Love the smell of coffee? Most do, even if they don't like drinking the substance that has powered a billion Internet blogs, this one included. According to scientists reporting in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the scent of coffee has a surprising effect on rats that may mimic the effect in humans.
Researchers found that sleep-deprived rats exposed to the aroma of coffee beans displayed 13 genetic differences, including antioxidant activity that protects nerve cells from stress-related damage, protein fate, cell rescue, defense, virulence, cell communication and energy metabolism.
To sum up:
In conclusion, the roasted coffee bean aroma changes the mRNA and protein expression levels of the rat brain, providing for the first time clues to the potential antioxidant or stress relaxation activities of the coffee bean aroma.
It may not be the elusive Unified Field Theory, but a universal theory of humor comes in a close second, at least in terms of perceived impossibility. In a report titled The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humor, Alastair Clarke has documented how and why humans find situations humorous, as well as explaining why humor is common in all societies.
“For some time now it’s been assumed that a global theory of humour is impossible. This theory changes thousands of years of incorrect analyses and mini-theories that have applied to only a small proportion of instances of humour. It offers a vital answer as to why humour exists in every human society.”
Humour is not about comedy it is about a fundamental cognitive function. Clarke explains: “An ability to recognize patterns instantly and unconsciously has proved a fundamental weapon in the cognitive arsenal of human beings.” Recognising patterns enables us to quickly understand our environment and function effectively within it: language, which is unique to humans, is based on patterns.
Clarke’s theory has wider implications: “It sheds light on infantile cognitive development, will lead to a revision of tests on ‘humour’ to diagnose psychological or neurological conditions and will have implications regarding the development of language. It will lead to a clarification of whether other animals have a sense of humour, and has an important role to play in the production of artificial intelligence being that will feel a bit less robotic thanks to its sense of humour.”
This research may explain why Mike Meyer's next movie, The Love Guru, appears totally void of humor: we've seen all of the jokes before when it was wrapped in an Austin Powers package.
There appears to be no end in sight to the ongoing Honey Bee crisis, evidenced by new data from the Apiary Inspectors of America. In their report, released yesterday, researchers reveal that 36.1% of the nation's hives have been lost.
From the Associated Press:
This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren't enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
"For two years in a row, we've sustained a substantial loss," he said. "That's an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm."
It's time for this situation to be properly addressed via government funding, as this is something that could spell disaster for our food supply, compounding an already troubled economy. If we wait until it's too late....then it will be too late.
After 30 years of searching, researchers in Borneo have finally located a lungless frog. The aquatic frog, known by the easy-to-say name Barbourula Kalimantanensis, receives all of its oxygen through its skin.
Of all tetrapods (animals with four limbs), lunglessness is only known to occur in amphibians. There are many lungless salamanders and a single species of caecilian, a limbless amphibian resembling an earthworm, known to science. Nevertheless, Bickford said, the complete loss of lungs is a particularly rare evolutionary event that has probably only occurred three times.
The discovery of lunglessness in a secretive Bornean frog supports the idea that lungs are a malleable trait in amphibians, which represent the evolutionary sister group to all other tetrapods, according to the researchers. Barboroula kalimantanensis lives in cold, fast-flowing water, they noted, so loss of lungs might be an adaptation to a combination of factors: a higher oxygen environment, the species’s presumed low metabolic rate, severe flattening of their bodies that increases the surface area of their skin, and selection for negative buoyancy—meaning that the frogs would rather sink than float.
William Roberts of the University of Western Ontario has published his research that explores whether or not animals have a human-like sense of time with concepts of past and future.
The research team, led by Roberts, designed an experiment in which rats visited the ‘arms’ of a maze at different times of day. Some arms contained moderately desirable food pellets, and one arm contained a highly desirable piece of cheese. Rats were later returned to the maze with the cheese removed on certain trials and with the cheese replaced with a pellet on others.
All told, three groups of rats were tested in the research using three varying cues: when, how long ago or when plus how long ago.
Only the cue of how long ago food was encountered was used successfully by the rats.
Time is overrated anyway.
“This research,” said Roberts, “supports the theory I introduced that animals are stuck in time, with no sense of time extending into the past or future.”
According to a new study by Paul Zak, Ph.D at Claremont Graduate University, a sense of charity and giving, even it when it will cost you more than you can afford, is influenced by the hormone oxytocin, which is produced naturally during sexual arousal and childbirth.
But when it came to the actual generosity of giving, oxytocin mattered a lot. Those inhaling the hormone offered an average of $4.86 compared with $4.03 for those who inhaled saline. In fact, those who received oxytocin were so giving that they actually left the lab with about 5 percent less money than their placebo counterparts.
I've seen studies that indicate Republicans tend to give more to charities than Democrats, so does this mean Republicans are having more sex? Probably.
Should you worry about casinos or charities spritzing this stuff in the air to make you spend or give more? “The answer is no,” Zak says. “You have to get a lot in your nose to get it into your brain. You would know you were getting it up your nose.” The larger danger is manipulation of our empathy and generosity through heart-wrenching images or narratives that cause the natural release of oxytocin to the brain.
Moral of the story? Best to shy away from sex when the Jerry Lewis Telethon is on, lest you go bankrupt.
Just about everyone has heard the term 'Gaydar', a word allocated for people with the uncanny ability to determine someones sexual preference. I can't really say I have good Gaydar, as I tend to use stereotypes to aid my senses, like, "Oh, he's a hair-dresser?" But that's probably cheating.
However, it appears Gaydar isn't some mythical superhuman ability, according to research conducted by Charles Wysocki, geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania's Monell Chemical Senses Center.
[When Charles Wysocki] asked volunteers to sniff underarm sweat from donors of a variety of genders and sexual orientations, some clear patterns began to emerge. Gay men strongly preferred the odor of other gay men, lesbians gravitated toward the smell of other lesbians, and straight women rated the odor of straight men higher than that of gay men. Each group, in short, preferred the smell of their first-choice mates, indicating a scent-based ability to assess sexual orientation. Another study confirmed that gay men and lesbians can recognize and identify the odor of others who share their sexual preference. This kind of scent-based gaydar enables gays to pinpoint potential partners instantly.
Mmm, sniffing underarm sweat for science! Now I'm glad I don't have this ability.
The 409-page Mitchell Report painted a startling picture of Major League Baseball when it was released at the end of 2007. Documenting an almost two year investigation into the illegal use of anabolic steroids by professional baseball players, the report names almost 90 individuals who are alleged to have used banned substances. Besides the black eye that the sport received, it begs the question of 'how have these illegal drugs affected the sport?'
As both a math and sports junkie, I found a recently released paper by Boston University students to provide a fascinating look at how steroids have changed baseball. Here's a snippet of the introduction:
Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and establishing their historical legacy. However, the concept of records and benchmarks assumes that that level of competition in baseball is stationary in time. Here we show that power-law probability density functions, a hallmark of many complex systems that are driven by competition, govern career longevity in baseball. We also find universal power laws in the distributions of all major performance metrics for pitchers and batters...We find statistical evidence of performance enhancement in the analysis of home runs hit by players in the last 25 years.
Keep reading for the full number-crunching details.
Though video game addiction has yet to be accepted as a true medical disorder, that hasn't stopped researchers from presenting a study at the British Psychological Society’s Annual Conference that comes to a rather unsurprising conclusion: people who are addicted to playing video games exhibit personality traits that are similar to those with Aspergers syndrome. I'll let the press release do a bit of the heavy lifting.
The researchers questioned 391 computer game players, 86 per cent of whom were male. They considered relationships between addiction, ‘high engagement’ and personality.
They found that the closer the players got to addiction the more likely they were to display negative personality traits. And that as players showed more signs of addiction they were increasingly characterised by three personality traits that would normally be associated with Aspergers, a variety of high functioning autism. These were neuroticism, and lack of extraversion and agreeableness.
The April issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry has an interesting report involving research into paranoia. It appears the general populace is far more paranoid than initially thought.
In our daily interactions with others, we pick up on facial and other cues that help us judge whether or not to trust another person. These judgments, however, are error-prone and can lead to exaggerated or unfounded fears about threats from others. These paranoid thoughts can range from thinking strangers are looking at you critically, or that others are spreading nasty rumors about you, to the feeling that others are deliberately trying to harm you in some way.
I personally believe paranoia serves a great evolutionary service, as without it, we probably wouldn't be here as a species. It's when the feeling cripples you that problems arise, rationality melting away.
Freeman and his colleagues equipped 200 volunteers with virtual reality headsets. The volunteers stepped into a virtual London underground subway, where they walked around during the four-minute trip between stations. Scattered throughout the train car were avatars that breathed, looked around and sometimes met a participant's gaze. One avatar read a newspaper and another occasionally smiled if looked at.
The participants reacted differently to the same avatars. While the volunteers most commonly perceived the virtual train riders as friendly or neutral, nearly 40 percent of participants reported at least one paranoid thought.
"It is an excellent example of the importance of interpretation," Freeman told LiveScience. "Two people can see the same things but draw completely opposite conclusions."
Have you ever had a paranoid experience that changed the way you approached a specific situation? Did it turn out to be real or was it all an illusion?
As a Laker fan (don't hate), I've seen Kobe go from ice-cold to red-hot more times than I can count. All of us have no doubt seen our favorite player enter some ethereal state of mind that finds them incapable of missing a basket. Well, research reveals that the notion of a hot-streak is nothing more than an illusion.
The illusory nature of basketball shooting streaks was first demonstrated by Amos Tversky and Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell. They began the investigation by sifting through years of Philadelphia 76er statistics. They looked at every single shot taken by ever single player, and recorded whether or not that shot had been preceded by a string of hits or misses. If "the hot hand" was a real phenomenon, then players should have a higher field goal percentage after making several previous shots. The streak should elevate their game.
So what did the scientists find? There was absolutely no evidence of "the hot hand". A player's chance of making a shot was not affected by whether or not their previous shots had gone in. Each field goal attempt was its own independent event. The short runs experienced by the 76ers were no different than the short runs that naturally emerge from any random process. Taking a jumper was like flipping a coin. The streaks were a figment of our imagination.
Brainiacs from Spain and Croatia have been researching several spider species, all of which are known to live the majority of their lives upside-down. This includes such activities as breeding and eating, something I've personally found very difficult to pull off.
What's the advantage to living a life upside down?
According to Dr. Dejan Vinkovic:
“As a physicist, I was particularly interested in the energetics of upside-down locomotion. With this research we finally proved that the energetic efficiency of such motion stems from the same physical principle used to run the grandfather’s clock – motion of a pendulum under the influence of gravity.”
By existing in such a state, upside-down spiders have evolved a unique shape that allows for extremely high energy efficiency. Smart little buggers.
Scientists with way too much time on their hands are exploring the possibility of training black sea bass to swim into a net when they hear a special tone. Aimed at commercial fishing, this would allow sea bass to be released into the open where they would be allowed to grow to market size and them, upon hearing the tone, swim back into captivity.
The bigger goal is to defray the costs of fish farming, an increasingly important source of the world's seafood. If fish can be trained to return to the farmer after feeding in the open ocean for several days, farms could save money on feed and reduce the amount of fish waste released in concentrated areas.
Now if we can just get deer to shoot themselves in the head.
So much for the stereotype of anti-social gamers. According to new research conducted at UC Davis, video games and other high-tech experiences can promote community-building, a sense of identity and higher-level planning.
"There is a lot of hemming and hawing among educators about the introduction of technology in the early grades," said Cynthia Carter Ching, associate professor of education at the University of California, Davis. "But the worst-case scenarios just don't pan out. Technology can facilitate creativity and social awareness, even when we don't design the use of it to do so. And when we do design technology activities with these things in mind, the possibilities are endless."
If it weren't for people yelling at me through my Xbox Live headset, I'd have no social life whatsoever, single-handedly validating this research.
This study shows that rather than technology being something that children merely use, it can be a creative tool for increased reflection on social networks, friendships, relationships with teachers and a sense of self within the world of school," Ching said.
Now all you WoW addicts can print off this report and hang it near your monitor so the girlfriend/wife/significant other can see it.
There seems to be a growing trend in today's media connecting violence and video games, but is there actually a relationship between the two? A group of researchers from Texas A&M International University say no.
They conducted two separate tests to determine whether or not video games and violence were in any way related. The first test required participants to choose a game based on a written description; Medal of Honor: Allied Assault or Myst III: Exile. Following the playing session, the following data was received:
"Individuals who played Medal of Honor were no more aggressive after playing than were individuals who played Myst III....[A]lthough males appeared to prefer to play violent video games relative to females, there was no evidence from this study to suggest that people who prefer violent video games are more innately aggressive than those who do not..."
