Sociologists from four major research institutions have published a study in the journal Sociological Inquiry examining how we support our false beliefs. They examined the false belief of many voters during the 2004 general election, which held that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was responsible for the primarily Saudi-conducted attacks on September 11, 2001.

The researchers concluded that the false beliefs were not caused by lies told repeatedly by the Bush Administration and some cable news channels, but by the individuals’ own personal need to justify a war that was already being waged. They named their study “There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification,” and claim that their findings offer serious challenge to democracy – in that the people cannot be trusted to discern truth from falsehood.

Now, while it is a trivial observation that people tend to believe what they want to believe, and that they will seek out information sources that support and/or confirm their already-held beliefs, this blogger is not convinced that these sociologists should have so pointedly ignored the fact that it was the Bush-Cheney administration that invented the lies, started the war, and was backed up in that false propaganda effort by the mainstream broadcast and cable news media establishments. Seems like giving political liars and media propagandists a free pass on misleading the public does serious damage to the conclusions of the supposedly scientific study itself.

The teabaggers who scream at congressional town hall meetings that they want the government to stay out of their Medicare did not decide on their own to believe Medicare isn’t socialized government health insurance. They have been repeatedly TOLD that by liars. They are obviously less intelligent than most people and have already demonstrated with other false political and/or religious beliefs that they are vulnerable to the propaganda aimed at them. Yet in the sociopolitical reality of the world’s oldest democracy, this unfortunate minority of intellectually challenged citizens would not be a big concern for the way government runs or what government can do.

By blaming the unfortunate individuals rather than the professional liars, propagandists and the vast corporate wealth behind them, this sort of “research” looks to be just another aspect of the Lie Machine instead of serious professional quality research from public universities. Even worse, the researchers interviewed their subjects well after those subjects had formed their opinion and invested emotion in the correctness of their opinions. They did not examine the actual sources of those opinions at all, even though they are voluminously documented historical record. Quite strange.

Perhaps a more worthwhile publicly supported sociological research project would have examined the lies, false statements, intelligence cooking, blatant propaganda, outright treason, and even the use of torture to force false confessions to support the fraudulent link in the push toward war in Iraq. THEN maybe examine the effect of all this high-level criminality on the least intelligent members of the voting body politic – to reach pertinent conclusions about the harmful effects of institutional and corporate political propaganda on the conduct of democratic government.

At the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science [AAAS] in Chicago on Friday the 13th, research was presented by a psychology professor at the University of Albany on the subject of kissing.

CNN reports in its coverage that the science of kissing is called “philematology.” Rutgers professor Helen Fisher says kissing is “a major escalation or de-escalation point in a powerful process of mate choice.” Kissing, says the study’s leader Gordon Gallup, Jr., transmits sensory information – smells, tastes, sound and tactile signals – that affect the couple’s perceptions of each other and whether they want to continue the relationship. In a survey of more than a thousand college students, Gallup and his colleagues found that 59% of men and 66% of women reported that after the first kiss their attraction ended.

The subconscious processing of the sensory information received in a kiss reveals some very interesting details about mate choices, too. The researchers found that women tend to be attracted to partners with a different immune system makeup than their own – information that is transmitted by the sense of smell. They also looked at increases and decreases in hormone levels before and after kissing, particularly oxytocin (the “love hormone”) and cortisol.

Kissing can quickly determine the success or failure of a potential mate choice, and that first kiss seems to be the most important in that respect. So all us fans of the Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore romantic comedy 50 First Dates get some scientific explanation for why we feel it’s so sweet that Barrymore’s brain-damaged character who forgets Sandler every night falls in love with him all over again every day at the first kiss.

Pucker up: Scientists study kissing

Or, how about “Angelina’s Alien Clone Babies!” (subtitle, “Brad stands by his woman even after UFO abduction…”. Or some such rot. We’ve all seen ‘em at the grocery store checkout line, and we’ve all been terribly tempted to read the funnies even if we absolutely don’t want to be seen buying one. I once saw a stand-up comedy act in which the comedian did nothing more than hold up a copy of the National Enquirer and read off the headlines and sidebar – with feeling. Then he’d say…

“But that’s NOT the real story! The REAL story is on page [whatever]…” whereupon he’d flip to some inside page with an even more bizarre headline and story. All with a perfectly deadpan face, fully animated only while reading the lurid details with Shakespearian delivery. He was so funny I saw the show three times.

Now, most of us actually do know better than to believe the sensationalized storytelling and photoshop creativity in tabloid rags like that. That’s what makes them such good comedy fodder. Nor do most of us purchase the magical anti-hex pendants or crystal healing rings or genuine eye of newt sure-love powder advertised in the pages of such rags. But somebody must be buying all that junk – as well as the tabloids they finance – and even if we do occasionally get a guilty pleasure out of light reading in the checkout line, most regular people would claim they don’t know anybody who’s really that dumb. Save perhaps an odd relative or friend of a friend.

Yet sometimes I wonder about how science and critical thinking are being taught (or not) in this country’s compulsory public education system, if this sort of “news” appeals to literally millions of people. Most all of whom got through at least the 10th grade, most all the way through high school. As a science news junky and long-time science-watcher, I am also sometimes surprised by how badly a ‘clever’ headline in the real science news misrepresents the nature or conclusions of studies or researches being reported on. Sometimes I’m more dismayed by how much mincemeat is made of the story itself, even when it’s spelled out clearly in the original institutional press release. Don’t science journalists have to know even more about science and critical thinking than the average high schooler?

So I think it’s about time to list the most important aspects of critical thinking about science news articles, so that regular people don’t end up getting fooled by pseudoscience or outright charlatans. Tabloid sensationalism exempted, of course, since that’s just adult comic book comedy. I’m quite sure all MY readers understand that.

When perusing a science news report that draws your interest, establish a few things right away. They should be clearly represented in the lede or first two paragraphs of the article -

1. Determine who is making a claim. Is it the reporter parsing something s/he may not understand, or is it one of the actual researchers?

2. Is what the researcher says something s/he is well qualified to know a lot about?

3. Is the research (and press release) originating from a respectable scientific/medical/research institution?

4. Is the research being reported upon published (or accepted for publication) by a respectable, peer reviewed scientific journal?

5. Is the reporter adding extraneous and possibly sensationalized statements to the researchers’ own conclusions, or doing the interpreting FOR you in a sensationalized way?

Using these five simple methods of critically approaching science news won’t always keep you from getting snowed, but assuming you aren’t inclined to believe that I really am Bigfoot’s love slave, they’ll probably keep you from being too embarrassed at the water cooler.

Or you could always just take a tabloid in to work in a plain paper wrapper, and do the whole comedy routine in the break room at lunch. A good laugh is always good medicine, they say…

In the year 2030, what’s left of us ‘Baby-Boomers’ will be in our late 70s and early 80s. We will not likely be the largest demographic bump in the general population at that time, as more than half of us will have died off by then. 2030 is also the year that researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, along with researchers at other institutions, project that 86% of Americans could be obese if current trends continue.

Worse, projections show that 96% of non-Hispanic black women and 91% of Mexican-American men will be in those numbers. The costs of this situation amount to nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of obesity-related health care spending, or 1 in every 6 health care dollars.

The projection is based on three decades’ worth of collected data from national surveys. As the obese population ages the health care costs related to being fat will more than double every decade. In addition to hypertension, heart disease and stroke, there is also the link between being overweight and type-2 diabetes. Not to mention the fact that obese children – an increasing problem – have a shorter life expectancy than healthy children.

Obesity and obesity-related diseases – particularly type-2 diabetes – are quickly increasing in all developed countries enjoying a ‘modern’ diet of junk food. Among the dietary factors associated with diabetes, sugar-sweetened and fruit beverages appear to be among the worst, possibly due to the amount of fructose in fruit juices and high-fructose corn syrup in soft drinks. Fructose more easily contributes to fatty tissue than other forms of sugar.

At the same time, research shows that actually eating fresh fruits and vegetables significantly reduces the chances of developing diabetes. Low-fat diets don’t seem to change the odds much, though significant weight loss itself does help reduce chances of developing diabetes.

Perhaps the best advice anyone could follow is simply not to get fat – or lose weight and get fit. Eat less, exercise more, eat more whole foods and less processed foods. Your body will thank you for it, and so will your pocketbook!

It was bound to happen. Science Daily reports that research from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil entitled The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution has established that regional cuisines don’t evolve much. Even in a small world.

The researchers examined historical food preferences for ‘national’ diets in Britain, France and Brazil, and found that certain staples as well as unique ingredients remain in the cuisines despite modern access to restaurants specializing in regional or ‘national’ foods. And despite the modern availability of regional foods in grocery stores.

In other words, the Irish still love potatoes, the French still eat snails and frogs’ legs, the Germans still love sausages and sauerkraut, the Japanese still rely on fish stock and Central and South Americans still choose tortillas over Wonder Bread. Mediterranean peoples still consume lots of olive oil, and still have longer lives, less heart disease and lower cholesterol than the average American.

One thing that struck me odd in the article’s conclusion was the statement that…

“Some low fitness ingredients present in the initial recipes have a strong difficulty of being replaced and can even propagate during culinary growth. They are like frozen ‘cultural’ accidents.”

“Low fitness?” As in ‘fit’ for what? Last I checked, amaranth was still a high quality grain as well as greens supplying as much nutritional value as spinach (which, next to peppers, are highest in certain vitamins of all foods). Parsley and cilantro are still high-value greens as well, whether in salsa or tabouli. Potatoes – which originated in Peru – are still the closest thing to a ‘perfect food’ that exists, and the lowly chayote of Central America (singled out in this article) is rich in amino acids and vitamin C. It’s an important vegetable not just in Central and South America and the Caribbean, but also in Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe.

I expect that the foods one grows up with, the ones most associated with both family history (grandma’s pasta sauce) as well as ethnic heritage, are strongly imprinted in us as preferences at a young age. So while we might look forward to eating Thai on Wednesday or Mexican on Friday or Italian whenever the opportunity arises, day to day food choices will tend to be those we’re most familiar with. That’s cabbage and potatoes for me. What is it for you?

Fun Links:

American Recipes & History by Region
Chinese Regional Cooking Styles
Hawaii Regional Cuisine
Indian Regional Cuisine

Way back in 2005 researchers at Texas A&M determined that humor – an appreciation of the absurd hilarity of life – can significantly increase Hope, and that hopefulness helps people cope with stresses in daily life and during illnesses as well.

In January of this year a communications professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, demonstrated that in a medical setting, laughter is the best medicine. Humor helps both the doctors and the patients cope. The finding was extended to the workplace and to educational situations as well, eventually reaching the conclusion that regardless of the content, humor seems to be beneficial and productive. It helps to get the point across in almost any situation.

Then on June 12, 2008 Alastaire Clarke published his Pattern Recognition Theory of Humor, which purportedly explains the reason that humor is common to all human societies. In Humor Shown to be Fundamental to Our Success as a Species, Clarke claims that humor is fundamantal to the evolution of human beings, and continues to be important in the cognitive development of infants and children.

Alas, Clarke’s Pattern Recognition Theory can’t tell us what’s funny or why, so it probably won’t be used by comedy writers or clowns to formulate their skits any time soon. And while humor can progress from basic slapstick to childish jokes to ridicule to satire, he does not attempt to explain why slapstick still makes us laugh even if we’ve progressed all the way to dry British satire. A clown would have a handy explanation for that, but I don’t think Clarke asked one. Oh, well.

The articles do make a strong case for the survival value of humor to human beings, and that may be all we really need to know about it.

Links:

Humor Can Increase Hope, Research Shows
Laughter is the Best Medicine

Where ecological footprints fall. The environmental impacts of high- (red), middle- (blue) and low- (yellow) income nations fall on other income tiers, as indicated by the footprints. The numbers are in trillions of 2005 international dollars. (Credit: Thara Srinivasan/UC Berkeley)

Rich Nations’ Environmental Footprints Tread Heavily on Poor Countries offers a study led by former UC-Berkeley Thara Srinivasan that examined the impacts of intensive agricultural expansion, deforestation, overfishing. loss of mangrove swamps and forests, ozone depletion and climate change between 1961 and 2000.

For the 3-year project Srinivasan teamed up with Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist and professor of energy and resources at UC-Berkeley. This allowed the team to evaluate economic impacts as well as ecological footprints.

Not surprisingly, the team noticed that poor nations are much more adversely impacted than rich nations. The calculation of “ecological footprints” of low, middle and high income nations demonstrated graphically that the large ecological footprints of rich nations unfairly impact poor nations whose footprints are small.

Economically speaking, the impact on poor nations is greater than the entire debt of those nations, about which Srinivasan said, “The ecological debt could more than offset the financial debt of low-income nations.” And middle-income nations had impacts on poor nations equivalent to the rich nations.

Sam Shuster, Described as a “Professor” (but with no indication of what he’s a ‘professor’ of) got a paper published in the British Medical Journal this week claiming that he’s figured out that the human capacity for humor develops from aggression caused by male hormones.

Professor Shuster figured this out by riding a unicycle around the streets of Newcastle upon Tyne and noticing the reactions he got from people of various ages. Those responses were predictable droll jokes, which indicated to Shuster that such jokes must have a biological cause. And because the most aggressive reactions came from young men, he’s convinced it has something to do with androgens in teenage boys. Most adult women responded with praise or encouragement instead of jokes, so apparently women – at least in one town in England – don’t have a sense of humor.

Now, this doesn’t appear to explain much about how my mother managed to keep her sharp wit and wicked sense of humor even as she was dying of COPD, or how my grandmother is still fondly recalled by everyone lucky enough to have known her as the funniest human being ever. Shuster did admit that he went for the “simplest explanation” for why teenage boys were so aggressive about his mode of transportation, and for the oh, so predictable jokes. Had to be the testosterone, but not the spectacle of some guy peddling down the street on a unicycle. Which I’m here to tell you is not the most efficient or graceful mode of transportation ever invented. There’s a reason you don’t see unicyclists in the Tour de France.

Perhaps if the professor were to wear a nice bowler and take up juggling the reactions might be less aggressive and probably a lot more lucrative. People are quite used to tossing money into the hat of buskers, after all. Or he could stay home and catch up on all the old episodes of I Love Lucy, see if he can explain how she got to be so funny without chest hair and six-pack abs.

Still, I’m sure that getting his research published in the British Medical Journal is a feather in Shuster’s cap, no matter what kind of cap he wears, or what it is he’s a professor of. This doesn’t appear to be research that was funded by tax money, so it’s all good.

Researchers Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University have published data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrating that getting divorced isn’t a ‘Green’ thing to do.

Soaring global divorce rates – even in places with strict religious policies against it – are driving urban sprawl and increasing consumption of resources like water and fuel for electricity.

Liu and Yu started with the obvious – when a couple divorces they require two housing units instead of one, even if the children share time at each. These require resources to construct and they take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. The story in Science Daily, A Really Inconvenient Truth, notes that a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to one person or to a family. Among the findings when they started digging deeper:

• In the US in 2005 divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved if the households were still combined by marriage. 38 million extra rooms came with additional costs in heating and lighting.

• Averaging 12 countries’ (including the US) divorces between 1998 and 2002, a total of 7.4 million ‘new’ households were established that would not have been established if those couples had remained married.

• The number of divorced households in the US in 2000 was almost 16 million.

To measure what happens when divorced people remarried, the study compared remarried households with stable marriage households, finding that the environmental footprint of remarried couples goes back to that of stable marriage households.

So. The statistical remedy for people who want to do their part against global warming but can’t manage to stay married? Fall back in love. Even serial monogamy saves resources!

Links:

A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce Is Not Green

PNAS: Environmental impacts of divorce

Michigan State University

Lots of interesting science reports lately about all things neurological, in brains and in our remote sensor neurons. First up is a surprising (or maybe not so surprising) finding by a researcher at the University of Hertfordshire – the harder we try to mentally suppress our thoughts and desires, the more we will indulge in the activity we’re trying to suppress.

Resistance to Thoughts of Chocolate is Futile

This research project dealt with something quite simple, chocolate. Which some say is addictive, but that’s a whole different area of research. Dr. Erskine of Hertfordshire divided 134 young (avg. age 22) people into two groups to investigate how our thinking affects our behaviors.

The participants were asked to try two brands of chocolate and answer questions about which they preferred and why. Then they were given two periods of thought verbalization where they were to talk about their thoughts while alone. On top of this they were told they must think about – or not think about – certain things. Including chocolate.

Among those told not to think about the chocolate which was still present and available to them, consumption of chocolate was significantly higher than in those who could think about chocolate all they liked. Among those who were told to go ahead and focus on thinking about chocolate, the males ate significantly more chocolate than the females.

It’s always nice to get scientific confirmation of things we already know. Meanwhile, psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh tell us that Human Decision-making Takes Multiple Brain Regions Performing Individual Functions, something most people who think about such things also already knew.

It’s not new news that there is a hierarchy of brain regions that separately receive inputs from our remote sensors and process the information before we become aware of what we are perceiving. What psychology professor Mark Wheeler tells us IS new is how these regions work together for decision-making – knowledge integration and action planning based on the perceptual information.

Decision making forwards the processed information to the object processing, reasoning and memory circuits for evaluation and classification in line with previous experience and memory.

A particularly interesting finding from studies at Drexel and Northwestern Universities tells us that Brain Activity Differs for Creative and Noncreative Thinkers. They found that creative thinkers made use of more right-hemisphere involvement in their thinking, which indicates that creative thinkers process more loosely connected or “remote” associations between elements of a problem than noncreative thinkers do.

From that report, “…creative and methodical solvers exhibited different activity in areas of the brain that process visual information. The pattern of “alpha” and “beta” brainwaves in creative solvers was consistent with diffuse rather than focused visual attention. This may allow creative individuals to broadly sample the environment for experiences that can trigger remote associations to produce an Aha! Moment.” Cool.

Finally, in the weird world of serious sensations that aren’t what they appear to be, researchers at the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University report that they’ve (once again) discovered the World’s Hottest Chili Pepper.

We fans of hot chili peppers already know that the alkaloid chemical capsaicin in pepper ribs and seeds is what stimulates our heat and pain sensing nerves to think we’re being badly burned, when no actual burn tissue damage is taking place. It apparently evolved as a way for the plant to get its seeds distributed by only certain animals (birds) and not by others (mammals).

To get a feel for the ‘heat’ this Indian “Ghost Chile” [Bhut Jolokia] is capable of producing, consider the lowly jalapeno, which has a Scoville heat unit [SHU] index of about 2,500. Those firey habaneros rate from 300,000 to 500,000 SHU, making them among the hottest known until now. The previous record holder was the Red Savina, which measured at a solid 577,000 SHU.

The Bhut Jolokia ghost chile weighed in at a cool million SHU. Not very likely to find its way into that pickled pepper jar on the bar at the local pub, as the reaction just might really hurt somebody. The researcher do think it may have an impact in the processed food industry, since it would take much less of the pepper to impart some serious heat to chiles, salsas, sauces and stews.

Links:

Resistance to Thoughts of Chocolate is Futile

Human Decision-making Takes Multiple Brain Regions Performing Individual Functions

Brain Activity Differs for Creative and Noncreative Thinkers

What Makes Peppers Hot May Also Be Cool For What Ails You

World’s Hottest Chile Pepper Discovered