Emailers or e-liars?

It’s more tempting to lie when you’re sending a message via email compared with using pen and paper, say psychologists at DePaul University in Chicago. They asked 48 students to split an imaginary pot of $89 by choosing the amount in the pot they would tell their partner and how much they were willing to share. Some conveyed their choice using email, while the rest wrote it down.

Nearly all of the emailers (92%) lied about the amount of money available, versus just 62% of letter writers. Participants reported they felt more justified in this deception, and also kept more of the money for themselves. Next time you’re doing a financial deal, be sure to get it in writing of the non-digital variety…

Don’t drink and drag

Everyone knows that smoking and drinking is bad for your health, but it seems that doing both at once could be even worse. Drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, such as two small glass of wine per day, has previously been linked to a reduced risk of stroke, but a 12-year study has found that smoking may counteract this benefit.

The study followed the drinking and smoking habits of 22,524 people in the UK. Moderate drinkers who didn’t smoke were 37% less likely to have a strike than non-drinkers, but the same wasn’t true of smokers.

Less is more when it comes to dating

Speed dating is increasingly popular these days, but it may not be the best way to find “the one”. When meeting a large number of potential partners, the brain may become overwhelmed by choice and end up resorting to surface values, instead of what’s inside.

A study published in Psychological Science found that people at speed dating events with 24 or more dates were more likely to pick a partner based on their weight or height, while those at smaller events took a deeper look, taking in into account attributes such as education and employment.

Scientists have genetically engineered mice with a predisposition for depression. The study aims to find out why, when faced with stressful situations, some people’s are genetically more prone to fall to depression. The mice were altered to carry a genetic change that affects serotonin transport in the brain, mimicking a change that occurs in people with the condition.

“There is a clear relationship between a short form of the serotonin transporter and a very high vulnerability to develop clinical depression when people are exposed to increasing levels of stressful life events.” says Dr. Allesandro Bartolomucci of Parma university, Italy.

Brain imaging of people with depression shows that they have greater activity in some brain areas, but the link with genetics is not as well understood. Chemical changes could be seen in these ‘knock’out’ mice in areas of the brain that regulate memory formation, emotional responses to stimuli and social interactions, such as meeting new mice. They showed physical signs of stress with changes in body temperature, body weight gain, higher levels of the ‘stress’ hormone corticosterone and lower levels of the ‘feel good’ hormone serotonin.

Depression is the number one cause of ‘disability’ worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation with 120 million people affected globally. The increased risk of hormone imbalances, heart disease, digestive problems and reduced immune response faced by depressed people makes it a formidable foe for the health services. The work from this study will help to find out how this genetic change in people affects serotonin turnover in the brain. The results published in the journal Disease Models and Mechanisms suggest that the genetic mutation causes an exaggerated response to stress.

I wrote this piece for the Guardian as part of their Valentine’s Day coverage:

Steamy love poems are always popular around Valentine’s Day, but can a few lines of tender verse really make people hot under the collar? Researchers at Aberystwyth University attempted to find out earlier this week, using thermal imaging cameras to take the temperature of volunteers reading the work of Romantic poets.

The experiment is a collaboration between the arts and the sciences, led by poet Richard Marggraf Turley from the Department of English and Creative Writing and Reyer Zwiggelaar from Computer Science. They asked six volunteers from each department to silently read 12 love poems, while a slightly less amorous text about thermal imaging served as a control. As the participants pored over poems, including Bright Star by John Keats and To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (both are reproduced in full below), thermal cameras monitored their faces for any change in temperature that could reveal their true feelings.

Read the rest at the Guardian.

A “new” formula for marriage? Not quite

A number of news outlets have run stories on a formula for finding your “Optimal Proposal Age”, based on a press release from the University of New South Wales. Far from being a new result, it’s actually a repackaging of an old mathematical puzzle known by a variety of names, including the marriage problem.

Imagine you’ve decided to search for the perfect partner by going on 100 blind dates. After each date you decide whether you want to marry the potential suitor, and if you choose not too you can never see them again. Contrived, but then this is a maths puzzle!

How do you pick your partner? If you wait until the end of all 100 dates, you’ll be stuck with whoever is on the end of the list, whether you like them or not, but if just go for the first person you like then you could be missing out on someone who is a better match. It turns out that the best strategy is to see the first 37 potentials, then pick the next one who is better than those 37. Not the most romantic approach, but at least it makes for a quirky Valentine’s Day news story I suppose.

Next stop, outer space

Even London natives can struggle with the complicated spiderweb that is the Tube map, but surprisingly enough it is actually intended to simplify getting about the capital. Inspired by its iconic design, Harvard scientist Samuel Arbesman developed a similar map for getting about the Milky Way:

But where is Morington Crescent?

The coloured lines correspond to an arm of the spiral galaxy, and each stop is a star or other astronomical object.

Mental time travel

You won’t be journeying to the age of the dinosaurs just yet, but psychologists at the University of Aberdeen have discovered a strange form of time travel. Apparently thinking about the past or future causes people to move backwards or forwards. The researchers suggest behaviour could be the origin of temporal metaphors such as future = forward and past = backward.

Bond. Strange Bond.

The Royal Society of Chemistry continued it’s tradition of strange PR stunts this week by announcing a search for a Sean Connery lookalike.

As if devising a new ending for the Italian Job or cooking the perfect Yorkshire pudding weren’t enough, they want to use the lookalike in a bizarre photoshoot designed to highlight the importance of British research keeping the nation healthy. No, I don’t get it either.

Everyone likes to bash the Daily Mail, but its always nice when you can point out some good science reporting – hence the “Getting It Right” category on Just A Theory. I was pleased to read a decent account of one woman’s struggle with sleep paralysis, complete with a scientific explanation of the disorder.

I’ve actually had sleep paralysis myself, and it’s a terrifying experience. You can’t move, you can’t speak, and you feel like something is coming to get you. Although it lasts just a few seconds, it feels like an age. Thankfully when it happened to me I realised what was going on because I’d read about it previously, but those not in the know must be left extremely frightened and confused. Hopefully the Mail article will help educate them.

Tasty and informative

You can never have too many novelty periodic tables, so how about another edible interpretation of Mendeleev’s masterpiece?

See more pics at Not So Humble Pie.

LHC a-go-go

The Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running again! As our CERN correspondent Emma mentioned last month, scientist in Geneva have been working on restarting the LHC after it had to be shut down last year. Their hard work paid off on Friday, and proton beams are now successfully colliding in the 27km-long ring of the world’s largest experiment. Now for the science!

What if the Earth had rings?

Speaking of rings, check out this short video showing how it would look if Earth had its own set, like Saturn.

At the equator they appear to be a thin line through the sky, but further north or south they make an amazing sight, lighting up the sky even at night. Anyway we can build these things and cover them in solar panels or something?

Field less players to win the World Cup

It seems that having a large squad to choose from can actually be a hindrance when it comes to top football. You might think fielding substitutions lets mangers pick the best players for every situation, but research shows that sticking with the top 11 is the key to success.

Bacteria that can detect landmines

Scientist at the University of Edinburgh have developed a strain of bacteria that glow green near explosives. By mixing them with a colourless solution, they can be sprayed from the air on to suspected landmine fields, turning the ground green if mines are detected.

Everyone loves optical illusions, especially three dimensional ones. The Necker Cube is a classical example of an ambiguous drawing, one that the human mind can interpret in a number of ways. Artist Guido Moretti has created a 3D sculpture of the cube, and it’s pretty nifty:

But can they do copernicium?

Pets aren’t normally known for their understanding of molecular chemistry, but this team of golden retrievers are here to explain the science of atoms:

Periodic table of YUM!

I guess I’m just a sucker for novelty periodic tables. Behold. the periodic table of cupcakes:

So many to choose from...*drool*

Let’s just hope they didn’t include samples of each element in the icing…

Researchers read illustrated stories to 50 children aged four, five, and seven. Each story was about a child coming across something frightning, either real or imaginary. For example, the child in the story could be confronted with a bear, or a ghost.

After the reading, the researchers then asked the participating children to predict how afraid the fictional children would be, to explain why they felt afraid, and to suggest a way to help.

One of the illustrated stories used in the research.

When the creatures in the stories were real, the researchers found children wanted to actively do something. Boys mostly suggested fighting, while girls thought they should avoid the creature.

For imaginary monster, the responses were different. Younger children suggested pretending the monsters were friendly, while older kids showed the ability to remember the reality of the situation – i.e., ghost aren’t real.

These results suggest that parents should take a different approach to easing their child’s fears, depending on their age. After all, there’s nothing really lurking under the bed…

Graduate student Yaara Yeshurun of the Weizmann Institute of Science suspected that this memory association is formed when we first encounter a smell in a particular context. That’s why cut grass might take you back to summer’s day in your youth, but not to a walk in the park last Tuesday.

To test her hypothesis, Yeshurun and her team got 16 volunteers to look at 60 objects, each accompanied wither either a pleasant or unpleasant smell. Next, an fMRI scanner measured their brain activity as they looked over the images again and tried to recall the associated odour. Participants then repeated the test with different smells, before coming back a week later for another round of tests.

Yeshurun found that after one week, the participants showed a distinctive brain pattern when recalling the first odour – even if they remembered both equally. The scan revealed activity in the hippocampus and amygdala, the parts of the brain involved with memory and emotion, and allowed Yeshurun and colleagues to predict participants reactions based on the data from the first day of the experiment.

Investigating further, they repeated the entire experiment with sound instead of smell. Surprisingly, they found that the first-time association was not repeated. Commenting on her result, Yeshurun said:

“As far as we know, this phenomenon is unique to smell. Childhood olfactory memories may be special not because childhood is special, but simply because those years may be the first time we associate something with an odour.”

Smokers looking to quit could be helped by a cigarette-crushing video game, according to a study published in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior. A group of Canadian researchers discovered that smokers placed in a virtual reality environment full of cigarettes to be destroyed showed a significant reduction in nicotine cravings.

The study took 91 regular smokers and randomly assigned them to two groups. All participants went through a 12-week anti-smoking program involving questionnaires, tests and counselling, as well as four weekly sessions with a head-mounted video game set in a medieval castle. One group was tasked with collecting virtual balls, while the others had to track down and crush cigarettes.

Crushing cigarettes in a virtual world

The results showed that the cigarette-crushers had a significant reduction in nicotine cravings compared to the ball-collectors. At the end of the 12-week treatment, 15% of the cigarette-crushers had abstained from smoking, while just 2% of the ball-collectors had managed to give up.

Virtual treatment also had a lasting effect. When interviewed six months later, only 20% of the ball-collectors said they had not smoked in the last week, but 39% of the cigarette-collectors had resisted lighting up.

The researchers suggest a number of reasons why cigarette-crushing helps keep from smoking. The act of destroying a virtual cigarette could boost a person’s confidence in their ability to give up real cigarettes, or make them want to give up more. Enjoyment in the game could also lead them to change their response towards cigarettes – presumably from “I’m dying for a smoke” to “die, cigarettes!”

Whatever the explanation, this research could lead to new anti-smoking treatments. Instead of reaching for the nicotine patches, you might end up patching your PC with some cigarette-killing software. Anyone for a game of capture the fags?

Girard, B., Turcotte, V., Bouchard, S., & Girard, B. (2009). Crushing Virtual Cigarettes Reduces Tobacco Addiction and Treatment Discontinuation CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12 (5), 477-483 DOI: 10.1089/cpb.2009.0118