skutella, of the University of Tübingen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, and his team isolated stem cells from adult, human testicles and cultivated them to become pluripotent cells, which can develop into many other types of cells. "In the sense that they become pluripotent, they are like embryonic stem cells," Skutella wrote in an email.  Easing Concerns A major breakthrough was made in 2006, when several research teams harvested stem cells from the testicles of adult mice.  Duplicating the feat in humans had proved elusive prior to research published online this week in Nature.  Japanese researchers announced in August that they had isolated stem cells in adult, human teeth, but the team's work was not peer reviewed.  "As you might imagine, this is a pretty significant step forward," said Chad Cowan of Harvard University's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.  Cowan is unaffiliated with the research.  "It looks like [the cells] have a broader development potential to become a lot of the different cell types we'd be interested in," he added.  "It's very exciting that we may now have a non-ethically troubling source of pluripotent cells for humans—or at least males."  One's Own Cells The cells, which can be harvested from living men, may also remove some immunological obstacles. "The exciting thing about this source of stem cells is that they are the patient's own and can be used to develop individual cell-based therapies that will not provoke any kind of immune reaction," Skutella said. "That is one of the big drawbacks of embryonic stem cells: Quite aside from the grave ethical considerations, they remain a foreign body and will always create immunological problems."  Scientists hope that a similar cell source can be found in women.  Cellular Toolbox But Skutella cautioned that the research is just a valuable step forward, and scientists must learn how to harness the cells to benefit patients.  Though pluripotent stem cells can be differentiated into any other kind of cell, they can't be implanted in their pluripotent state. They must be differentiated so that they self-renew as only one specific type of cell.  "Stem cell therapy is extremely promising, but it is still in its infancy," Skutella explained.  "You could think of it like this: What we have successfully done right now is identify a mother lode. That ore now needs to be forged into tools, i.e. the various differentiated cell lines," he wrote.  "Then someone needs to figure out how to use those tools to fix what's broken, [that is] to develop concrete therapies."

Enzymes that do TWO things! Whoa!

Cool, more general than it's supposed to be. Also, the bio teacher's nightmare: proteins are extremely specific, and can only do one thing. "but sir, there's this virus with a protein that can do TWO things! HA!!"

'Two In One' Enzyme: Unusually Flexible

ScienceDaily (Oct. 6, 2008) — Scientists from the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) have solved the structure of an unusually flexible enzyme in a virus that infects marine bacteria.

The virus, which infects the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, can produce specific pigments more effectively than its host can. It requires only one enzyme, in contrast to the host Prochlorococcus, which needs two enzymes. The virus makes use of phycoerythrobilin synthase, a "two in one" enzyme.

As part of his dissertation, Thorben Dammeyer, a member of the research team under the supervision of Prof. Nicole Frankenberg-Dinkel (Physiology of Microorganisms) and Assistant Professor Dr. Eckhard Hofmann (X-ray diffraction analysis of proteins), solved the 3D structure of the enzyme. An unexpected flexibility was discovered, allowing sections of the protein to assume different positions – an unusual property for proteins in combination with their substrate.

The scientists have documented their results, honored as "Paper of the Week," in the current issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Pigments are produced in two steps

The so-called P-SSM2 virus with the "two in one" enzyme infects the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacterium found in extremely large numbers in the worlds oceans. The virus does however differ in that - in contrast to its cyanobacterial relatives - it does not harvest light for photosynthesis via red and blue pigments, but with chlorophyll, as is the case with higher plants. Nevertheless Prochlorococcus contains all the genetic information for the entire machinery required to produce these pigments. This takes place in two steps with two different enzymes as catalysts.

Green turns red in one step

Nicole Frankenberg-Dinkel stated that "we have discovered the genetic blueprint for an enzyme within the virus. This enzyme is capable of producing the red pigment more effectively than its host, which has convinced us that the pigment cannot be unimportant for Prochlorococcus, even if it is not required for light trapping. On the other hand, we obviously wanted to know how this enzyme can combine two functions."

The scientists used X-ray diffraction analysis to determine the 3D structure of the enzyme at atomic resolution both alone and in complex with its natural substrate, the green biliverdin IXa. This molecule was found in the binding pocket of the protein, where the conversion into a red pigment takes place.

Prof. Frankenberg-Dinkel explained that the scientists were able to observe how different parts of the enzyme around the binding pocket are capable of assuming different positions. "This property might not be unusual for proteins in solution, but is extremely rarely found in protein crystals." The structural variations observed supplied the scientists with the first indications of the movements of the enzyme during catalysis.

Next step: tracking the evolution

The next stage of research will consist of studies of targeted and randomly genetically altered forms of the unusually flexible protein. Using this system, the scientists want to observe the in vitro evolution of this specific enzyme. Nicole Frankenberg-Dinkel's and Eckhard Hofmann's research teams are funded by the Collaborative Research Centre 480 "Molecular Biology of Complex Functions in Botanical Systems."

Not kidding. This article is not for the faint of heart.

Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe's Birth

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects

By Martin Bojowald

Atoms are now such a commonplace idea that it is hard to remember how radical they used to seem. When scientists first hypothesized atoms centuries ago, they despaired of ever observing anything so small, and many questioned whether the concept of atoms could even be called scientific. Gradually, however, evidence for atoms accumulated and reached a tipping point with Albert Einstein's 1905 analysis of Brownian motion, the random jittering of dust grains in a fluid. Even then, it took another 20 years for physicists to develop a theory explaining atoms—namely, quantum mechanics—and another 30 for physicist Erwin Müller to make the first microscope images of them. Today entire industries are based on the characteristic properties of atomic matter.

Physicists' understanding of the composition of space and time is following a similar path, but several steps behind. Just as the behavior of materials indicates that they consist of atoms, the behavior of space and time suggests that they, too, have some fine-scale structure—either a mosaic of spacetime "atoms" or some other filigree work. Material atoms are the smallest indivisible units of chemical compounds; similarly, the putative space atoms are the smallest indivisible units of distance. They are generally thought to be about 10^–35 meter in size, far too tiny to be seen by today's most powerful instruments, which probe distances as short as 10^–18 meter. Consequently, many scientists question whether the concept of atomic spacetime can even be called scientific. Undeterred, other researchers are coming up with possible ways to detect such atoms indirectly.

The most promising involve observations of the cosmos. If we imagine rewinding the expansion of the universe back in time, the galaxies we see all seem to converge on a single infinitesimal point: the big bang singularity. At this point, our current theory of gravity—Einstein's general theory of relativity—predicts that the universe had an infinite density and temperature. This moment is sometimes sold as the beginning of the universe, the birth of matter, space and time. Such an interpretation, however, goes too far, because the infinite values indicate that general relativity itself breaks down. To explain what really happened at the big bang, physicists must transcend relativity. We must develop a theory of quantum gravity, which would capture the fine structure of spacetime to which relativity is blind.

The details of that structure came into play under the dense conditions of the primordial universe, and traces of it may survive in the present-day arrangement of matter and radiation. In short, if spacetime atoms exist, it will not take centuries to find the evidence, as it did for material atoms. With some luck, we may know within the coming decade.

Pieces of Space
Physicists have devised several candidate theories of quantum gravity, each applying quantum principles to general relativity in a distinct way. My work focuses on the theory of loop quantum gravity ("loop gravity," for short), which was developed in the 1990s using a two-step procedure. First, theorists mathematically reformulated general relativity to resemble the classical theory of electromagnetism; the eponymous "loops" of the theory are analogues of electric and magnetic field lines. Second, following innovative procedures, some that are akin to the mathematics of knots, they applied quantum principles to the loops. The resulting quantum gravity theory predicts the existence of spacetime atoms [see "Atoms of Space and Time," by Lee Smolin; Scientific American, January 2004].

Other approaches, such as string theory and so-called causal dynamical triangulations, do not predict spacetime atoms per se but suggest other ways that sufficiently short distances might be indivisible [see "The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride," by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo; Scientific American, November 2007, and "The Self-Organizing Quantum Universe," by Jan Ambjørn, Jerzy Jurkiewicz and Renate Loll; Scientific American, July]. The differences among these theories have given rise to controversy, but to my mind the theories are not contradictory so much as complementary. String theory, for example, is very useful for a unified view of particle interactions, including gravity when it is weak. For the purpose of disentangling what happens at the singularity, where gravity is strong, the atomic constructions of loop gravity are more useful.

The theory's power is its ability to capture the fluidity of spacetime. Einstein's great insight was that spacetime is no mere stage on which the drama of the universe unfolds. It is an actor in its own right. It not only determines the motion of bodies within the universe, but it evolves. A complicated interplay between matter and spacetime ensues. Space can grow and shrink.

Loop gravity extends this insight into the quantum realm. It takes our familiar understanding of particles of matter and applies it to the atoms of space and time, providing a unified view of our most basic concepts. For instance, the quantum theory of electromagnetism describes a vacuum devoid of particles such as photons, and each increment of energy added to this vacuum generates a new particle. In the quantum theory of gravity, a vacuum is the absence of spacetime—an emptiness so thorough we can scarcely imagine it. Loop gravity describes how each increment of energy added to this vacuum generates a new atom of spacetime.

The spacetime atoms form a dense, ever shifting mesh. Over large distances, their dynamism gives rise to the evolving universe of classical general relativity. Under ordinary conditions, we never notice the existence of these spacetime atoms; the mesh spacing is so tight that it looks like a continuum. But when spacetime is packed with energy, as it was at the big bang, the fine structure of spacetime becomes a factor, and the predictions of loop gravity diverge from those of general relativity.

Attracted to Repulsion
Applying the theory is an extremely complex task, so my colleagues and I use simplified versions that capture the truly essential features of the universe, such as its size, and ignore details of lesser interest. We have also had to adapt many of the standard mathematical tools of physics and cosmology. For instance, theoretical physicists commonly describe the world using differential equations, which specify the rate of change of physical variables, such as density, at each point in the spacetime continuum. But when spacetime is grainy, we instead use so-called difference equations, which break up the continuum into discrete intervals. These equations describe how a universe climbs up the ladder of sizes that it is allowed to take as it grows. When I set out to analyze the cosmological implications of loop gravity in 1999, most researchers expected that these difference equations would simply reproduce old results in disguise. But unexpected features soon emerged.

Gravity is typically an attractive force. A ball of matter tends to collapse under its own weight, and if its mass is sufficiently large, gravity overpowers all other forces and compresses the ball into a singularity, such as the one at the center of a black hole. But loop gravity suggests that the atomic structure of spacetime changes the nature of gravity at very high energy densities, making it repulsive. Imagine space as a sponge and mass and energy as water. The porous sponge can store water but only up to a certain amount. Fully soaked, it can absorb no more and instead repels water. Similarly, an atomic quantum space is porous and has a finite amount of storage space for energy. When energy densities become too large, repulsive forces come into play. The continuous space of general relativity, in contrast, can store a limitless amount of energy.

Because of the quantum-gravitational change in the balance of forces, no singularity—no state of infinite density—can ever arise. According to this model, matter in the early universe had a very high but finite density, the equivalent of a trillion suns in every proton-size region. At such extremes, gravity acted as a repulsive force, causing space to expand; as densities moderated, gravity switched to being the attractive force we all know. Inertia has kept the expansion going to the present day.

In fact, the repulsive gravity caused space to expand at an accelerating rate. Cosmological observations appear to require such an early period of acceleration, known as cosmic inflation. As the universe expands, the force driving inflation slowly subsides. Once the acceleration ends, surplus energy is transferred to ordinary matter, which begins to fill the universe in a process called reheating. In current models, inflation is somewhat ad hoc—added in to conform to observations—but in loop quantum cosmology, it is a natural consequence of the atomic nature of spacetime. Acceleration automatically occurs when the universe is small and its porous nature still quite significant.

Time before Time
Without a singularity to demarcate the beginning of time, the history of the universe may extend further back than cosmologists once thought possible. Other physicists have reached a similar conclusion [see "The Myth of the Beginning of Time," by Gabriele Veneziano; Scientific American, May 2004], but only rarely do their models fully resolve the singularity; most models, including those from string theory, require assumptions as to what might have happened at this uneasy spot. Loop gravity, in contrast, is able to trace what took place at the singularity. Loop-based scenarios, though admittedly simplified, are founded on general principles and avoid introducing new ad hoc assumptions.

Using the difference equations, we can try to reconstruct the deep past. One possible scenario is that the initial high-density state arose when a preexisting universe collapsed under the attractive force of gravity. The density grew so high that gravity switched to being repulsive, and the universe started expanding again. Cosmologists refer to this process as a bounce.

The first bounce model investigated thoroughly was an idealized case in which the universe was highly symmetrical and contained just one type of matter. Particles had no mass and did not interact with one another. Simplified though this model was, understanding it initially required a set of numerical simulations that were completed only in 2006 by Abhay Ashtekar, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parampreet Singh, all at Pennsylvania State University. They considered the propagation of waves representing the universe both before and after the big bang. The model clearly showed that a wave would not blindly follow the classical trajectory into the abyss of a singularity but would stop and turn back once the repulsion of quantum gravity set in.

An exciting result of these simulations was that the notorious uncertainty of quantum mechanics seemed to remain fairly muted during the bounce. A wave remained localized throughout the bounce rather than spreading out, as quantum waves usually do. Taken at face value, this result suggested that the universe before the bounce was remarkably similar to our own: governed by general relativity and perhaps filled with stars and galaxies. If so, we should be able to extrapolate from our universe back in time, through the bounce, and deduce what came before, much as we can reconstruct the paths of two billiard balls before a collision based on their paths after the collision. We do not need to know each and every atomic-scale detail of the collision.

Unfortunately, my subsequent analysis dashed this hope. The model as well as the quantum waves used in the numerical simulations turned out to be a special case. In general, I found that waves spread out and that quantum effects were strong enough to be reckoned with. So the bounce was not a brief push by a repulsive force, like the collision of billiard balls. Instead it may have represented the emergence of our universe from an almost unfathomable quantum state—a world in highly fluctuating turmoil. Even if the preexisting universe was once very similar to ours, it passed through an extended period during which the density of matter and energy fluctuated strongly and randomly, scrambling everything.

The fluctuations before and after the big bang were not strongly related to each other. The universe before the big bang could have been fluctuating very differently than it did afterward, and those details did not survive the bounce. The universe, in short, has a tragic case of forgetfulness. It may have existed before the big bang, but quantum effects during the bounce wiped out almost all traces of this prehistory.

Some Scraps of Memory
This picture of the big bang is subtler than the classical view of the singularity. Whereas general relativity simply fails at the singularity, loop quantum gravity is able to handle the extreme conditions there. The big bang is no longer a physical beginning or a mathematical singularity, but it does put a practical limitation on our knowledge. Whatever survives cannot provide a complete view of what came before.

Frustrating as this may be, it might be a conceptual blessing. In physical systems as in daily life, disorder tends to increase. This principle, known as the second law of thermodynamics, is an argument against an eternal universe. If order has been decreasing for an infinite span of time, the universe should by now be so disorganized that structures we see in galaxies as well as on Earth would be all but impossible. The right amount of cosmic forgetfulness may come to the rescue by presenting the young, growing universe with a clean slate irrespective of all the mess that may have built up before.

According to traditional thermodynamics, there is no such thing as a truly clean slate; every system always retains a memory of its past in the configuration of its atoms [see "The Cosmic Origins of Time's Arrow," by Sean M. Carroll; Scientific American, June]. But by allowing the number of spacetime atoms to change, loop quantum gravity allows the universe more freedom to tidy up than classical physics would suggest.

All that is not to say that cosmologists have no hope of probing the quantum-gravitational period. Gravitational waves and neutrinos are especially promising tools, because they barely interact with matter and therefore penetrated the primordial plasma with minimal loss. These messengers might well bring us news from a time near to, or even before, the big bang.

One way to look for gravitational waves is by studying their imprint on the cosmic microwave background radiation [see "Echoes from the Big Bang," by Robert R. Caldwell and Marc Kamionkowski; Scientific American, January 2001]. If quantum-gravitational repulsive gravity drove cosmic inflation, these observations might find some hint of it. Theorists must also determine whether this novel source of inflation could reproduce other cosmological measurements, especially of the early density distribution of matter seen in the cosmic microwave background.

At the same time, astronomers can look for the spacetime analogues of random Brownian motion. For instance, quantum fluctuations of spacetime could affect the propagation of light over long distances. According to loop gravity, a light wave cannot be continuous; it must fit on the lattice of space. The smaller the wavelength, the more the lattice distorts it. In a sense, the spacetime atoms buffet the wave. As a consequence, light of different wavelengths travels at different speeds. Although these differences are tiny, they may add up during a long trip. Distant sources such as gamma-ray bursts offer the best hope of seeing this effect [see "Window on the Extreme Universe," by William B. Atwood, Peter F. Michelson and Steven Ritz; Scientific American, December 2007].

In the case of material atoms, more than 25 centuries elapsed between the first speculative suggestions of atoms by ancient philosophers and Einstein's analysis of Brownian motion, which firmly established atoms as the subject of experimental science. The delay should not be as long for spacetime atoms.

Ig Nobel Prize.. what the heck??

This is totally random, but the sperm study just takes it home. Best when it's tied to an opposing study.

 

P.S. Ovulating women are happier? O.o

 

Smart Slime, Ovulating Strippers Among 2008 Ig Nobels

Brian Handwerk  for National Geographic News

October 3, 2008

Some fake drugs are better than others, armadillos are assaulting our history, and slime mold is smarter than we think—these and other offbeat scientific triumphs were honored Thursday night at the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.  The prizes celebrate "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think."  More than 1,200 people attended a raucous affair at Harvard University, dubbed the "18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony" in honor of this year's theme—redundancy.  William Lipscomb, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1976, dispensed prizes to the ten honorees. He himself was the prize in the Win a Date With a Nobel Laureate contest.  The gala is thrown every year by the science/humor journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). (Related: "Poop Vanilla, Endless Soup Among 2007 Ig Nobels" [October 5, 2007].) Generics and Jerks Duke University business professor Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, took home the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine. In one study covered in the book, a group of people took placebos—fake pharmaceuticals—that they were told were expensive. Another group took the same pills but was told the drugs were inexpensive. The "expensive" pills were found to be more effective pain relievers than the "cheap" ones. The study could have implications for patients given generic, instead of brand-name, medications. An eight-year-old girl, Miss Sweetie-Poo, chased Ariely from the podium when he delivered an acceptance speech longer than the allotted 60 seconds.  Organizers employed the child to loudly repeat "Please stop! I'm bored!" when winners exceeded the time limit.  David Sims of Cass Business School, London, won the Ig Nobel Prize for literature for a workplace study entitled "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation Within Organizations."  Sims explained that consistent behavior, even bad behavior, isn't as maddening as that which leaves one struggling for an explanation. A predictable jerk, in other words, isn't as distressing as a loose cannon. "Hero, fool, villain—what is this person going to be in [the story of my life]?" he asked. "The people you get really angry with are the ones who don't settle into a single character—you just can't work out what they're up to." The findings had stuck a familiar chord with many readers.  "When I was taking this around as a seminar paper, everyone was convinced that I had gathered my data in their institution."  Snacks, Smart Mold, and Super Fleas The Ig Nobel for nutrition was bestowed for an unusual taste test. Scientists had electronically enhanced the sound made when a person bites into a potato chip. Testers were fooled into thinking their snack was crisper and fresher than it actually was.  Japanese and Hungarian scientists captured the Ig Nobel in cognitive science for proving that slime mold can navigate a maze.  When placed in a maze with food sources on both ends, the organism had spread "like mayonnaise on a slice of bread," said Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University in Japan.  But after about ten hours, the mold had abandoned the maze's dead ends and inhabited only the most direct route between the food sources.  Three French scientists took the Ig Nobel biology honors by demonstrating that fleas living on dogs can jump higher than those living on cats.  And though history may be written by the winners, archaeological history can be rewritten by the burrowing of armadillos. A Brazilian team won the archaeology Ig Nobel for demonstrating live armadillos can scramble the locations of artifacts in an archaeological dig site. Reflections on Plants, Strippers, and Coca-Cola Urs Thurnherr, of the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology, accepted the Ig Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the citizens of Switzerland—who have adopted the constitutional principle that plants have inherent dignity.  On stage, Thurnherr asked, "Have you ever been away or forgotten to water one of your house plants and then had to throw it away? Did that make you feel uneasy in any way?"  The prize in economics went to Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur, and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, who had discovered that lap dancers' tip earnings rise and fall with their ovulatory cycles—from an average of U.S. $70 per hour when about to ovulate to just $35 during menstruation.  Previous studies had shown that women in mid-cycle have faces and breasts that are more attractive to men, as well as a more appealing scent, Miller said. Research also suggests that many women are happier at this time.  "Men are probably responding partly to physical appearance and smell, and quite a bit to behavior, happiness, and outgoingness—but we really don't know yet," Miller said.  The physics prize went to a team that had unveiled a new type of string theory. This version was a mathematical proof that piles of string or hair will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.  *The chemistry prize was shared by two groups that had conclusively put an urban legend to rest—sort of.  Deborah Anderson, of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School, was recognized for her 1980s discovery that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide (though not a reliable form of birth control).  "I'd like to thank the Ig Nobels for recognizing our seminal study," she quipped.  However, Anderson shared the prize with a team of Taiwanese scientists who had proved just the opposite.  With the winners crowned and the stage swept clear of paper airplanes tossed by the audience, Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, closed the evening in traditional style.  "If you didn't win an Ig Nobel Prize tonight—and especially if you did—better luck next year."

Follow the leader

Bees can follow too, so don't look down on their intelligence. J

Bee Swarms Follow High-speed 'Streaker' Bees To Find A New Nest

ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2008) — It's one of the hallmarks of spring: a swarm of bees on the move. But how a swarm locates a new nest site when less than 5% of the community know the way remains a mystery. Curious to find out how swarms cooperate and are guided to their new homes, Tom Seeley, a neurobiologist from Cornell University, and engineers Kevin Schultz and Kevin Passino from The Ohio State University teamed up to find out how swarms are guided to their new home.

According to Schultz there are two theories on how swarms find the way. In the 'subtle guide' theory, a small number of scout bees, which had been involved in selecting the new nest site, guide the swarm by flying unobtrusively in its midst; near neighbours adjust their flight path to avoid colliding with the guides while more distant insects align themselves to the guides' general direction. In the 'streaker bee' hypothesis, bees follow a few conspicuous guides that fly through the top half of the swarm at high speed.

Schultz explains that Seeley already had still photographs of the streaks left by high-speed bees flying through a swarm's upper layers, but what Seeley needed was movie footage of a swarm on the move to see if the swarm was following high-velocity streakers or being unobtrusively directed by guides. Passino and Seeley decided to film swarming bees with high-definition movie cameras to find out how they were directed to their final destination.

But filming diffuse swarms spread along a 12·m length with each individual on her own apparently random course is easier said than done. For a start you have to locate your camera somewhere along the swarm's flight path, which is impossible to predict in most environments. The team overcame this problem by relocating to Appledore Island, which has virtually no high vegetation for swarms to settle on. By transporting large colonies of bees, complete with queen, to the island, the team could get the insects to swarm from a stake to the only available nesting site; a comfortable nesting box. Situating the camera on the most direct route between the two sites, the team successfully filmed several swarms' chaotic progress at high resolution.

Back in Passino's Ohio lab, Schultz began the painstaking task of analysing over 3500 frames from a swarm fly-by to build up a picture of the insects' flight directions and vertical position. After months of bee-clicking, Schultz was able to find patterns in the insects' progress. For example, bees in the top of the swarm tended to fly faster and generally aimed towards the nest, with bees concentrated in the middle third of the top layer showing the strongest preference to head towards the nest.

Schultz also admits that he was surprised at how random the bees' trajectories were in the bottom half of the swarm, 'they were going in every direction,' he says, but the bees that were flying towards the new nest generally flew faster than bees that were heading in other directions; they appeared to latch onto the high-speed streakers. All of which suggests that the swarm was following high-speed streaker bees to their new location.

And why I laugh at you XD, More sleep = better study.

Ask the Brains: Why Do We Laugh When Someone Falls?

Also: Does napping after a meal affect memory formation?

By The Editors

Why do we find it funny when some one falls down?
—William B. Keith, Houston

William F. Fry, a psychiatrist and laughter researcher at Stanford University, explains:

Every human develops a sense of humor, and everyone's taste is slightly different. But certain fundamental aspects of humor help explain why a misstep may elicit laughter.

The first requirement is the "play frame," which puts a real-life event in a nonserious context and allows for an atypical psychological reaction. Play frames explain why most people will not find it comical if someone falls from a 10-story building and dies: in this instance, the falling person's distress hinders the establishment of the nonserious context. But if a woman casually walking down the street trips and flails hopelessly as she stumbles to the ground, the play frame may be established, and an observer may find the event amusing.

Another crucial characteristic is incongruity, which can be seen in the improbable or inconsistent relation between the "punch line" and the "body" of a joke or experience. Falls are incongruent in the normal course of life in that they are unexpected. So despite our innate empathetic reaction—you poor fellow!—our incongruity instinct may be more powerful. Provided that the fall event establishes a play frame, mirth will likely ensue.

Play frames and incongruity are psychological concepts; only recently has neurobiology caught up with them. In the early 1990s the discovery of mirror neurons led to a new way to understand the incongruity aspect of humor. When we fall down, we thrash about as we reach out to catch ourselves. Neu rons in our brain control these movements. But when we observe another person stumbling, some of our own neurons fire as if we were the person doing the flailing—these mirror neurons are duplicating the patterns of activity in the falling person's brain. My hypothesis regarding the relevance of this mechanism for humor behavior is that the observer's brain is "tickled" by that neurological "ghost." The observer experiences an unconscious stimulation from that ghost, reinforcing the incongruity perception.

Does napping after a meal affect memory formation?
—Yadhu Kumar, Konstanz, Germany

Neuroendocrinologists Manfred Hallschmid and Susanne Diekelmann of the University of Lübeck in Germany reply:

The past two decades have yielded considerable evidence for sleep's pivotal role in memory consolidation. The lion's share of research has focused on the relevance of longer periods of nocturnal rest. For that reason, the duration that is actually needed for sleep's effects on memory to become behaviorally relevant has not yet been exhaustively investigated. We have reason to assume, however, that even short periods of rest can indeed improve memory formation.

There are only a handful of studies investigating the effect of a short nap on the consolidation of declarative memories, which involve facts and events. Most of these studies have reported better memory performance after sleep as compared with wakefulness, revealing improvements of 4 to 46 percent in word-pair memory after a nap and a 3 percent loss to a 28 percent improvement after wakefulness. Even an ultrashort catnap of about six minutes resulted in better memory retention than staying awake did, but a longer doze of 35 minutes was clearly superior. Interestingly, a number of experiments have indicated that sleep improves memory regardless of whether it occurs during the night or the day, which further highlights the cognitive potential of a postprandial nap.

Research on procedural memory, which comprises perceptual and motor skills (such as learning to play an instrument), has found that a short siesta of 60 to 90 minutes improves visual perception only if the nap includes both slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement sleep, the two phases that the brain cycles through while we doze. In studies focusing on motor skills, such as those in which subjects were asked to repetitively type certain keyboard sequences, a posttraining nap of 60 to 90 minutes likewise improved finger-tapping performance. Even so, the study participants did not show as much improvement after the nap as they did after the following full night of sleep.

In sum, these observations suggest that napping may indeed help you remember what you have just learned but that you need longer periods of shut-eye to tap the full potential of sleep.

Note: This story was originally published with the title, "Ask the Brains".

What’s cooking? Ask my pet wasps XD

seriously, this is cool. the method's gonna be a better deterrent than catching him red handed. "we suspect you have drugs in your rectum" "i do not!" "we strongly suggest you give up or we'll put you in this room full of wasps that can smell drugs. imagine what they'll do to your butt" "fine! i have drugs in my rectum! just don't let them sting my ass!"

Wasps: Man's New Best Friend!
Entomologists Train Insects to Act Like Sniffing Dogs

July 1, 2006 — If rewarded with sugary water, wasps can be trained in minutes to follow specific smells. The olfactory sensors in their antennae can sense chemicals in the air in concentrations as tiny as a few parts per billion. Wasps could be cost-effective helpers in searching for explosives, toxic chemicals, and even fungi on crops.

ATHENS, Ga. -- Wasps are not man's best friend -- probably their worst. But when it comes to sniffing out trouble, scientists believe they may be better than dogs.

They ward off intruders, track down criminals, find bombs and detect toxic chemicals, but dogs could soon be replaced by wasps. They have the same sensitive odor detection as dogs and are now being trained to sniff out trouble.

"The advantages of a wasp over a dog is you can produce them by the thousands. They are real inexpensive, and you can train them in a matter of minutes," Joe Lewis, a research entomologist at University of Georgia in Athens, tells DBIS.

He and Biological and agricultural engineer Glen Rains are doing just that. Olfactory sensors on the wasps' antennae can smell chemicals in concentrations as tiny as a few parts per billion in the air.

"So far, they've been able to detect, to some level, any chemical that we've trained them to," Rains tells DBIS.

Training is simple and quick. The wasps are fed sugar water. At the same time they're introduced to a smell for 10 seconds. The process is repeated two more times.

Lewis says, "We can train a wasp within a matter of 10 to 15 minutes."

For example, a set of wasps is trained to detect the smell of coffee. When they are put into a simple container, a tiny web camera watches their actions. When the smell of orange is pumped into the pipe, nothing. But when it's coffee, the wasps crowd around the smell.

So far, Rains and Lewis have not found anything the wasps cannot be trained to detect. They can be trained to detect everything from drugs to human remains to fungi on crops. They could one day even be able to detect deadly diseases like cancer.

BACKGROUND: Scientists from the University of Georgia and the USDA Agricultural Research Service are training wasps to detect the telltale odors of concealed explosives, drugs and human remains, and possibly one day certain diseases like cancer. They are now investigating whether it is possible to train mosquitoes as living odor detectors as well, and plan to eventually study other insects with excellent sniffing ability, like honeybees and moths.

HOW IT WORKS: The Georgia scientists have built a device they call the Wasp Hound: an odor-detection device that costs around $60. It is made of a small PVC tube containing five wasps that can be trained to detect any target odor within minutes. The device has a fan at the top, which draws odors into the tube through a filter. If the wasps catch a whiff of whatever they've been trained to smell, they crowd around a hole in the filter. A web cam inside the tube is attached to a computer, which alerts the operator to the wasps' reaction with a beep or a flashing light. The Wasp Hound could be used by farmers to monitor crops for diseases and pests; to check for explosives in airport security applications; to help doctors monitor diseases, or even by defense forces searching for buried land mines.

ADVANTAGES: Unlike dogs and the electronic sensors more commonly used today, wasps are cheap and disposable. It costs pennies and takes minutes to train them: Feed them sugar water while introducing them to a target smell for 10 seconds; give them a 30-second break, repeat the process twice more, and they are completely trained to track that single scent.

ABOUT WASPS: Wasps have olfactory sensors on their antennae that they use to stay alive. For instance, one strain of wasp lays its eggs inside a specific variety of caterpillar. The insects are attracted to the caterpillars by chemicals released by plans as the caterpillars much on them -- a type of SOS signal from the plants. This is also how wasps attract mates. Wasps can sense chemicals in concentrations as tiny as a few parts per billion in the air ý the same range to which dogs and chemical sensors are sensitive. Some species can pick up scents at concentrations as low as one part in a thousand billion, which is a hundred thousand times weaker that the concentrations detectable by commercial "electronic noses."

 

Note: This story and accompanying video were originally produced for the American Institute of Physics series Discoveries and Breakthroughs in Science by Ivanhoe Broadcast News and are protected by copyright law. All rights reserved.

 
 

OOOH, scientific backing to gossip XD

Girls, you now have an evolutionary reason to gossip XD

 

The Science of Gossip: Why We Can't Stop Ourselves

It helped us thrive in ancient times, and in our modern world it makes us feel connected to others—as long as it is done properly

By Frank T. McAndrew

In the past few years I have heard more people than ever before puzzling over the 24/7 coverage of people such as Paris Hilton who are "celebrities" for no apparent reason other than we know who they are. And yet we can't look away. The press about these individuals' lives continues because people are obviously tuning in. Although many social critics have bemoaned this explosion of popular culture as if it reflects some kind of collective character flaw, it is in fact nothing more than the inevitable outcome of the collision between 21st-century media and Stone Age minds.

When you cut away its many layers, our fixation on popular culture reflects an intense interest in the doings of other people; this preoccupation with the lives of others is a by-product of the psychology that evolved in prehistoric times to make our ancestors socially successful. Thus, it appears that we are hardwired to be fascinated by gossip.

Only in the past decade or so have psychologists turned their attention toward the study of gossip, partially because it is difficult to define exactly what gossip is. Most researchers agree that the practice involves talk about people who are not present and that this talk is relaxed, informal and entertaining. Typically the topic of conversation also concerns information that we can make moral judgments about. Gossip appears to be pretty much the same wherever it takes place; gossip among co-workers is not qualitatively different from that among friends outside of work. Although everyone seems to detest a person who is known as a "gossip" and few people would use that label to describe themselves, it is an exceedingly unusual individual who can walk away from a juicy story about one of his or her acquaintances, and all of us have firsthand experience with the difficulty of keeping spectacular news about someone else a secret.

Why does private information about other people represent such an irresistible temptation for us? In his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Harvard University Press, 1996), psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool in England suggested that gossip is a mechanism for bonding social groups together, analogous to the grooming that is found in primate groups. Sarah R. Wert, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Peter Salovey of Yale University have proposed that gossip is one of the best tools that we have for comparing ourselves socially with others. The ultimate question, however, is, How did gossip come to serve these functions in the first place?

An Evolutionary Adaptation?
When evolutionary psychologists detect something that is shared by people of all ages, times and cultures, they usually suspect that they have stumbled on a vital aspect of human nature, something that became a part of who we are in our long-forgotten prehistoric past. Evolutionary adaptations that enabled us not only to survive but to thrive in our prehistoric environment include our appreciation of landscapes containing freshwater and vegetation, our never-ending battle with our sweet tooth and our infatuation with people who look a certain way.

It is obvious to most people that being drawn to locations that offer resources, food that provides energy, and romantic partners who appear able to help you bear and raise healthy children might well be something that evolution has selected for because of its advantages. It may not be so clear at first glance, however, how an interest in gossip could possibly be in the same league as these other preoccupations. If we think in terms of what it would have taken to be successful in our ancestral social environment, the idea may no longer seem quite so far-fetched.

As far as scientists can tell, our prehistoric forebears lived in relatively small groups where they knew everyone else in a face-to-face, long-term kind of way. Strangers were probably an infrequent and temporary phenomenon. Our caveman ancestors had to cooperate with so-called in-group members for success against out-groups, but they also had to recognize that these same in-group members were their main competitors when it came to dividing limited resources. Living under such conditions, our ancestors faced a number of consistent adaptive problems such as remembering who was a reliable exchange partner and who was a cheater, knowing who would be a reproductively val uable mate, and figuring out how to successfully manage friendships, alliances and family relationships.

The social intelligence needed for success in this environment required an ability to predict and influence the behavior of others, and an intense interest in the private dealings of other people would have been handy indeed and would have been strongly favored by natural selection. In short, people who were fascinated with the lives of others were simply more successful than those who were not, and it is the genes of those individuals that have come down to us through the ages. Like it or not, our inability to forsake gossip and information about other individuals is as much a part of who we are as is our inability to resist doughnuts or sex—and for the same reasons.

A related social skill that would have had a big payoff is the ability to remember details about the temperament, predictability and past behavior of individuals who are personally known to you; there would have been little use for a mind that was designed to engage in abstract statistical thinking about large numbers of unknown outsiders. In today's world, it is advantageous to be able to think in terms of probabilities and percentages when it comes to people, because predicting the behavior of the strangers with whom we deal in everyday life requires that we do so. This task is difficult for many of us because the early wiring of the brain was guided by different needs. Thus, natural selection shaped a thirst for, and a memory to store information about, specific people; it is even well established that we have a brain area specifically dedicated to the identification of human faces.

For better or worse, this is the mental equipment we must rely on to navigate our way through a modern world filled with technology and strangers. I suppose I should not be surprised when the very same psychology students who get glassy-eyed at any mention of statistical data about human beings in general become riveted by case studies of individuals experiencing psychological problems. Successful politicians take advantage of this pervasive "power of the particular" (as cognitive psychologists call it) when they use anecdotes and personal narratives to make political points. Even Russian dictator Joseph Stalin noted that "one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." The prevalence of reality TV shows and nightly news programs focusing on stories about a missing child or the personal gaffes of politicians is a beast of our own creation.

Is Gossip Always Bad?
The aspect of gossip that is most troubling is that in its rawest form it is a strategy used by individuals to further their own reputations and selfish interests at the expense of others. This nasty side of gossip usually overshadows the more benign ways in which it functions in society. After all, sharing gossip with another person is a sign of deep trust because you are clearly signaling that you believe that this person will not use this sensitive information in a way that will have negative consequences for you; shared secrets also have a way of bonding people together. An individual who is not included in the office gossip network is obviously an outsider who is not trusted or accepted by the group.

There is ample evidence that when it is controlled, gossip can indeed be a positive force in the life of a group. In a review of the literature published in 2004, Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University and his colleagues concluded that gossip can be a way of learning the unwritten rules of social groups and cultures by resolving ambiguity about group norms. Gossip is also an efficient way of reminding group members about the importance of the group's norms and values; it can be a deterrent to deviance and a tool for punishing those who transgress. Rutgers University evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has discussed the evolutionary importance of detecting "gross cheaters" (those who fail to reciprocate altruistic acts) and "subtle cheaters" (those who reciprocate but give much less than they get). [For more on altruism and related behavior, see "The Samaritan Paradox," by Ernst Fehr and Suzann-Viola Renninger; Scientific American Mind, Premier Issue 2004.]

Gossip can be an effective means of uncovering such information about others and an especially useful way of controlling these "free riders" who may be tempted to violate group norms of reciprocity by taking more from the group than they give in return. Studies in real-life groups such as California cattle ranchers, Maine lobster fishers and college rowing teams confirm that gossip is used in these quite different settings to enforce group norms when an individual fails to live up to the group's expectations. In all these groups, individuals who violated expectations about sharing resources and meeting responsibilities became frequent targets of gossip and ostracism, which applied pressure on them to become better citizens. Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer groups have typically revealed a similar social control function for gossip in these societies.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm of the University of Southern California has proposed in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1999) that gossip evolved as a "leveling mechanism" for neutralizing the dom inance tendencies of others. Boehm believes that small-scale foraging societies such as those typical during human prehistory emphasized an egalitarianism that suppressed internal competition and promoted consensus seeking in a way that made the success of one's group extremely important to one's own fitness. These social pressures discouraged free riders and cheaters and encouraged altruists. In such societies, the manipulation of public opinion through gossip, ridicule and ostracism became a key way of keeping potentially dominant group members in check.

Favored Types of Gossip 
According to one of the pioneers of gossip research, anthropologist Jerome Barkow of Dalhousie University, we should be especially interested in information about people who matter most in our lives: rivals, mates, relatives, partners in social exchange, and high-ranking figures whose behavior can affect us. Given the proposition that our interest in gossip evolved as a way of acquiring fitness-enhancing information, Barkow also suggests that the type of knowledge that we seek should be information that can affect our social standing relative to others. Hence, we would expect to find higher interest in negative news (such as misfortunes and scandals) about high-status people and potential rivals because we could exploit it. Negative information about those lower than us in status would not be as useful. There should also be less interest in passing along negative information about our friends and relatives than about people who are not allies. Conversely, positive information (good fortune and sudden elevation of status, for example) about allies should be likely to be spread around, whereas positive information about non allies should be less enticing because it is not useful in advancing one's own interests.

For a variety of reasons, our interest in the doings of same-sex others ought to be especially strong. Because same-sex members of one's own species who are close to our own age are our principal evolutionary competitors, we ought to pay special attention to them. The 18-year-old male caveman would have done much better by attending to the business of other 18-year-old males rather than the business of 50-year-old males or females of any age. Interest about members of the other sex should be strong only when their age and situational circumstances would make them appropriate as mates.

The gossip studies that my students and I have worked on at Knox College over the past decade have focused on uncovering what we are most interested in finding out about other people and what we are most likely to spread around. We have had people of all ages rank their interest in tabloid stories about celebrities, and we have asked college students to read gossip scenarios about unidentified individuals and tell us about which types of people they would most like to hear such information, about whom they would gossip and with whom they would share gossip.

In keeping with the evolutionary hypotheses suggested earlier, we have consistently found that people are most interested in gossip about individuals of the same sex as themselves who happen to be around their own age. We have also found that information that is socially useful is always of greatest interest to us: we like to know about the scandals and misfortunes of our rivals and of high-status people because this information might be valuable in social competition. Positive information about such people tends to be uninteresting to us. Finding out that someone already higher in status than ourselves has just acquired something that puts that person even further ahead of us does not supply us with ammunition that we can use to gain ground on him. Conversely, positive information about our friends and relatives is very interesting and likely to be used to our advantage whenever possible. For example, in studies that my colleagues and I published in 2002 and in 2007 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, we consistently found that college students were not much interested in hearing about academic awards or a large inheritance if it involved one of their professors and that they were also not very interested in passing that news along to others. Yet the same information about their friends or romantic partners was rated as being quite interesting and likely to be spread around.

We have also found that an interest in the affairs of same-sex others is especially strong among females and that women have somewhat different patterns of sharing gossip than men do. For example, our studies reveal that males report being far more likely to share gossip with their romantic partners than with anyone else, but females report that they would be just as likely to share gossip with their same-sex friends as with their romantic partners. And although males are usually more interested in news about other males, females are virtually obsessed with news about other females.

This fact can be demonstrated by looking at the actual frequency with which males and females selected a same-sex person as the most interesting subject of the gossip scenarios we presented them with in one of our studies published in 2002. On hearing about someone having a date with a famous person, 43 out of 44 women selected a female as the most interesting person to know this about, as compared with 24 out of 36 males who selected a male as most interesting. Similarly, 40 out of 42 females (versus 22 out of 37 males) were most interested in same-sex academic cheaters, and 39 out of 43 were most interested in a same-sex leukemia sufferer (as opposed to only 18 out of 37 males). In fact, the only two scenarios among the 13 we studied in which males expressed more same-sex interest than females did involved hearing about an individual heavily in debt because of gambling or an individual who was having difficulty performing sexually.

Why Such Interest in Celebrities?
Even if we can explain the intense interest that we have in other people who are socially important to us, how can we possibly explain the seemingly useless interest that we have in the lives of reality-show contestants, movie stars and public figures of all kinds? One possible explanation may be found in the fact that celebrities are a recent occurrence, evolutionarily speaking. In our ancestral environment, any person about whom we knew intimate details of his or her private life was, by definition, a socially important member of the in-group. Bar kow has pointed out that evolution did not prepare us to distinguish among members of our community who have genuine effects on our life and the images and voices that we are bombarded with by the entertainment industry. Thus, the intense familiarity with celebrities provided by the modern media trips the same gossip mechanisms that have evolved to keep up with the affairs of in-group members. After all, anyone whom we see that often and know that much about must be socially important to us. News anchors and television actors we see every day in soap operas become familiar friends.

In our modern world, celebrities may also serve another important social function. In a highly mobile, industrial society, celebrities may be the only "friends" we have in common with our new neighbors and co-workers. They provide a common interest and topic of conversation between people who otherwise might not have much to say to one another, and they facilitate the types of informal interaction that help people become comfortable in new surroundings. Hence, keeping up on the lives of actors, politicians and athletes can make a person more socially adept during interactions with strangers and even provide segues into social relationships with new friends in the virtual world of the Internet. Research published in 2007 by Charlotte J. S. De Backer, a Belgian psychologist now at the University of Leicester in England, finds that young people even look to celebrities and popular culture for learning life strategies that would have been learned from role models within one's tribe in the old days. Teenagers in particular seem to be prone to learning how to dress, how to manage relationships and how to be socially successful in general by tuning in to popular culture.

Thus, gossip is a more complicated and socially important phenomenon than we think. When gossip is discussed seriously, the goal usually is to suppress the frequency with which it occurs in an attempt to avoid the undeniably harmful effects it often has in work groups and other social networks. This tendency, however, overlooks that gossip is part of who we are and an essential part of what makes groups function as well as they do. Perhaps it may become more productive to think of gossip as a social skill rather than as a character flaw, because it is only when we do not do it well that we get into trouble. Adopting the role of the self-righteous soul who refuses to participate in gossip at work or in other areas of your social life ultimately will be self-defeating. It will turn out to be nothing more than a ticket to social isolation. On the other hand, becoming that person who indiscriminately blabs everything you hear to anyone who will listen will quickly get you a reputation as an untrustworthy busybody. Successful gossiping is about being a good team player and sharing key information with others in a way that will not be perceived as self-serving and about understanding when to keep your mouth shut.

In short, I believe we will continue to struggle with managing the gossip networks in our daily lives and to shake our heads at what we are constantly being subjected to by the mass media, rationally dismissing it as irrelevant to anything that matters in our own lives. But in case you find yourself becoming just a tiny bit intrigued by some inane story about a celebrity, let yourself off the hook and enjoy the guilty pleasure. After all, it is only human nature.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Can Gossip Be Good?"

 

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