Link Banana

Interesting:

A study, published today in the journal NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer.

(via Slashdot)

The New York Times ran a story last week to warm a teetotalers heart:

No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.

William Saletan, as always, makes an interesting point: why, if we’re relatively sure it’s free of the smoke and health risks of cigarettes, are the US, Australia, and and Hong Kong banning nicotine vaporizers? His answer:

We tolerated smoking until science proved it was harmful to nonsmokers. As momentum grew, the war on smoking became cultural, with disapproval and ostracism of anyone who lit up. Electronic cigarettes have removed the war’s scientific basis, but our cultural revulsion persists. Therefore, so does our prohibition and condemnation.

An interesting theory: the reason ineffectual folk cures spread is that their ineffectiveness raises their visibility. So that’s why all those people take Emergen-C and Airborne…

(via Idea of the Day)

I know I know. Pigs! Flu! Pandemic! Mexico! Death! But this was news to me:

Birds are known to carry every single one of the 144 varieties of influenza virus, as defined by the shape of their surface proteins (ranging from the H1N1 strain to H16N9). For this reason, most scientists believe that all forms of the virus originated in birds and every flu is on some level a kind of bird flu.

UPDATE: This seems relevant, if not contradictory, to the above: Swine Flu Genes From Pigs Only. I suppose it’s partly a question of how generously you define “originated.”

Perhaps it’s just because my opinions on embryos are so close to his, but William Saletan seems to me the most serious liberal writing about these difficult issues. His piece on the way to treat the President’s recent decision to overturn the embryonic stem cell ban is good. This part especially:

The danger of seeing the stem-cell war as a contest between science and ideology is that you bury these dilemmas. You forget the moral problem. You start lying to yourself and others about what you’re doing. You invent euphemisms like pre-embryo, pre-conception, and clonote. Your ethical lines begin to slide.

There is also a follow-up here.

That’s the theory being offered by Harvard’s Richard Wrangham.

And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

(via The Meaningfulness of Little Things)

Sounds boring and technical until you see this.

(via kottke)

Careful research shows that as the hardware the games run on has gotten more powerful, the force of gravity has gotten closer to reality (though it’s never been lower than 4Gs.)

Also, with gravity that great, it is a wonder Mario can perform such feats as leaping almost 5 times his own body height!

Exactly what I was thinking.

(via Waxy)

An old friend’s first venture into “e-junk” taught me a bit of science and history:

These things are some of the biggest planes ever built. The largest, dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster, was longer than a football field, could move over 1000 tonnes of cargo, and crossed the Caspian at speeds over 250mph. The Soviets kept the project secret, so you can imagine the poor fishermen who undoubtedly found themselves in the path of these speeding behemoths. Keep in mind they never flew more than a few meters above the water.

A brief exploration of the importance of your smallest finger.

So what would you lose if you didn’t have one?

“You’d lose 50 percent of your hand strength, easily…”

While much of the United States is enjoying(?) a cold and snowy December, Slate is rerunning Daniel Engbar’s argument against the weatherman’s favorite piece of senseless banality: the wind chill.

By 2001, the Joint Action Group on Temperature Indices had created a new system that toned down wind chill readings across the board. After the recalibration, conditions that were once said to feel like minus 40 now “felt like” minus 19. (Click here for a sidebar that explains how Osczevski and Bluestein came up with their new wind chill table.)

The updated model patches over the worst flaws of the old wind chill system, but it’s not anything close to perfect.

Discover adds a veneer of science to this skyporn so you don’t have to feel bad about enjoying it.

(via Buzzfeed)

William Saletan has two recent piece about motherhood that caught my eye. They are, as usual, full of interesting but vaguely tangential ideas.

The first is about grandmother surrogacy:

Take the Japanese case from a couple of years ago. Japanese law treated the child’s gestational mother—the genetic grandmother—as its legal mother. Therefore, the genetic mother had to adopt the child from her own mother. In the Virginia case, the genetic dad ended up telling reporters, “Mommy’s doing fine. Not this mommy. Grandma mommy.” Imagine looking at your mom and realizing that in a way, she’s your sister. Imagine getting into an argument with your mother-in-law over the way you’re raising your kids—religion, discipline, whatever—and realizing that in a way, she’s their mother.

The second is about, well, this: “What’s the next best thing to having your own baby? Having your identical twin’s baby.”

I’m increasingly leery of news stories proclaiming that academics have proven or demonstrated something or other. That said, some Dutch researchers have experimental evidence showing that signals of low-level crime make people more likely to litter or steal.

(via Ideas)

Though I don’t know how much scientific utiliy this has, it’s cool to see this schlieren photo of a person coughing. Also worthwhile: the story explaining the technique and a slideshow of more such photos.

There’s nothing too complex to it, but I’d never actually heard the story before.

When you took the picture, the camera flash sent a lot of light into the eye in a very short time, the light reflected off the back of the eye and out through the pupil and, because the camera lens is close to the flash and able to capture images very quickly, it caught the light reflecting back out.

So why is that light red? Because the fundus, the interior surface of the eye that includes the retina, is loaded with melanin, a pigment that gives it a brownish-reddish color.

Lloyd points to an interesting slideshow from Scientific American profiling those who should have received (science) Nobel Prizes but didn’t.

On a related note: some analysis of this year’s so-far and likely winners.

I link to this mainly to pointlessly say: I thought of this first. Like, when I was 14. That is not to say, I should note, that I think the idea’s completely correct. In any case, the idea:

“In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of twenty. Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to the age of 21. Our life expectancy is now so good that eliminating all accidents and infectious diseases would only raise it by a further two years. Natural selection no longer has death as a handy tool.”

(via Ideas)

As ever shouldering his responsibility to tackle moral gray areas, William Saletan offers an enlightening (if unsettling) look into the battle over our organs.

How can we get more organs? By redefining death. First we coined “brain death,” which let us take organs from people on ventilators. Then we proposed to allow organ retrieval even if nonconscious brain functions persisted. That goal has now been realized through “donation after cardiac death,” the rule applied in Denver, which permits harvesting based on heart, rather than brain, stoppage.

Stoppage is complicated. There’s no “moment” of death. Some transplant surgeons wait five minutes after the last heartbeat. Others wait two. The Denver team waited 75 seconds, reasoning that no heart is known to have self-restarted after 60 seconds.