The wonderfulicious Brea Grant is this week’s Geek a Week.

Brea’s an actress who played Daphne, "The Speedster" on "Heroes", and I was tickled a while back to find out she reads my blog. I had a lot of fun hanging out with her at Comic Con last year (and hope to see her again while I’m there in a couple of weeks), and even did a short interview with her when I was there.

Brea is smart, funny, generous with her time, and a complete and total comic book geek. When Len Peralta, who does the Geek a Week podcast and art, interviewed me for the series, he asked if I knew anyone else I would recommend. That was an easy one! I’m glad it worked out.. and she wasn’t the only person I suggested. Stay tuned.

Len’s got quite a few more very cool folks on his list, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he does with them. The trading cards are killer funny and it’s always nice to hear what’s going on inside other people’s nerdy heads.

In October 2007, the British band Radiohead released their seventh album – In Rainbows – as a digital download that customers could pay whatever they liked for. The results of this risky venture are a guarded secret, but the album’s popularity was clear. It topped the charts and allegedly sold 1.2 million copies in the first day alone. Even though many fans paid nothing (the average contribution ranged from $2.26 to around $8 depending on the survey), the band still earned more money from In Rainbows than their previous album, Hail to the Thief. But according to a new study, Radiohead could have earned even more money by adding a slight twist to their plan – telling people that half their voluntary payments would go to charity.

Many businesses are trying out new strategies that appeal to the better nature of their customers. Some promote the fact that they donate a proportion of their profits to charity. Others, from Radiohead to restaurants, invite people to pay what they like for their products. People often get away without paying anything but in practice, they frequently cough up something. But according to Ayelet Gneezy from the University of California, San Diego, the best strategy is to fuse the two approaches.

At a theme park, Gneezy conducted a massive study of over 113,000 people who had to choose whether to buy a photo of themselves on a roller coaster. They were given one of four pricing plans. Under the basic one, when they were asked to pay a flat fee of $12.95 for the photo, only 0.5% of them did so.

When they could pay what they wanted, sales skyrocketed and 8.4% took a photo, almost 17 times more than before. But on average, the tight-fisted customers paid a measly $0.92 for the photo, which barely covered the cost of printing and actively selling one. That’s not the best business model – the company proves itself to be generous, it’s products sell like (free) hot-cakes, but its profit margins take a big hit. You could argue that Radiohead experienced the same thing – their album was a hit but customers paid relatively little for it.

When Gneezy told customers that half of the $12.95 price tag would go to charity, only 0.57% riders bought a photo – a pathetic increase over the standard price plan. This is akin to the practices of “corporate social responsibility” that many companies practice, where they try to demonstrate a sense of social consciousness. But financially, this approach had minimal benefits. It led to more sales, but once you take away the amount given to charity, the sound of hollow coffers came ringing out. You see the same thing on eBay. If people say that 10% of their earnings go to charity, their items only sell for around 2% more.

But when customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof. Around 4.5% of the customers asked for a photo (up 9 times from the standard price plan), and on average, each one paid $5.33 for the privilege. Even after taking away the charitable donations, that still left Gneezy with a decent profit.

This is a substantial result, especially since it came from a real setting. The theme park that Gneezy used stands to make another $600,000 a year in profits if it takes up her sales strategy. And just to be sure, Gneezy confirmed that sales at a nearby souvenir shop didn’t fall on the days when she ran her study. These extra profits weren’t coming at a cost to retailers elsewhere in the park.

Gneezy describes the combination of charitable donations and paying what you like as “shared social responsibility”, where businesses and customers work together for the public good. It’s a slightly different idea to corporate social responsibility, where the act of charity is dictated by the company. And it’s very different from the classic view of the modern corporation as a profit-making machine, beholden only to its shareholders.

Corporate social responsibility is a mantra for many a modern firm, but it’s often done at a financial cost. Customers might assume that the company has ulterior motives for its practices beyond the call of ethics. Indeed, that’s often the case – acts of goodwill can do wonders for a company’s brand, and public interest in its products of services. But if people suspect that they’re somehow being manipulated, that can negate the positive effects of any act of charity.

Gneezy thinks that shared social responsibility is a better model because the company is clearly putting itself at financial risk, and people are less likely to smell a rat. Customers are also more likely to personally identify with the cause they are contributing to. Regardless of who sets the price, they are still contributing to charity, but it feels more like an active decision if they choose the price themselves.

There’s more evidence to back up this idea in the experiment – when Gneezy added a charitable donation to the pay-what-you-want scheme, fewer people bought the photo. The option to name your own price attracts a lot of cheapskate customers, who may not actually want the product very much, and who aren’t prepared to pay much, if anything, for it.

When the charity factor is introduced, these casual freeloaders balk at the idea of paying nothing, because it’s more likely to reflect badly on them. Rather than naming a higher price, their preference is to avoid buying altogether – for them, it isn’t worth it. Sales fall, but the actual profits go up because the remaining customers are motivated by their desire for the product and for the cause, will pay for both.

The experiment could be expanded in many interesting ways. For example, what about a discounted fixed price option with charitable donation, or a pay-what-you-want option with a minimum threshold? For now, it tells us that trying to tap into the ethical side of consumerism is very tricky, but possible without compromising profits. As Gneezy concludes, “Apparently, a company can best serve its community and its shareholders by sharing its social responsibility with its customers.”

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1186744

Image from alterna2

More on decision-making:

• Sports results can affect election results
• Requests work better than orders, even when we’re asking or ordering ourselves
• Why do people overbid in auctions?
• Undecided voters aren’t really undecided – the hidden side of decision-making

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

Rosetta leaves asteroid Lutetia after a close encounter. Click for larger. Credit ESA via Science@NASA

The ESA spacecraft Rosetta is a comet chaser launched in February 2004 atop the powerful Ariane-5 rocket from launch facilities in French Guiana.  The comet Rosetta is ultimately going to reach is Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in May 2014.

You’d thing that huge rocket would send the comparatively small spacecraft right to the comet, but that’s just not the way things work.  Rosetta is having to take kind of the long way around, including two trips into the asteroid belt and taking advantage of gravitational speed boosts by a flyby of Mars (in 2007) and three flybys of Earth (2005, 2007 and 2009).  If you’ve ever been on a long ride with kids in the back seat you know the drill, instead ESA has people like me in the back seat going “are we there yet – are we there yet?”).

It’s a good thing for us in every long trip there are bound to be some worthwhile sights along the way and in this case it’s an asteroid named Lutetia.  The image above is a shot of Rosetta leaving Lutetia and if you look close or better yet click on the image to make it larger you will see Saturn in the background.

You can see this image and more including close ups at Science@NASA and even more at the ESA Rosetta webpage.

Researchers have decided to get personal with Mona Lisa–by irradiating her face. In a study recently published in Angewandte Chemie, researchers trucked around the Louvre to look at nine faces painted by Leonardo Da Vinci with a portable X-ray machine.

Their particular technique, as reported by the BBC, is called X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and is a way to uncover the layers of paint without damaging the paintings. By looking at this layering, they learned more about Da Vinci’s brush strokes and a technique called sfumato, which he used to hide transitions between dark and light areas and to create realistic shading.

The Da Vinci researchers aren’t the only X-ray art historians. Another recently published study looked at “Mayan blue”–a long lasting pigment made by the civilization that lived in Central American from 2500 BC to the 1600s.

Archeologists were impressed with Mayan blue’s resistance to fading, given that most of the other colors used in Mayan artworks lost their vividness long ago. As reported by Technology Review, Catherine Dejoie at the Néel Institute in Grenoble used X-ray diffraction and also examined the blue samples’ weight changes during heating (called thermogravimetric analysis) to uncover the pigment’s secret.

The researchers knew that the Mayans made their blue by heating the pigment with palygorskite (a type of clay); their analysis showed that this heating allowed the pigment to enter tiny channels in the clay which are sealed after the mixture cools, protecting and keeping the pigment true blue for centuries.

Check out DISCOVER’s new Web TV show Joe Genius, in which things get blown up for the sake of science.

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Image: Wikimedia

I have to say: Since we ruthlessly banned a lot of bad actors over the past week or so, discussions at the Intersection have been quite civil and productive. See, for example, this thread. Or this one. And something else has occurred, too--I actually find myself commenting on my own blog again. I'd largely stopped doing it (and largely stopped paying detailed attention to most comments) because anything I'd say would be pored over, twisted, bent, attacked, and so on. So saying anything at all seemed a waste of time. This has been a learning experience for me. My initial outlook in the blogosphere, and one I held for a very long time, was that I should err on the side of letting everyone who wanted to post do so rapidly, without hinderance. Only after the fact, and after much clear and undeniable abuse of the privilege, should I or Sheril step in and moderate or ban. But I now see that perhaps this was not right at all. Moderating all comments here takes much more work, and creates more delay; but so far, it also ensures better discussion. The ideal approach, I think, would be if some commenters could become "trusted" and get ...

Identical twins don’t share everything. The mix of viruses in a person’s gut, a new study says, is unique to each of us, even if we share nearly all our DNA with another person. That is, at least according to our poop.

This year scientists have been working to decode the genetics of the beneficial microbes that live inside us, like the bacteria that help us digest food. But those trillions of bacteria have partners of their own—beneficial viruses. Jeffrey Gordon and colleagues wanted to see what those viruses were like, and how they differed from person to person. To do it, they studied fecal samples that came from four sets of identical twins, as well as their mothers.

Each identical twin had virus populations that didn’t resemble those of their sibling—or anybody else, for that matter.

Remarkably, more than 80 percent of the viruses in the stool samples had not been previously discovered. “The novelty of the viruses was immediately apparent,” Gordon said. The intestinal viromes of identical twins were about as different as the viromes of unrelated individuals [MSNBC].

In addition, those viruses appeared to be stable over time, as opposed to the ever-shifted bacterial populations in people. And the virus-bacterium relationship in our gut, the study suggests, is different than in many other places. Viruses that infect bacteria and take advantage of them to replicate are called bacteriophages, and the two often enter an evolutionary arms race of new attacks and defenses.

Not inside us, though.

When the researchers probed deeper, they found that many of the bacteriophages carried bacterial genes that help microbes survive the anaerobic conditions in the colon. “You could see that these viruses were porting around genes that could benefit their host bacteria,” Gordon says. If the viruses transfer those genes to other bacteria that don’t normally carry them, that could help genetically disadvantaged bacteria evolve to live better in the colon [Science News].

If our gut viruses are truly unique, then the question for future research becomes: Why? And how does one’s unique viral population become established?

Gordon’s study also shakes up our picture of who’s the boss. We’ve talked before about humans’ reliance on our resident bacteria, without which we could not survive. But if bacteria are reliant upon viruses to shake up their genetics and help them survive the harsh environment of human intestines, are not viruses the true lords of our guts? Says microbiologist David Relman:

“It could be that viruses are the real drivers of the system because of their ability to modify the bacteria that then modify the human host,” he says. “So this study is in some ways looking into the genesis of the human body by seeing what viruses within it are up to” [Nature].

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Related Content:
80beats: Study: C-Section Babies Miss Out on a Dose of Beneficial Bacteria
80beats: Scientists Sequence DNA from the Teeming Microbial Universe in Your Guts
80beats: Your Belly Button Is a Lush Oasis for Bacteria, and That’s a Good Thing
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80beats: Parasitic Wasp Genome Is Like the Wasp Itself: Weird and Surprising

Image: Gordon et. al.

[An old post I'm fond of]

Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and grub daddies, cram grapes in her cheeks in imitation of the chipmunks, and ask again and again about where the birds spend Christmas. This is, of course, hog heaven for a geeky science-writer father like myself, but there is one subject that I hope she doesn’t ask me about: how the garden snails have babies. Because then I would have to explain about the love darts.

Garden snails, and many other related species of snails, are hermaphrodites, equipped both with a penis that can deliver sperm to other males and with eggs that can be fertilized by the sperm of others. Two hermaphroditic snails can fertilize each other, or just play the role of male or female. Snail mating is a slow, languorous process, but it also involves some heavy weaponry. Before delivering their sperm, many species (including garden snails) fire nasty-looking darts made of calcium carbonate into the flesh of their mate. In the 1970s, scientists sugested that this was a gift to help the recipient raise its fertilized eggs. But it turns out that snails don’t incorporate the calcium in the dart into their bodies. Instead, love darts turn out to deliver hormones that manipulate a snail’s reproductive organs.

Evolutionary biologists have hypothesized that this love dart evolved due to a sexual arms race. When a snail receives some sperm, it can gain some evolutionary advantage if it can choose whether to use it or not. By choosing the best sperm, a snail can produce the best offspring. But it might be in the evolutionary interest of sperm-delivering snails to rob their mates of their ability to choose. And love darts appear to do just that. Their hormones prevent a snail from destroying sperm with digestive enzymes, so that firing a love dart leads to more eggs being fertilized.

Recently Joris Koene of Vrije University in the Netherlands Hinrich Schulenberg of Tuebingen University in Germany set out to see how this evolutionary arms race has played out over millions of years. They analyzed DNA from 51 different snail species that produce love darts, which allowed them to work out how the snails are related to one another. They then compared the darts produced by each species, along with other aspects of their reproduction, such as how fast the sperm could swim and the shape of the pocket that receives the sperm.

Koene and Schulenberg found that love darts are indeed part of a grand sexual arms race. Love darts have evolved many times, initially as simple cones but then turning into elaborate harpoons in some lineages. (The picture at the end of this post shows eight love darts, in side view and cross section.) In the same species in which these ornate weapons have evolved, snails have also evolved more powerful tactics for delivering their sperm, including increasingly complex glands where the darts and hormones are produced. These aggressive tactics have evolved, it seems, in response to the evolution of female choice. Species with elaborate love darts also have spermatophore-receving organs that have long, maze-like tunnels through which the sperm have to travel. By forcing sperm to travel further, the snails can cut down the increased survival of the sperm thanks to the dart-delivered hormones.

Sexual conflict has been proposed as a driving force in the evolution of many species, and this new research (which is published free online today at BMC Evolutionary Biology) supports the idea that hermaphrodites are not immune to it. What’s particularly cool about the paper is that all these attacks and counter-attacks co-vary. That is, species with more blades on their love darts tend to have longer rerpoductive tracts and more elaborate hormone-producing glands and so on. Only by comparing dozens of species were they able to find this sort of a relationship.

My wife always tells me that as a science writer, I ought to be well-prepared to give our children the talk about the birds and the bees. But I’m not sure the love darts would send quite the right message.