Well, this topic has really run away on its own at this point. I can no longer keep track of all the things that have been said. I find Chad Orzel's thread the best, because it really gets into a lot of the baffling reactions, many of which amount to saying, "this oped omits X" -- even though X is to be found in the longer paper, or in the American Academy's lengthy transcripts which I was asked to summarize. So I really feel that the people who are making this argument about omissions, without even mentioning the longer work, are being unfair. An example would be Evil Monkey--here criticizing the Post piece without mentioning the longer paper, and yet nevertheless saying "I've already done more than Mooney. I've made a couple concrete suggestions for how the problem needs to be addressed"; here glossing over that omission by saying the prior post "was directed at the Op-ed, which was pedantic and useless, if not counterproductive." Look: Everybody knows that one has to pare a topic down in order to write shorter articles, especially for mass media outlets rather than specialized ones. I've really seen nothing raised as an alleged omission in my Washington ...

The more you know, the better it tastes:

People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative. It’s the same thing that’s going on in the wine world….

I agree that the “story” or our understanding of something (e.g., whether it’s $100 or $10) can affect our perception of the hedonic experience. But sometimes coffee just tastes better. So the first time I had a Stumptown roast I was blown away, without knowing anything of the roaster’s history or reputation (it has a good reputation). I wasn’t even much of a coffee snob then (and really, I’m not much now). Though I think that the narrative of civet coffee might make me avoid it, even I if accept that objectively it has a better taste.

Note: Naturally Felix takes wine as an analog, but I think the ‘narrative’ is a much bigger deal, because people have far less objective discernment when it comes to wine.

NPR has a series on Morning Edition titled “The Human Edge,” which explores human evolution and genetics. The first episode is up, Finding Our Inner Fish. They focus on Neil Shubin’s work (also, some reporting on what fish can tell us about human skin color on All Things Considered).

As a constructive criticism, I wonder if NPR could do something with science like Planet Money.

A bunch of blogs are inviting their commenters (and, especially, lurkers) to out themselves. As it has been a couple of years since our previous de-lurking, we figured we’d join in on the fun.

We know that Cosmic Variance readers are all strong, good looking, and better than average. Why don’t you say hello? Maybe tell us a little about yourself, and what you like/dislike about our blog? Are there events we should know about? Important blogs we haven’t advertised? Should we start a petition to bring Sean back out of retirement? Should we post more about puppies?

Two years ago Ed Yong wanted to find out about who was reading his blog and started a thread to see what kind of information he could gather. Now Ed's revived the meme and science bloggers all around the interwebs are joining in. We think it's a great idea, so here's where you come in...
In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved? But really, these questions are a rough guide. I’m working on the basis that what you have to say will be far more interesting than what I think you might say.

A couple years ago, Ed Yong, blogger/whippersnapper, asked his readers to describe themselves in a comment thread. It was a very successful experiment, one that many science bloggers have since replicated. Now Ed’s reviving the meme, which seems as good a time as any for me to join in (especially after a day so hot that my brain was parboiled inside my skull like some exotic delicacy). So, to quote from the memester:

In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved?

But really, these questions are a rough guide. I’m working on the basis that what you have to say will be far more interesting than what I think you might say.

So…who goes there? I’m curious.

I think it is probably best to have a weekly open thread for links and what not of interest. So I’ll just do this every week (in fact, I’m going to schedule a bunch ahead), and leave links or pointers. I suppose people could ask questions too, as a lot of my blog posts which are more didactic emerge through reader feedback (often via email).

Edmund Yong has rebooted the “Who are you?” meme. I’ll quote him:

So let’s do it again. In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved?

I will try and be a little less…abrasive…on this thread in relation to comments, so feel free to let your hair down and “de-lurk”

That being said, I do take surveys of my readership periodically, so here are some of the demographic breakdowns which I have from a survey I took last winter….

-20% of the readership responded that they’d been reading GNXP for more than 4 years

-50% have at least a master’s degree (22% have doctorates, 11% professional advanced degrees)

-Nearly 50% of university degree holders who read GNXP have a background in science & engineering (science = natural science + mathematics)

-78% are atheists & agnostics

-60% have no religious identity

-70% live in the United States of America

-80% are of European ancestry

-86% are male

-35% are on the political Left, 30% on the Right, and 25% Libertarian

-60% have no children

-12% are virgins

-82% have taken calculus

The above includes both GNXP weblogs. The sample size is north of 600 (the omission rates varied by question).

In 2000 and 2001, two 27ft telescopes, located in Hawaii and Chili, began scientific operations as the Gemini Observatories.  Named for the constellation Gemini, the twins, the optical/infrared telescopes are among the largest and most advanced available to astronomers.  Named Gemini North (Hawaii) and Gemini South (Chili) when discussing the individual observatories, Gemini is usually referred to in the singular, with no distinction.

Gemini South - Image shamelessly lifted from the Gemini Website

Built and operated jointly by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chili, any astronomer from these countries can apply for observatory time on Gemini.  What’s really cool is a scientist doesn’t have to be physically present at the observatory to operate the telescope; Gemini is designed to be remotely operated.  This saves astronomers valuable time (and expense, of course), and makes Gemini extremely responsive to unexpected celestial events; like this image of Jupiter getting hit by an asteroid:

Being a land-based observatory, Gemini must deal with distortions from the Earth’s atmosphere (something for which space telescopes like the Hubble don’t have to compensate).  In order to compensate for the distortion, the telescopes operate with a system of “adaptive optics”.  In effect, Gemini is wearing glasses.

Since beginning its scientific work, Gemini has been responsible for some ground-breaking discoveries.  Imaging the Milky Way’s galactic core, Gemini’s combined optical/infrared images returned images clearer and more detailed than has ever before been possible.  Most recently, Gemini confirmed the imaging of a planet around a distant star (read Tom’s post here).  That’s just the most recent in a long line of Gemini-based discoveries.  If you have a minute, take a look at these links from the Gemini website.  It would take a whole ‘nother post to talk about these discoveries, but it’s well-worth your time to take a look.

Gemini weighs in as the “next generation” in telescope optics, and it’s a heavy hitter.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Anyone currently following the World Cup, Wimbledon, or any of the many sporting events around the world will know the emotional highs and lows that they can produce. But these events wield even more power than we think. According to Andrew Healy­ from Loyola Marymount University, sports results can even swing the outcome of an election.

In the US, if a local college football team wins a match in the ten days before a Senate, gubernatiorial or even presidential election, the incumbent candidate tends to get a slightly higher proportion of the vote. This advantage is particularly potent if the team has a strong fan-base and if they were the underdogs. Healy’s study provides yet more evidence that voting decisions aren’t just based on objective and well-reasoned analysis, despite their importance in democratic societies. They can be influenced by completely irrelevant events, putting the fate of politicians into the hands (or feet) of sportsmen.

Healy says that a victory by a local team puts sports fans in a generally positive frame of mind. If they approach the ballot box in this way, they’re more likely to think well of the incumbent party, to interpret their past record more positively, and to be more content with the status quo. The same effect, where emotions cross the boundaries between different judgments, has been seen countless times before in laboratory studies.

When we’re in a good mood, we overestimate the frequency of happy events in our lives, we interpret things around us more favourably, and we spend more time thinking about the positive sides of the things we’re judging. These trends hold true even for things that have nothing to do with whatever made us happy. As an example, people think that their cars or televisions perform better if they received a free gift beforehand. And this applies to politicians too.

Healy looked at the results of local college football games between 1964 and 2008, for all counties with teams in the Bowl Championship Series. He compared these results to those of American presidential, gubernatorial and senate elections within the same counties. The numbers showed that if the local team won in the 10 days before the election, the incumbent’s share of the vote went up by 0.8 percentage points – a small but statistically significant change. This effect became even bigger after Healy adjusted the results for how strong and consistent the teams were, or the wealth, education and ethnic diversity of the counties.

If Healy’s explanation about positive moods is correct, you would expect football games to have a stronger influence in conditions where they engender stronger emotions. And that’s exactly what happens. If the local underdog team won against expectations (as measured by looking at the odds given by betting offices), the incumbent’s vote share went up by 1.61 percentage points. In counties where more people turn up to matches, or where the local team has a track record of championship wins, a local victory boosted the incumbent’s vote share by between 2.30 and 2.42 percentage points.

These stats support Healy’s idea that it’s all about emotions. The buzz of seeing the local team win can translate to a feel-good factor for the current government, particularly if the victory was unexpected or if you’re in an area that’s football-mad. And in all these cases, games played after Election Day had no bearing on the incumbent’s prospects.

Healy found the same effect in another sport and at an individual level, by showing that the performance of local teams in a basketball tournament affected people’s approval of President Obama.

During the 2009 NCAA men’s college basketball tournament, Healy asked over 3,000 people to name their favourite team and found that for every win the team achieved above the bookies’ predictions, their approval rating for Obama went up by 2.3 percentage points. Again, the effect was strongest among the biggest fans. Victories garnered an extra 5 percentage points of support for the President among people closely following the tournament, but just 1.1 points among more casual supporters.

And this time, Healy embedded an experiment in his study. After asking the volunteers to name their team, he told half of them about the scores in recent games in great detail. Doing so completely nullified the effect of these games on Obama’s approval ratings. That’s critically important for it suggests that the link between sporting success, mood and voting decisions is a unconscious one. It also tells us that moving these considerations to the front of our minds can strip them of any influence.

Healy’s work is just the latest of a long line of psychological studies that show us the irrational nature of voting. People make child-like judgments about a candidate’s competence based on second-long glances at their faces, and they can predict the winner of an election with reasonable accuracy based on such short looks. The subliminal sight of a national flag can shift people’s voting choices. And even undecided people have often secretly made their minds up, even if they have no clue that they’ve done so.

Now we see that events well beyond a politician’s control can also affect their fates. Sports are an ideal avenue for exploring this effect. You wouldn’t expect governments to respond to the outcomes of games, nor voters to hold governments responsible for such outcomes. And whether a school is privately or publicly funded had no bearing on the link between sporting and election results. And yet, sporting outcomes do seem to trigger small shifts at the ballots.

Imagine then the even greater influence of other events that could be reasonably tied to government performance, such as the health of the economy or the outcome of a natural disaster. As Healy says, “A voter who is presented with negative information about the local economy may perceive a separate news story about the president’s foreign policy in a less positive light.”

If that seems dangerous, the study also provides a silver lining – this effect is a fragile one. If you can make people aware of the reasons for their state of mind, the influence of irrelevant events becomes weaker – all the more reason to do research like this in the first place.

Reference: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1007420107 If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

Images by Rama and Mike Kaplan

More on the psychology of voting and political attitudes:

• Undecided voters aren’t really undecided – the hidden side of decision-making
• Voters use child-like judgments when judging political candidates
• Subliminal flag shifts political views and voting choices
• How light or dark is Barack Obama’s skin? Depends on your political stance…
• Political attitudes linked to startle reflexes

The European Space Agency just released the first all-sky survey taken by their Planck orbiting observatory, and it’s a beauty!

[Click to entelescopinate.]

Planck observes the sky from the far infrared all the way out to near radio frequencies, detecting cold gas and dust, star forming regions, and even the subtle and cooling glow of the background fire from the Big Bang itself. In this image, infrared is blue, and the longer wavelengths (out toward the radio part of the spectrum) are progressively more red. It shows the whole sky, which is why the image is an oval; that keeps the map from getting too distorted (like how maps of the Earth are distorted near the edges).

The line running horizontally across the image is the Milky Way galaxy itself. The galaxy is a flat disk, and we’re inside it, so it looks like a line. Think of it this way: imagine you are inside a vast fog-filled room, five hundred meters on a side, but only five meters high. When you look across the room you see lots of fog, but when you look up you only see a little bit — the amount of fog depends on how far into the room you look. The Milky Way is the same way; we’re halfway to the edge of a huge, flat disk filled with dust. When we look into the disk we see it edge-on, and we can see all that dust. Look up or down (toward the top and bottom of the image) and we don’t see as much.

This map is in galactic coordinates, meaning the center of the Milky Way is the center of the map. That makes it a little confusing for people used to using coordinates based on the Earth (celestial latitude and longitude), but much easier for astronomers mapping the galaxy and the objects beyond it. That’s what this map was made for, and that’s why it uses a galactic reference.

The wispy material in the image is dust blown up out of the disk by the fierce combined winds of thousands of young massive stars when they are born, and also when they die and explode (a close up from an earlier Planck image can be seen on the left). The reddish glow you can see near the poles of the picture is from the Cosmic Microwave Background, the fading glow of the Big Bang. You can find out more about that in a post I wrote about it a little while back. To many astronomers, that glow is the most important thing in this image, but to get at it they’ll have to digitally remove all the foreground glow of the Milky Way; it’s like looking out a bedroom window at night at a faint object when your light is on. You have too much local glow swamping your view. Removing that foreground light from the Milky Way is extremely difficult and will take astronomers long time, possibly years. But when they do, they’ll have the best ever view of it, and will learn a huge amount about how the Universe itself formed.

The ESA put up a helpful map indicating where some more familiar objects are. For example, Orion is almost all the way to the right, and the big puffy pink circle halfway to the left is the star-forming region in Cygnus, the Swan.

If you want to explore this image more, I suggest heading over to Chromoscope, an interactive map that lets you switch between different wavelengths of light, from radio up to gamma rays. It’s a nifty tool to show you how the sky changes when you observe it in different light.

The Planck data is truly amazing, and I’m very glad to see it released. I know a lot of astronomers who will be hunkering down and spending the next several years of their lives poring over it. They’ll tease out subtle hints about the Universe: how it formed, how it has evolved, and how, eventually, it may die. This is what we are now able to do, we big-brained apes. I have to disagree with Alexander Pope: the proper study of mankind is the Universe, and everything in it.

Credits: ESA/ LFI & HFI Consortia

Around two years ago, I started a thread asking readers to identify themselves, say something about their background, and tell me a bit about why they were reading this blog. That thread was resurrected last year and has since acquired more than 200 comments. They’re some of my favourite comment threads – it’s incredibly motivating to see what a diverse range of people I’m writing for.

So let’s do it again. In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been reading, what do you think about it, and how could it be improved?

But really, these questions are a rough guide. I’m working on the basis that what you have to say will be far more interesting than what I think you might say.

So say as little or as much as you like, but do say something, even if you’ve never commented before and even if you commented on the last “Who are you?” thread.

(PS – Thanks to Drugmonkey for restarting this meme. He’s got a fuller list of everyone else’s threads too)

(Including the one I live with who left before 7am this morning...)

EPOXI is already in orbit (not shown) around the Sun. This graphic shows its trajectory starting from the 2009 Earth Flyby. The spacecraft will make its last Earth Flyby on 27 June 2010 before heading to its rendezvous with comet Hartley

Remember the Deep Impact spacecraft that released a probe that smashed into Comet Temple I back on July 4, 2005?  I sure do, I attended a Moody Blues concert and got home in time to watch it.  It was an amazing end to a fine day.

The part of the spacecraft that didn’t hit the comet, the part that contains two cameras, two telescopes and an infrared spectrometer, was recycled thanks in large part to Michael A’Hearn (University of Maryland, Deep Impact team leader and all around good guy).  What is recycled you ask?  Well through careful planning, it means another comet encounter and guess what else?  They set the spacecraft on an altered course with one last flyby of Earth this past Sunday.

The spacecraft came as close as 18,900 miles above the South Atlantic and from that got a gravity assist to increase its speed by a whooping 1.5-Km/sec – that’s 3,470 mph.  The result will be to reshape the spacecrafts orbit just the right amount to have a close encounter with Comet Hartley 2.  We won’t be waiting long either, science data will start to be received this September and the close encounter will occur on November 4, 2010.  Don’t expect an impact this time around though.

What’s in a name?  EPOXI is an extended mission of the Deep Impact spacecraft. Its name is derived from its two tasked science investigations — the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization (EPOCh) and the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI).

[I was originally going to avoid this, but decided to do it for the critical analysis, because I suspect it will be widely but badly covered, and because I also suspect that very little of this coverage will point out the publication record of these authors. Which is worth pointing out. Have fun in the comments!]

Why do different countries have different IQs? You’d first answer probably has something to do with education, but a trio of US scientists have put forward a radically different hypothesis – international variation in intelligence is related to the prevalence of parasites in a country. As is, according to them, pretty much ever y major aspect of human culture (but more on this later)…

Christopher Eppig, Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill (yes, that one) from the University of New Mexico have suggested that fighting off parasitic infections during childhood takes up valuable energy that might otherwise go towards the development of the brain. More parasites mean less well developed brains and weaker mental abilities.

To test their controversial idea, the trio collected average IQ values for countries all over the world using three separate sets of data. They also used the World Health Organisation’s data on global “disability-adjusted life years” (DALYs), a measure of a country’s disease burden that looks at the number of years of ‘healthy’ life lost by an average citizen because of poor health. They found a strong correlation between these two figures, both across all nations and within each continent (except South America).

They claimed that the prevalence of infectious diseases is the “most powerful predictor of average national IQ”, even after they adjusted the results for other factors, like each country’s temperature, GDP, literacy rate, enrolment in secondary school and more. They also suggest that this could help to explain the mysterious Flynn effect, where IQ increases sharply as a nation develops.

The very obvious caveat to all of this is that old adage that correlation is not causation. In this case, a link between infections and IQ tells us nothing about whether infected people grow up to be less intelligent, or whether intelligent people are less likely to become infected. Intelligence, after all, could affect one’s understanding of what a disease is, how to avoid it, and how to seek help for an infection. And perhaps a third factor is at work here – higher education could lead to both greater intelligence and the knowledge to avoid common infections. Readers may enjoy trying to come up with alternative explanations of their own.

These problems become particularly astute when you’re looking for correlations between statistics that represent entire nations. This broad-brush ‘ecological’ approach tells us nothing at the individual level. In a given country, do children who acquire early infections grow up to have lower IQs? We simply don’t know.

In fairness to Eppig, Fincher and Thornhill, they say, “We are not arguing that global variation in intelligence is only caused by parasite stress.” They also frame their paper as a way of introducing a hypothesis and suggest ways of testing it. Fair enough, but they have supported their hypothesis with data that are, at best, inconclusive. As such, I wonder what this study is doing in a Royal Society journal rather than, say, Medical Hypotheses.

Indeed, as I alluded to earlier, this new paper is the latest in a long line of hypothesis-generating publications from Fincher and Thornhill linking parasites and infections to pretty much any sweeping aspect of human life you can think of. Through similar studies based on correlations at the national level, Thornhill and Fincher have suggested that infections are linked to individualism and collectivism, religious diversity, linguistic diversity, armed conflicts and civil war, and democracy and liberal values. Like any attempt to explain very complex patterns of human behaviour through a single cause, this ought to raise an eyebrow. I’m raising two.

Reference: Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.0973

Social conservative blogger Rod Dreher points me to this interview of a Left-wing sociologist on the malevolent influence of pornography on modern relationships. She has a book out, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality. Her conclusion:

To turn this around there needs to be a massive public health awareness campaign. Unless people begin to understand the role pornography is playing in our culture, I can’t see any reason that this won’t get worse, because all of these men who started watching pornography young are going to want more and more. Pornographers themselves say they’re having trouble keeping up with what fans want because they want it so hardcore.

Where is this going to end? I don’t know. What will an 11-year-old boy want 10, 20, or 30 years from now? Nobody knows. The truth is we’ve never brought up a generation of males with hardcore pornography. No one can really say what’s going to happen. What we do know, from how images and media affect people, is that it’s going to increasingly shape the way men think about sex, sexuality, and relationships.

A lot of the rest of the interview is going to, or not going to, make sense depending on your priors. Just as Christian evangelical psychotherapy, or a rabbi making a ruling based on the halakhah, uses terms and logics which may seem totally meaningless to outsiders, so people trained in sociology operate in their own lexical universe which operates in a parallel empirical world (when I actually spent some time around young evangelical Christians I recalled that they often interspersed their banal conversations with phrases such as “glorifying God,” or “glorifying my Lord and Savior,” which seemed to have a lot of meaning for them, even if it was about their workout regime*). As an intellectual exercise I often take an interest in what sociologists say, but it’s equivalent to theology as far as I’m concerned insofar as it makes any pretense to mapping onto reality. In contrast, I think economists are guilty of hubris and error, but they at least aim for some clarity so you know when they’re wrong. I am here thinking of Noam Chomsky’s attitude toward Post Modernism.

On a personal note I come from a generation which spanned the period when pornography was scarce, and when it was ubiquitous. It’s an empirically correct observation that it takes two seconds to find extremely disgusting fetish material, whereas before the internet you may not even have been aware of the existence of whole genres of pornography! A case in point, I did not know of the existence of bestiality until I was sixteen years old (a friend took me to a Christian youth group meeting, and the pastor started talking about all the disgusting perverted things you weren’t supposed to do, but he had to define a lot of it in the process). A few years after I happened to walk by a computer in a family room, and I saw that an eight year old boy was deleting disgusting fetish porn spam from his Hotmail account! What had been beyond the ken of my comprehension even into adolescence was a nuisance for this individual in their elementary school years.

Over the past 15 years we’ve run a massive sociological experiment in the United States of America. A whole generation has grown up with easy access to hardcore pornography. Many of the boys exposed in the 1990s are now 30 and older, and starting families. And yet violent crime is still declining in the United States, including rape. There is also no robust evidence that the youth of today are more sexual than those of the past.

That’s why I say that the sorts of sociologists profiled above live in a parallel world, where porn is a primary determinant of the decline in morals in manners. They wouldn’t say morals and manners, but I think that’s what really going on, and explains the attraction of social conservatives like Rod Dreher to the Left-wing critiques. The terminology may differ, but it isn’t too hard to do a search & replace across the arguments and see that they have a similar structure. There was in the past, in some idealized nation, a world of companionate partnership from which we’re declining. In the details the ideal partnership of a Left-wing feminist sociologist and a socially conservative Christian obviously differs a great deal, but both feel besieged by the destabilizing and amoral impact of technology and capitalism, which is saturating us with choice, information and plenitude of perversion.

The repulsiveness of modern pornography is not a trivial matter. I do believe that societies need values, that we’re not simple pure hedonic machines (this is a matter of aesthetics and taste, some may differ as to the necessity of this binding of values). But we need to keep some perspective. Foot binding, corsets and shotgun marriages were parts of the cultural landscape in the past, without the influence of porn. More fundamentally I think Left-wing and conservative critiques of the modern culture of pleasure are overly alarmed because they neglect the biologically rooted essentialist aspect of the experience. Porn arouses despite the fact they’re pixels on the screen. But it is no substitute for a real flesh & blood person, because the essence of the source of the pleasure matters. Some social conservatives worry that the youth will be “converted” to homosexuality. The mainstream generally rejects this perspective as ludicrous on the face of it. Graphically, consider the prospect of a straight male receiving oral sex from a male as opposed to a female. On low-level hedonic grounds one would assume that there is no distinction, but many would demur and say that it was “different.” Similarly, pornography can never replace a real relationship.

Technology and the market, the radical and rapid turnover over lifestyles and choices, make people rightly fearful. But as I suggest above despite our biologically rooted fear of change things are getting better. Of course not all change is always for the good, but to actually differentiate the good from the bad, we need to remain rooted in the real world.

Note: Most of the studies I’ve seen which show that perverts have viewed the grossest of porn don’t establish the arrow of causality. That is, if you’re a pervert obviously you are going to seek perversion by definition. Though arguably exposure to perversion can render you a pervert, I see no reason why this has to be the null.

* The sacralization of all aspects of life is not exceptional or atypical, I simply observe that a lot of the references to it operate in its own universe of meaning which is pretty opaque to outsiders.

Emotional contagion in soccer penalty shootouts: Celebration of individual success is associated with ultimate team success.

“We examined the association between celebratory responses after successful soccer penalty kicks and the outcome of a penalty shootout. Individually displayed post-shot behaviours in penalty shootouts held in World Cups and European Championships (N = 151) were rated on the presence of universally distinct and recognizable behaviours associated with positive emotions. Using chi-square analyses we investigated which behaviours were associated with winning the shootout, when the relative standing between the teams was equal. Players who engaged in certain celebratory post-shot behaviours were more likely to be in the team that ultimately won the penalty shootout. In particular, celebrations including both arms were associated with winning the shootout. It was more likely that the next kick taken by an opponent was missed after a player displayed these behaviours after a goal than when he did not. The findings are interpreted in terms of emotional contagion – that is, the transference of emotions from individuals onto teammates and opponents. It is suggested that the individual expression of post-performance emotions serves a direct purpose in enhancing future team performance and that emotional contagion is an important process in the context of elite sport performance.”

Image: flickr/popofatticus

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: World Cup Week: Can watching World Cup football kill you?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Blue is for losers.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: An ecological study of glee in small groups of preschool children.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Investigators are now swabbing dog cheeks. A dog DNA database–similar to the one the FBI keeps for criminals–may help to deter dog-fighting.

Dog-fighting is a federal crime and a felony offense in every U.S. state, but it’s difficult to detect and stop. Officers rarely catch fighters in the act, and the industry, as a multimillion-dollar business, makes money not only from gambling on the violent and often fatal matches, but also from breeding and selling champion dogs.

The New York Times reports that some dogs sell for as high as $50,000 dollars. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimates that there could be tens of thousands of people involved in dog fighting in the United States.

So where does the genetics come in?

Selective, champion breeding means that many fighting dogs come from traceable bloodlines. Enter dog DNA. A veterinary genetics lab at the University of California-Davis maintains the database, called The Canine CODIS, which can help investigators connect one dog to known fighters’ bloodlines.

“People are not generally going to the pound and buying pit bulls to fight—these dogs are from established bloodlines,” said Tim Rickey, senior director of field investigations and response for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “And if a suspected dog fighter’s animal matches one of those bloodlines, that would be a key piece of evidence.” [The New York Times]

The first DNA for the database came from a the largest dog-fighting crackdown in U.S. history, which took place last July after an 18-month investigation and involved a total of around 400 different animals from seven different states. The project’s members believe that this new database will not only help states get more convictions, but also help investigators discover how the crime spreads–hopefully allowing them to save and rehabilitate more dogs.

“[The DNA] will put that dog, and by extension its owner, at the scene of a dog fight,” said Beth Wictum, director of the forensic unit of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory…. “This will give us a window into the world of dog fighting, and we can see how these bloodlines are carried from state to state.” [The Kansas City Star]

The database is a collaboration between the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, The Humane Society of Missouri, and the Louisiana SPCA. Wictum believes that this DNA can bring justice for executed fighting dogs found abandoned on roadsides and animals severely malformed from abuse.

“When these cases come to trial, it’s important to make your strongest case,” [Wictum] adds. “DNA evidence not only establishes links between owners, breeders, and dog fighting sites, it tells a story. We can tie blood spatter on pit walls and clothing, or blood trails found outside of the pit, to a specific dog and tell his story for him. We become the voice for those victims.” [ASPCA]

Related content:
80beats: Dogs Think Like Babies, While Wolves Think for Themselves
80beats: Will Dog Cloning Become Mainstream as the Price Drops?
80beats: Where Did Dogs First Become Man’s Best Friend?
80beats: Revealed: The Genetic Secret of the Dachshund’s Stubby Legs
80beats: Wolves Have Dogs to Thank for Their Dark Fur

Image: flickr / audreyjm529

Really interesting trailer for a movie which is premised on a “secret history” where a group of Nazis flee to the far side of the moon at the end of World War II, and are returning imminently in the near future from their exile.

Wired has the back story of how this group of film makers generated broad-based funding for their project. Of course they’re Finnish….

Would you eat honey called Dulles Delight? LAX Natural? LaGuardia Lip-Smackers? Some Germans are enjoying Düsseldorf Natural, honey made from airport-dwelling bees. The Düsseldorf International Airport and 7 other airports have employed bees as “biodetectives”: inspectors test the bees’ honey for pollutants as an indirect way to monitor airport air quality.

As The New York Times reports, these bees come from a long line of other insect inspectors–including aquatic bugs for testing water quality. Though the airports still use more-traditional sensors to test for air pollutants, in 2006 they added these buzzing mini-inspectors to their testing fleet.

The German Orga Lab tests the honey, made from around 200,000 bees, twice a year for contaminants such as hydrocarbons and heavy metals. They hope to monitor changes over long stretches of time to see if the bees can pick up air quality differences.

Martin Bunkowski, an environmental engineer for the Association of German Airports, told The New York Times that the project is appealing because the insects’ job seems clear.

“It’s a very clear message for the public because it is easy to understand,” Bunkowski said.

Currently, the Düsseldorf honey is looking good–contaminants were far below official limits, and the honey was comparable in quality to that harvested in more scenic locales. Most importantly, since the local bee club gives the honey out for no charge, the sweet stuff is effectively duty free.

Related content:
80beats: How Ancient Beekeepers Made Israel the Land of (Milk and) Honey: Imported Bees
80beats: Honeybees Get High on Cocaine And Dance, Dance, Dance
DISCOVER: The Baffling Bee Die-Off Continues
DISCOVER: Who Killed All Those Honeybees? We Did
DISCOVER: The Alluring and Alien Sights of a Bee in Ultra Close-up (photo gallery)

Image: flickr /cygnus921