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

Are you 25?

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

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

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

Alice robots at work.

What’s the News: The diminutive, unassuming Alice robot has helped a Swiss research team test a core tenet about the evolution of altruism, called Hamilton’s rule. The researchers’ new study shows that even simple robots operating with simple evolutionary rules can recreate evolution’s complex interplay of selfishness and selflessness.

How the Heck:

Each Alice bot is a trundling cube equipped with two wheels and 33 “genes” that reflect the make-up of its artificial nervous system. These genes control how well they can move around and push small disks that represent food into their nests. Because researchers wanted to do the study on a big scale (500 generations of 1,600 robots each), they actually carried out most of the action in a computer simulation of the robots, where it could be done faster and cheaper. (Previous work showed that the software version of Alice evolution was a good model of the hardware version.)

At the beginning of the simulation, each robot was randomly assigned a value for each of its genes. Then survival of the fittest took over: The robots that couldn’t gather food effectively didn’t have their ...

I do so love to report these wins for reality, as rare as they are: the very vocal antivax advocate Mark Geier has had his medical license revoked in Maryland. Why?

The Maryland State Board of Physicians reviewed nine cases of autistic children seen by Geier, of which he treated seven. Of those nine, the Board found he misdiagnosed six of them. He (mis)diagnosed them with "precocious puberty", a medical condition where kids have extremely early onset of puberty. Why would he do such a thing? Well, this condition can be treated with Lupron, a drug which lowers testosterone (it’s used to chemically castrate adult men). Geier happens to think Lupron can also help autism — despite there being no evidence at all that’s the case — which makes his diagnosis very suspect. It implies strongly that he used the precocious puberty diagnosis as an excuse to prescribe the drug.

By the way, Lupron costs $5000 – $6000 a month to administer. The side effects can be severe as well, including seizures, and it’s known that autistic children are prone to seizures. That’s why the Board wrote that Geier’s treatment "exposed the children to needless risk ...

Like John Hawks I get a fair number of questions from students. Some of them seem legit and I try and answer them, but sometimes they’re asking detailed things which would take me too long and it falls out of my task stack. And alas on occasion they’re clearly straight up asking me to write their paper from what I can tell. But today I got an interesting email from a doctoral student in England who found me via twitter and my blog, and was wondering if I could fill in an online survey for her research. It took me all of 5 minutes, so if you want to help them out (I’m thinking this is a painless way to increase someone’s sample size):

To fill in the survey, please:

Click here if you have bought a genetic test. (If you have bought a test but haven’t recieved your results yet, please still follow this link and just ignore any questions you can’t answer).

Click here if you are thinking of buying a genetic test.

Like a bazillion other geeks, I’m a big fan of Randall Munroe’s web comic xkcd. It’s funny and wonderful, but sometimes it’s his particular way of expressing his view that’s simply astonishing.

As poignant as that is, you really need to go to his page and mouse over the comic to read the text that pops up. It reminded me strongly of my own sentiments in an OpEd I wrote for the New York Post a couple of years ago. Especially this part:

For all of history, the Moon was a metaphor for an unreachable place, beyond our grasp. But in 1969 NASA looked to this unachievable destination and made it achievable. It was an event so singular that every accomplishment ever since has been compared to it. It was NASA’s shining hour.

But I’ve met many Apollo astronauts, and — no offense to them — they’re old. The last man to walk on the Moon is 75. How old will he be when the next human leaves a footprint on the lunar surface?

It’s a question I’d like the answer to very soon.

Related posts:

- ...

Very excited to learn that my talk from TEDxCaltech is featured on the TED home page today. They have their own comment thread, and in a couple of weeks we’ll have a live call-in “conversation with the speaker” deal. If the Twitters are to be believed, these TED talks are pretty darn popular.

The talk is a punchy, 15-minute version of my usual cosmology-and-the-arrow-of-time schtick. Glad to see the arrow of time get some more publicity; sophisticated Cosmic Variance readers know all about it, but not everyone is so lucky. When Brian Cox did an episode of Wonders of the Universe that discussed the arrow of time, the comments were all “Wow, what an amazing concept, never heard of that!” Obviously reading the wrong blogs.

But I can’t help but notice something about the presentation on the TED home page…

Each talk is advertised by an image from the video; in most cases it’s a picture of the speaker actually giving the talk. But for mine, they (wisely) went with the Hubble Deep Field.

Lesson: you can’t compete with the universe! It’s bigger, smarter, and prettier, too.

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., an HIV research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

Last night, the George Washington University and the University of Ottawa presented the D. Allan Bromley Memorial Lecture with featured speaker Dr. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

I attended the event with the intention of getting to the root of a problem that has been irking me for months. I wanted to ask Dr. Holdren why the scientific integrity guidelines that he requested from all agencies have not been delivered. This has been a drawn out process mired in inaction and delays since President Obama made his request for the guidelines more than 2 years ago.

Initially, the President assigned to Dr. Holdren “the responsibility for ensuring the highest level of integrity in all aspects of the executive branch’s involvement with scientific and technological processes.” Dr. Holdren was to confer with “the heads of executive departments and agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget and offices and agencies within the Executive Office of the President, and recommend a plan to achieve that goal throughout the executive branch.” This task was to be performed within 120 days of the issuance of the President’s memorandum. That would have been approximately July 9, 2009. Instead, it took more than 18 months before Dr. Holdren produced his own memorandum on December 17, 2010 directing the heads of the executive departments and agencies to implement the Administration’s policies on scientific integrity. In his memo, Dr. Holdren asked that “all agencies report to [him] within 120 days the actions they have taken to develop and implement policies” in these areas.

On April 21, 2011, OSTP reported that all 30 executive branch departments, agencies and offices had responded to Dr. Holdren’s request, six of which had submitted draft or completed policies. This announcement, however, described the responses as “progress reports,” which for me changes the meaning of Dr. Holdren’s December memo. Whereas last year Dr. Holdren asked for a report of “the actions that have been taken to develop and implement policies,” one might assume this means more than a progress report. Personally, I would like to see a little more action on this issue.

Why am I so concerned about the establishment of these guidelines? For starters, I shouldn’t have to remind you of the gross misconduct that occurred at the Department of the Interior during the Bush administration in regards to endangered species. But, I’m also troubled by the 2010 survey from the Union of Concerned Scientists that concluded that special interests and public officials continue to routinely inhibit government scientists and inspectors from doing their job of protecting the American food supply. If these problems are readily detectable by a UCS survey, we must wonder what types of infringements are occurring without our knowledge. Thus, it is imperative that scientific integrity guidelines be established pronto.

What happened at the end of the speech caught me completely off-guard. Dr. Holdren’s talk was entitled “Science and Technology Policy Challenges and Opportunities in the Obama Administration.” After providing a little history of his position as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Dr. Holdren launched into a presentation on Science and Technology Policy. He covered science and technology for policy and policy for science and technology, two topics with unique challenges in and of themselves. It was very much an academic talk about the distinctions of each of these areas of science policy. Frankly, it was a lecture I’ve seen many times prior to this speech. In the process of describing the problems and opportunities in science and technology process, he made one point that I found to be reassuring in light of my chosen career path. Dr. Holdren confirmed that a non-problem for the science and technology is the availability of job posts for science and technology policy-trained individuals.

At a time when budgets are being squeezed in the fields of science and technology, to hear that there is an area where science-minded individuals can take refuge is heartening. Although I shouldn’t be too pessimistic about science funding, because Dr. Holdren provided evidence of his effective advocacy for preserving science funding even during this time of economic hardship. He showed that among the agencies that receive federal funding for scientific endeavors few budgets were cut and some agencies even received a boost in funding.

The cynical attitude with which I entered the room began to fade. By the time Dr. Holdren reached the section of his speech entitled “President Obama’s view”, my spirits had been lifted. Granted, this was Dr. Holdren’s mission with this speech, but I think there was no doubt that those in the room were inspired. As Dr. Holdren went on to describe President Obama’s engagement with the science and technology community, I began to have hope that we are making progress in the fight to maintain our competitiveness in the world.

There were a few moments in which Dr. Holdren talked candidly about the President’s commitment to science that drove the point home for me. First, Dr. Holdren pointed out that the President has appointed no less than 5 Nobel Laureates to his cabinet and/or to head various scientific agencies. At high level positions within the administration, there are 25 members from our leading scientific organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine and American Association of Arts and Sciences. President Obama has appointed the first ever Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer. Dr. Holdren was adamant that no President in history has made science, technology and innovation more prominent in their administration.

President Obama continues to demonstrate his commitment to science and technology through White House events speeches and policy recommendations. President Obama was the first to give a speech at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since John F. Kennedy. During that speech, the President stated, “Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before.”

In terms of real policy, President Obama has acknowledged that science and technology are central to America’s economic recovery and growth. America is facing challenges in nearly every sector of our economy. Many of these challenges will be solved through scientific endeavors. Investments in infotech, biotech, nanotech and greentech will be the way to success. According to Dr. Holdren, the ways that we will ensure that we have the scientific capital to address these problems also include investing in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, lowering or eliminating taxes on research and development expenditures and encouraging cooperation and partnerships among our scientific agencies. He confirmed that the President reads the recommendations from his council of advisors on science and technology (PCAST) and he stated that “what the President knows about science and technology is simply extraordinary.”

Dr. Holdren boasted that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has the “highest batting average” among executive offices that submit event requests for the President to attend. He even went so far as to say that the President had stated his desire to spend more time with science students and less time with athletes (Sorry UConn).

By the time, Dr. Holdren reached the issue of scientific integrity guidelines, it felt rather ridiculous for me to squabble about the rate of progress on this issue. Dr. Holdren pointed out that his staff of 100 at OSTP is simply dwarfed by the volume of work they face on a daily basis. Although I continue to hold reservations about the tenacity with which the scientific integrity guidelines are being pursued, I now have more of a sense of the magnitude of the problem. From a cynical perspective, it seems that this administration continues to be bogged down by at least 8 years of neglect and I can only hope that they will get on schedule to undo the damage before President Obama leaves office.

As I said before, I entered the room with a specific (cynical) goal and left feeling inspired. Dr. Holdren was very effective at winning me over. If I haven’t made his case clear enough, I’ll leave you with one of his departing remarks that I feel represents a distinct difference between the current administration’s appreciation for science and technology and the previous administration and the impact that will have on our future.

At the end of the event, when asked about programs designed to encourage minorities and particularly women to participate in science, Dr. Holdren offered this example:

In October of 2009, President Obama hosted “Astronomy Night at the White House.” I believe Dr. Holdren said there were more than 30 telescopes on the White House South Lawn. In attendance were 300 middle school students from the DC-area. Also, attending the event were “space heroes” Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride and several other astronomers and space scientists including 5 women scientists. Two of the students, 14 year old Caroline Moore and Lucas Bolyard, a high school sophomore, had each made significant astronomical discoveries. Caroline had become the youngest person to discover a supernova and Lucas located a pulsar. After presenting awards to the students and talking about the importance of science education, President Obama finished is comments with a lasting thought. First, he asked the children in attendance, “which one of you are going to come back here to claim your prize?” He went on to ask the students “Are you going to find a new star? Or a cure for a disease? Or invent the next iPhone?…What will your great discovery be?”

Dr. Holdren’s wife was in the audience amongst the students. She described to Dr. Holdren how the children had responded to these questions from President Obama. One of the students with tears on their cheek said, “The President was talking to me.”

In a lab in Kansas, Aracely Lutes has created a new species of all-female lizard that reproduces by cloning itself. There wasn’t any genetic engineering involved; Lutes did it with just a single round of breeding.

This feat stands in stark contrast to the slow pace at which species usually arise. Here’s the typical story: different populations become separated in some way, whether by space, time, predators, sexual preferences, or an inability to understand one another. Differences gradually build up between them, until they can no longer produce fit and fertile offspring. Voila – where there was once one species, there are now two.

There are exceptions to this recurring tale of slow divergence. Different species sometimes mate to create hybrids, whose genomes are a mash-up of those of their parents. These individuals are often infertile (think mules) or weak. But in rare cases, they survive and prosper. For example, there is a hybrid bat from the Caribbean that combines the genomes of three separate species, one of which is now extinct. Other mammals including the red wolf and stump-tailed macaque might also be ...

Sometimes it pays to look over some older data and re-examine it. An exoplanet called 55 Cancri e was thought to have an orbit that was just 2.8 days long when it was discovered. However, two researchers looked over the data and realized they got a better fit if the orbit were actually only 0.73654 days — just under 18 hours! This meant it orbited its star far closer than previously thought as well.

And while that may be somewhat interesting, it’s the implications for the planet itself that make this orbital revision so cool. Or actually, hot. And dense.

Right. As usual, there’s a story to tell here…

The planet was discovered using the Doppler method: as it orbits its star, the gravity of the planet tugs on the star, causing a very small shift in the spectrum of starlight. The problem is getting enough observations to nail down the planet’s period; you can’t observe when it’s up during the day, and that cuts into the ability to get a good sampling of measurements. The discovery data gave a good fit at 2.8 days, so that’s what ...

Imagine you know everything on Wikipedia, in the Oxford English Dictionary, and the contents of every book in digital form. When someone asks you what you did twenty years ago, on demand you recall with perfect accuracy every sensation and thought from that moment. Sifting and parsing all of this information is effortless and unconscious. Any fact, instant of time, skill, technique, or data point that you’ve experienced or can access on the internet is in your mind.

Cybernetic brains might make that possible. As computing power and storage continue to plod along their 18-month doubling cycle, there is no reason to believe we won’t at least have cybernetic sub-brains within the coming century. We already offload a tremendous amount of information and communication to our computers and smartphones. Why not make the process more integrated? Of course, what I’m engaging in right now is rampant speculation. But a neuro-computer interface is a possibility. More than that: cyber-brains may be necessary.

The idea of a cyber-brain is pretty simple. Our brains are all-in-one systems that store, process, organize, and collect data. A cybernetic brain would augment one, many, or all parts of that ...

I recently came across this post at Science & Religion Today, authored by Dan Kahan, who is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor at Yale Law School. It clarifies so many important issues about motivated reasoning–what it is, what it isn’t–that I asked Kahan if I could repost it here, as I think it deserves very wide circulation. He said okay. So here goes:

Recently, scholars and commentators have drawn attention to the contribution of “motivated cognition” to diverse political conflicts, including climate change and the birthplace of President Obama. I will offer a few points to help people assess such claims.

1. To begin, motivated cognition refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal. Consider a classic example. In the 1950s, psychologists asked experimental subjects, students from two Ivy League colleges, to watch a film that featured a set of controversial officiating calls made during a football game between teams from their respective schools. The students from each school were more likely to see the referees’ calls as correct when it favored their school than when it favored their rival. The researchers concluded that the emotional stake the students had in affirming their loyalty to their respective institutions shaped what they saw on the tape.

The end or goal motivates the cognition in the sense that it directs mental operations—in this case, sensory perceptions; in others, assessments of the weight and credibility of empirical evidence, or performance of mathematical or logical computation—that we expect to function independently of that goal or end. But the normal connotation of “motive” as a conscious goal or reason for acting is actually out of place here and can be a source of confusion. The students wanted to experience solidarity with their institutions, but they didn’t treat that as a conscious reason for seeing what they saw. They had no idea (or so we are to believe; one needs a good experimental design to be sure this is so) that their perceptions were being bent in this way.

2. Motivated cognition is best understood as a description or characterization of a process and not an explanation in and of itself. For a genuine explanation, we need to know, at a minimum, what the need or goal was that did the motivating (or directing) of the agent’s mental processing and the precise cognitive mechanism or mechanisms through which it operated to generate the goal-supporting perceptions or beliefs.

Examples of the goals or needs that can motivate cognition are diverse. They include fairly straightforward things, like a person’s financial or related interests. But they reach more intangible stakes, too, such as the need to sustain a positive self-image or protect connections to others with whom someone is intimately connected and on whom someone might well depend for support, emotional or material.

The mechanisms are also diverse. They include dynamics such as biased information search, which involves seeking out (or disproportionally attending to) evidence that is congruent rather than incongruent with the motivating goal; biased assimilation, which refers to the tendency to credit and discredit evidence selectively in patterns that promote rather than frustrate the goal; and identity-protective cognition, which reflects the tendency of people to react dismissively to information when accepting it would cause them to experience dissonance or anxiety. Identifying these more concrete and empirically established mechanisms and giving a plausible and textured account of how they are at work is critical; otherwise, assertions of “motivated cognition” become circular—“x believes that because it was useful; the evidence is that it was useful for x to believe that.”

3. To be sure, motivated cognition can make us stupid, but it is not a consequence of stupidity. Social psychologists and behavioral economists distinguish between two forms of reasoning: “System 1,” which is rapid, intuitive, emotional, and prone to bias, and “System 2,” which is more deliberate, more reflective, more dispassionate, and (it is said) more accurate. A long line of research in social psychology, however, shows that “motivated cognition” spans the divide—that is, that needs and goals can unconsciously steer not only rapid “gut” reactions, but also even more systematic forms of analysis that are thought to be examples of “System 2.” Indeed, some researchers have shown that expert scientists are at least sometimes prone to motivated reasoning—that they conform the performance of their reflective and deliberate evaluations of evidence to the desire they have to see exciting conclusions vindicated and disfavored ones rejected. Scary stuff. And humbling (unless as a result of motivated reasoning we see evidence of its operation only in those who disagree with us—in which case, motivated reasoning makes us anything but humble).

4. Work on motivated cognition and political conflict tends to focus more on the need for maintaining a valued identity, particularly as a member of a group. It is certainly plausible that an individual would employ one or another of the mechanisms for motivated cognition to advance her economic interests. But the seeming inability of economic interests to explain who believes what on issues such as climate change, the HPV vaccine, one or another economic policy involving tax cuts or social welfare spending, and the like is in fact the motivation—as it were—for examining the contribution that identity-protective forms of motivated cognition are making.

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and a member of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School.

A new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society dovetails with some posts I’ve put up on the peopling of Japan of late. The paper is Bayesian phylogenetic analysis supports an agricultural origin of Japonic languages:

Languages, like genes, evolve by a process of descent with modification. This striking similarity between biological and linguistic evolution allows us to apply phylogenetic methods to explore how languages, as well as the people who speak them, are related to one another through evolutionary history. Language phylogenies constructed with lexical data have so far revealed population expansions of Austronesian, Indo-European and Bantu speakers. However, how robustly a phylogenetic approach can chart the history of language evolution and what language phylogenies reveal about human prehistory must be investigated more thoroughly on a global scale. Here we report a phylogeny of 59 Japonic languages and dialects. We used this phylogeny to estimate time depth of its root and compared it with the time suggested by an agricultural expansion scenario for Japanese origin. In agreement with the scenario, our results indicate that Japonic languages descended from a common ancestor approximately 2182 years ago. Together with archaeological and biological evidence, our results suggest that the first farmers ...

Since I’ve been on the Discover Magazine website for one year I thought I’d look at some patterns in Google Analytics. Specifically, over the interval from April 1st 2010 to April 30th 2011 (alas, I lost access to the ScienceBlogs traffic data). For example, what institutions are people coming to this website from? To do that I just filtered for “university” and “college” in Google Analytics. Below are those institutional addresses which sent 500 or more visits to this website over the year.

Institution
Visits HARVARD UNIVERSITY
2568 UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
1973 STANFORD UNIVERSITY
1372 BEIHANG UNIVERSITY
1359 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
1283 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
1188 OXFORD UNIVERSITY
1169 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
1009 YALE UNIVERSITY
990 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON
974 UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
958 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
936 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
893 UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
879 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
842 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
841 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
840 YORK UNIVERSITY
835 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
805 UPPSALA UNIVERSITY
802 BOSTON UNIVERSITY
784 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA
784 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO
746 NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
732 DUKE UNIVERSITY
724 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
723 UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI
710 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS
700 UNIVERSITY SIEGEN CAMPUS NETWORK
670 CORNELL UNIVERSITY
669 UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
665 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
654 OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
650 SMITH COLLEGE
637 BROWN UNIVERSITY
626 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
614 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
611 UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL
589 THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY
583 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
552 WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY
532 SAINT JOHN S UNIVERSITY – COLLEGE OF SAINT BENEDICT
518 MCGILL UNIVERSITY
505 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ACADEMIC AFFAIRS
501

Now let’s look at visitor loyalty:

Visit that was the visitor’s nth visit
% of all visits 1 times
824746
62% 2 times
114278
9% 3 times
51544
4% 4 times
32629
2% 5 ...

[Note: there have been some connection issues to the pages linked here. There are cache links in the comments.]

I received an email last night. It was from Slau, a musician friend of mine (I met him through George Hrab) who’s also a skeptic and all-around good guy. Slau was asking me a favor, a small one, really, but with terrible gravitas: he had a friend, Derek Miller, who was dying of cancer. He only had a few weeks, maybe days, to live. Derek was a fan of mine, Slau told me, and asked if I could tweet about his site, or blog about it. Slau knew Derek would get a kick out of it.

Of course I’d do it, I thought. I went to Derek’s site, and immediately got a jolt: I recognized his avatar; he commonly retweeted stuff I posted, or sent me notes. OK, I thought, I’ll tweet something — but by then it was pretty late, so I figured better to wait until morning when more people will see it.

When morning came, I got on my computer and was ready to write something when ...

Testing the validity of the Danish urban myth that alcohol can be absorbed through feet: open labelled self experimental study

“Objective: To determine the validity of the Danish urban myth that it is possible to get drunk by submerging feet in alcohol… The primary end point was the concentration of plasma ethanol (detection limit 2.2 mmol/L (10 mg/100 mL)), measured every 30 minutes for three hours while feet were submerged in a washing-up bowl containing the contents of three 700 mL bottles of vodka. The secondary outcome was self assessment of intoxication related symptoms (self confidence, urge to speak, and number of spontaneous hugs), scored on a scale of 0 to 10. Plasma ethanol concentrations were below the detection limit of 2.2 mmol/L (10 mg/100 mL) throughout the experiment. No significant changes were observed in the intoxication related symptoms, although self confidence and urge to speak increased slightly at the start of the study, probably due to the setup. Our results suggest that feet are impenetrable to the alcohol component of vodka. We therefore conclude that the Danish urban myth of being able to get drunk by submerging feet ...

What’s the News: Bats have to use twice as much energy to fly when they’re wet as when they’re dry, a new study in Biology Letters found, which may help explain why many bats refrain from flying in heavy rain.

How the Heck:

The researchers captured ten Sowell’s short-tailed bats in Costa Rica.
Each of the bats flew around a large outdoor cage in three different circumstances: dry, wet (the researchers dampened their fur and wings with tap water) on an otherwise dry day, and wet on a fairly rainy day.
By measuring the bat’s metabolism, the researchers found that wet bats expended twice as much energy during a short flight as dry bats did (twenty and ten times their resting rate, respectively).
The wet bats didn’t weigh more than the dry ones, ruling out the idea that the damp bats simply had to work harder to carry extra water weight. Nor did already wet bats burn more energy flying on a rainy day than a dry one, meaning the problem isn’t that raindrops mess with the bats’ flight mechanics.
The researchers suggest two other explanations: Being wet might cool the ...

Last night, I spoke at a panel on science blogging, social media and the future of science writing with my peerless peers, Carl Zimmer and Hillary Rosner. Here’s the video. Thanks to Cristine Russell, Phil Hilts and Tom Levenson for persuading me to make the trip.

The original robots

We are haunted by Hamilton. William D. Hamilton specifically, an evolutionary biologist who died before his time in 2000. We are haunted because debates about his ideas are still roiling the intellectual world over a decade after his passing. Last summer there was an enormous controversy over a paper which purported to refute the relevance of standard kin selection theory. You can find out more about the debate in this Boston Globe article, Where does good come from? If you peruse the blogosphere you’ll get a more one-sided treatment. So fair warning (I probably agree more with the loud side which dominates the blogosphere for what it’s worth on the science).

What was Hamilton’s big idea? In short he proposed to tackle the problem of altruism in social organisms. The biographical back story here is very rich. You can hear that story from the “horse’s mouth” in the autobiographical sketches which Hamilton wrote up for his series of books of collected papers, Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Evolution of Social Behaviour and Narrow Roads of Gene Land: Evolution of Sex. ...