Lab Notes : Featured

The Brains of Early Birds and Night Owls

Sharon Begley — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:12:02 GMT

Early birds wake up at the crack of dawn and struggle to stay alert and productive (especially in the cognitive realm) in the evening. Night owls perform well in the evening but are worthless if you yank them out of bed too early in the morning. There are less-well-known differences, too: early birds experience what scientists call “a faster build-up of homeostatic sleep pressure” during the day compared to night owls, who, like a certain battery-powered bunny, just seem to keep going and going, resisting the pressure to sleep. (That must be why I practically turn into a pumpkin by 9 p.m.) And when they do sleep, early birds experience a faster dissipation of that sleep pressure, feeling restored more quickly than night owls. Now a new study, in the journal Science, reports some intriguing differences between the brain-activity patterns of the two types that underlie the behavioral differences.

Scientists led by Christina Schmidt and Philippe Peigneux of the University of Liege in Belgium had 15 extreme night owls and 16 extreme early birds spend two nights in a sleep lab. The two groups were separated by about four hours in their sleep patterns; if early birds were happy waking up at 7, night owls slept til 11, and early birds were ready to go to sleep at 11 while night owls had no trouble staying up til 3 in the morning. An hour and a half after waking up, and again 10.5 hours after waking up, the volunteers had their brain activity measured by fMRI while they took a simple reaction-time test of their ability to maintain focused attention. Both the early birds and the night owls were sleeping and waking whenever they pleased, rather than being kept on an artificial schedule.

There was no real difference between the early birds and the night owls in their performance on the morning test. But the evening test was a different story: night owls were less sleepy and had faster reaction times than early birds. (Just to emphasize, 'evening' was a relative term: it was a different actual time for each group, but the exact same 10.5-hours-after-waking for both early birds and night owls.) So even though both groups were sleeping and waking according to their preferred schedule, night owls generally outlasted early birds in how long they could stay awake and mentally alert before becoming mentally fatigued. The fMRI supported the behavioral results: 10.5 hours after waking up, the early birds had lower activity in brain regions linked to attention and the circadian master clock, compared to night owls.

So don’t ask your early bird to do anything that requires sustained focus more than 10 or so hours after she gets up. And if you’re an early bird, you can stop feeling morally superior: night owls can keep their brains awake and alert for longer after they wake up—even if it’s after noon—than you can.

The Blob That Didn't Eat the Universe

Sharon Begley — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:55:50 GMT

It’s hard to resist an astronomy discovery when it’s called a blob, even if the precise name is the Lyman-Alpha blob. In a paper being published this afternoon in Astrophysical Journal, astronomers are announcing that they spied such an object—thought to be an enormous body of gas that may be the precursor to a galaxy—dating from when the universe was a mere 800 million years old. Stretching for 55,000 light years (approximately the radius of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk), this Lyman-Alpha blob has astronomers scratching their heads.

Named Himiko for a legendary Japanese shaman queen, the blob is not the largest such object ever discovered. That honor goes to a Lyman-Alpha blob reported in 2006 and thought to be the biggest object in the universe. Instead, this one is notable because it is so far away, and in cosmic terms far away = long ago. “The farther out we look into space, the farther we go back in time,” says astronomer Masami Ouchi of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution , who led the international team that made the discovery: because light travels at a finite velocity, it takes time for light from objects in space to reach the eyes of Earthlings or their telescopes, which means we are seeing the blob as it was near the dawn of time, when the universe was barely 6 percent of its current age of 13.7 billion years. That means light from Himiko has been traveling toward us for 12.9 billion years, which is equivalent to saying we are seeing it was it was 12.9 billion years ago.

And that makes astronomers a bit uneasy. Whether the blob is ionized gas powered by a supermassive black hole, a primordial galaxy, the collision of two young galaxies or a single giant galaxy with a mass of 40 billion Suns—all of which are on the table—it’s too big for its age. As Ouichi puts it, “I have never imagined that such a large object could exist at this early stage of the universe’s history. According to . . . Big Bang cosmology, small objects form first and then merge to produce larger systems. This blob had a size of typical present-day galaxies when the age of the universe was about 800 million years old.” In fact, other blobs had the decency to wait to show up, appearing when the universe was 2 to 3 billion years old. No extended blobs had been found from when the universe was younger, until Himiko, which means astronomers need to scurry back to the drawing boards to figure out how an object this massive managed to grow up so fast.

Even Avatars Are Racist?

Sharon Begley — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:17:43 GMT

Now that Americans are hanging around virtual worlds almost as much (it seems) as the real one, research on how we behave in places like Second Life and how things like our choice of avatar spills over into the real world is heating up. As I described in a column last February, players who had super-attractive avatars have an exaggerated view of their real-world appearance and act accordingly. For instance, they believe that especially attractive men or women whose faces they’re shown from an online dating site would be interested in them. (When you have a more realistic view of your attractiveness, you dial down your expectations.) Now a study finds an uglier side to avatars: they display racist attitudes just as real people in the real world do.

In the experiment that Paul W. Eastwick and Wendi L. Gardner of Northwestern University describe in a paper called “Is It a Game? Evidence for Social Influence in the Virtual World,” published online in the journal Social Influence, one avatar asked another if he would teleport to Duda Beach (one of the sites in the virtual world There.com) with her and let her take a screenshot of him. (The him’s and her’s are interchangeable here; the scientists used male and female avatars in various permutations.)

The avatar was more likely to agree if that request had been preceded by a more unreasonable one: teleporting to 50 locations with her to take screenshots. That would have required about two hours of teleporting and traveling—an unreasonable request. When the one-beach request was presented alone, players were less likely to say okay.

What seems to happen—and this is true in real life as well—is that when you reject one request, and the requester then makes a second, more moderate one, you reciprocate what you perceive as her “concession” by going from brushing her off to acquiescing.

Then the scientists gave the avatar making the request dark skin. While white avatars got about 20 percent more of those they asked to agree to the modest request after the unreasonable one, the increase for the dark-toned avatars was only 8 percent. Even when the avatars modified what they were asking, players still mostly brushed them off.

Again back in the real world, decades of psychology studies have shown that whether or not someone agrees to a request under these experimental conditions—and also in real life—depends on whether they think the requester is worthy of impressing, For dark-skin avatars, apparently, the answer is, not so much. I should add that the players knew they were part of a psych study; not even that had a significant effect on (let's just say it) racism.

“You would think when you’re wandering around this fantasyland, operating outside of the normal laws of time, space and gravity and meeting all types of strange characters, that you might behave differently,” Eastwick said. “But people exhibited the same type of behavior, and the same type of racial bias, that they show in the real world all the time,” where people are more uncomfortable with minorities and less likely to help them.

Why You Can't Swat a Fly

Sharon Begley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:49:41 GMT

The reason you can’t swat a fly is that, for a creature with a brain hardly deserving of the name, the fly is a marvel of calculating ability. But before I explain what scientists led by Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology (that would be the Dickinson whose e-mail is "flyman") have learned about how the fly brain calculates the location of the looming swatter, formulates an escape plan and plants its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way (all within about 100 milliseconds of spotting the swatter), let’s cut to the chase: the best way to swat a fly, Dickinson says, is “not to swat at the fly’s starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter.”

Where will it jump? Using high-resolution, high-speed imaging of flies in action, the scientists are reporting today online in Current Biology, they found that if the descending swatter (they used a 6-inch-diameter black disk, dropping at a 50-degree angle toward a fly) comes from in front of the fly, the fly moves its middle legs forward and leans back, then raises and extends its legs to push off backward, away from the swatter. Are you approaching your quarry from behind? The fly has a nearly 360-degree field of view and can see behind itself, so when it spies the swatter behind it it moves its middle legs a tiny bit backward and flies forward. With a swatter from the side, the fly keeps its middle legs still and leans in the opposite direction before jumping. The idea is to position its center of mass so that when the legs push off the fly will evade the swatter.

“When the fly makes planning movements prior to takeoff, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat,” Dickinson says. “The fly somehow ‘knows’ whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture.” It does all this “long” (in fly time) before it takes off. “These movements are made very rapidly, within about 200 milliseconds” of seeing the swatter, says Dickinson, “but within that time the animal determines where the threat is coming from and activates an appropriate set of movements to position its legs and wings.”

Don’t believe the folk wisdom that if you approach the fly really, really slowly so your swatter doesn’t stir the air then the fly won’t notice. The Caltech scientists found that flies can tell you’re coming by sight alone—and remember that 360-degrees of vision thing.

It is Dickinson’s hope that discoveries about the fly’s neuronal processing will shed light on more complicated brains, not that his work will help humans kill flies better. His admiration for the little guys’ abilities, in fact, have made him hope that people will “think before they swat.”

There's a Peasant Under My Van Gogh!

Sharon Begley — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:35:52 GMT

If only Vincent van Gogh (1853−1890) had been able to afford canvas, the world would have many more of the master’s paintings. But as scholars have long known, van Gogh re-used his canvasses, especially when he wasn’t happy with a painting, creating a new work on top of an old one. These hidden compositions have mostly eluded art historians because current museum-based imaging tools cannot properly visualize them.

But European researchers now say they have a way to reveal the covered-over paintings in unprecedented detail, finding the van Goghs under the Van Goghs. In the first use of the technology, they report in the online issue of Analytical Chemistry, they have discovered a woman’s head hidden under van Gogh’s "Patch of Grass."

Since scholars estimate that one-third of van Gogh’s paintings were covered over, the technology—called synchrotron radiation-based X-ray fluorescence mapping—could reveal a whole new world of the master’s works that have remained invisible to earlier techniques, notably X-ray radiation transmission radiography. XRR mostly picks up heavy metals in paint pigments, such as lead in lead white or mercury in vermillion. Since van Gogh’s “do overs” usually started with a primer coat of lead white to cover up the original image, XRR often produces few recognizable details. Under "Patch of Grass," for instance, XRR revealed the vague outlines of a head, but no facial characteristics, making the person portrayed unidentifiable.

Scientists led by Joris Dik of Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands thought they could do better. They transported Patch of Grass to the synchrotron light source at the HASYLAB, part of the particle physics lab DESY in Hamburg, Germany. After bombarding the painting with the radiation, they write, “we succeeded in visualizing the hidden face with unprecedented detail."

The technique picked up and identified mercury and antimony in the red (vermillion) and light (Naples yellow) pigments, respectively, letting the scientists see the flesh tones, the brushstrokes and all the facial details—eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. They could even see “the reddish intensity of the flesh tones of the lips, cheek, and forehead,” they report:

“The hidden painting dovetails with an extensive series of heads from the artist’s period in Nuenen (The Netherlands). Between October 1884 and May 1885 he painted the heads of peasant models in the dark settings of their huts, in the neighborhood of the village of Nuenen. . . . The present head must belong to a smaller group of studies that Vincent gave to his brother Theo in Paris, as mentioned in his letters (Some of the heads I promised you are finished, but they are not quite dry yet; I should like to hear whether those rolled-up things arrived safely). After 2 1/2 years, Vincent went to join Theo in Paris and may very well have found the woman’s head hopelessly old-fashioned by then. This, together with his uncomfortable financial situation, can explain the presence of a colorful, Parisian style floral painting on top of a dark and sombre head of a provincial Dutch woman.”

Here she is:

Tapping Tobacco to Cure Cancer

Sharon Begley — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:23:49 GMT

Sure, broccoli fights cancer. But tobacco?

When scientists at Stanford University looked around for a good way to grow a cancer vaccine, they realized they could do no better than the plant that has caused more cancers than you can count. They were not trying to develop a cancer vaccine such as Gardasil, which gives the body immunity against an infectious agent (in this case, the papillomavirus) that can trigger cancer (in this case, cervical). That's all well and good, but the true grail is a therapeutic vaccine, one that would prompt the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells and only cancer cells, or that would consist of antibodies that do so.

The theory rests on the fact that the surface of malignant cells are studded with molecules that can prime the immune system’s T cells, for instance, to attack the cancer cells, or act as homing signals that lure antibodies to munch up and destroy the cells.

A bunch of such cancer vaccines are in development, but they face a serious problem. Everyone is likely to need a different vaccine, because everyone's cancer cells are probably slightly different on the molecular level. Growing the antibodies according to the usual recipe means using animal cells, which is expensive (thousands of dollars per patient), time consuming (months) and possibly risky (they might contain viruses or other contaminants that are not exactly what you want to inject into cancer patients). So biologist Ronald Levy of Stanford University and colleagues decided to investigate plants as vaccine factories.

This evening, they are announcing in the advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have grown an injectable cancer vaccine in genetically-engineered plants, tested it in 16 cancer patients and found it to be safe (tests of whether it works come next).

Fully aware of the irony here, Levy and his team used tobacco plants to grow the vaccine, which would act against follicular B-cell lymphoma. This chronic, incurable form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma strikes some 16,000 people in the United States each year. For all its horrors, however, follicular B-cell lymphoma just may be tailor-made for a cancer vaccine: all of the malignant cells are the descendants of a single bad actor and have an identical molecule on their surface. But the molecular signature of one patient’s cancer cells is slightly different from every other patient’s; hence the need for potentially expensive personalized vaccines.

The scientists therefore spliced the DNA for the molecular sequences of the antibodies from each of the 16 patients into tobacco cells. The DNA triggered production of antibodies in the tobacco plants’ leaves which were tailor-made for each patient’s lymphoma cells. The scientists ground up the leaves and isolated the antibodies, injecting them into each patient.

The patients’ immune systems got cracking: 70 percent of the patients developed an immune response to the plant-produced vaccine, and 47 percent produced a response specific to the antigen.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether this will fight cancer. But growing cancer vaccines in plants has one big thing going for it: patients would have a tailor-made vaccine within days, rather than waiting the months it takes to grow vaccines in animal cells.

Breast Self-Exam: Don't Count on It

Sharon Begley — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 23:00:19 GMT

It’s a tough call, deciding which topics gets readers most incensed. Evolution always makes a strong run for the title, but I have to go with something else: readers get really, really upset when you tell them that early cancer detection is unlikely to save their life.

So apologies that I have to say it again. But the latest review of studies evaluating the value of monthly breast self-exams—a staple of college health centers, OB-GYN visits and women’s mags—comes to a dismal conclusion: there is no evidence that they actually reduce breast-cancer deaths, and instead may do more harm than good.

Before you roll your eyes and say, oh, just one little study, what does it know?, let me say this: there are actually a lot of studies casting doubt on what breast self-exams can do for you. In 2002, for instance, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle concluded in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that teaching women breast self-examination does not decrease the number of deaths in the group from breast cancer. And just as the study released this evening finds, teaching BSE increases the rate of benign breast biopsies, which are no fun. A JNCI editorial concluded that rather than spending time teaching breast self-exam, physicians should educate women about cancer symptoms and take more time performing the clinical breast exam. “Routinely teaching BSE may be dead,” they wrote, “but giving women information . . . should live on.”

Alas, six years later, BSE is not at all dead, and the myth of the value of self-exam persists. Lest you think this is all a vast conspiracy on the part of unfeeling male scientists to make more of us die from breast cancer, check out the Website of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, a women's research and advocacy group that has often taken unpopular positions. For years it has been telling women that “there is currently no scientific evidence from randomized trials that breast self-exam (BSE) saves lives or enables women to detect breast cancer at earlier stages. In addition, there are some data that show that BSE greatly increases the number of benign lumps detected, resulting in increased anxiety, physician visits, and unnecessary biopsies. Therefore, NBCC does not support efforts to promote and teach BSE on a population-wide level in any age group of women.” And the American Cancer Society stopped recommending monthly self-exams five years ago; there’s just no evidence it saves lives.

How can it be that self-exam doesn’t make you less likely to die of breast cancer, as the latest paper, from the Cochrane Library, concludes? (And that the PSA test for prostate cancer, mammograms, and X-ray screening for lung cancer also have little to no value in keeping you alive?)

For one thing, many tumors grow so slowly that they can be in you for years with no ill effects. So whether you find the tumor today or on July 15, 2014, makes no difference. For another, just because someone who found a tumor herself lives for 17 years, while someone whose tumor was found on a mammogram lived only 6, doesn’t mean the earlier detection improved survival: the ultimately fatal outcome might have been inevitable, and the only thing early detection bought was more years of living with cancer, not more years of life.

It’s understandable why women get so upset at the fact that monthly breast self-exams don’t improve survival odds. It means that there is that much less we can do ourselves to stay healthy and alive—and no one likes to think that our fate is so completely out of our hands.

Bumper Stickers = Road Rage

Sharon Begley — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:12:22 GMT

Bob Rowan / Progressive Image-Corbis

I used to think that the most dangerous thing about bumper stickers was that they make curious drivers inch ever closer to the car in front of them in order to read the things (“He Put the Duh in W,” perhaps, or “At Least the War on the Environment is Going Well,” or “49% ***, 51% Sweetheart; Don’t Push It,” or “If There Is a Tourist Season, Why Can’t We Shoot Them?”—for all of which I am indebted to http://www.bumperart.com). But no, bumper stickers pose another danger: drivers who plaster their vehicles with the things are more prone to road rage than drivers who leave their car or truck unadorned.

As scientists led by Paul Bell, Lucy Troup and Bell's student William Szlemko of Colorado State University report in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, it’s a simple matter of territoriality. Researchers have long known that drivers who have a strong sense of personal space while in their vehicle are more likely to be road-ragers, and the more someone plasters his vehicle with bumper stickers and decals the more territorial he feels about the space inside.

As researchers at the American Automobile Association warned way back in 1995:

“Human beings are territorial. As individuals we have a personal space, or territory, which evolved essentially as a defense mechanism—anyone who invades this territory is potentially an aggressor and the time it takes the aggressor to cross this territory enables the defender to prepare to fend off or avoid the attack. This may extend no further than a matter of a few feet or less. . . . The car is an extension of this territory. Indeed, the territory extends for some distance beyond the vehicle, again providing room for the defender to prepare to fend off or avoid the attack. If a vehicle threatens this territory by cutting in, for example, the driver will probably carry out a defensive maneuver. This may be backed up by an attempt to re-establish territory . . . flashing headlights or a blast of the horn are, perhaps, most commonly used for this purpose. However, this may not always succeed in communicating the full depth of our feelings. As it is usually difficult to talk or even shout to the offending driver, other non-verbal communication (offensive gesticulations) may be employed. . . . In some circumstances, the defending driver may wish to go one step further and assert his dominance. Many drivers admit to having chased after a driver to ‘teach him a lesson,’ often pressing him by moving to within inches of his rear bumper. This is comparable to the manner in which a defending animal will chase an attacker out of its territory.”

In 1995 AAA found that road rage had been responsible for 12,610 injuries and 210 deaths in the first six years of the 1990s, and that the number of road-rage incidents was rising 7 percent a year. They’re expected to reach at least 25,000 injuries and 370 deaths this year, with thousands more incidents that stop short of bodily (but not necessarily mental or emotional) injury.

So assuming you can even afford to drive this summer, stay away from cars with bumper stickers. As the Colorado scientists report, people with lots of bumper stickers and decals on their car were 16 percent more likely to succumb to road rage. As Szlemko told Nature magazine, “The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving.”

And the wording of bumper tickers was irrelevant. Someone who plasters his car with religious stickers such as “1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4 Given” is just as likely to go crazy if you pass him as the guy with “I Support the Right to Arm Bears.” To be safe, consider any and all bumper stickers as synonymous with, “This is my space, and if you get too close an obscene gesture will be the least of your problems.”

Dance of the Bees: Universal Understanding

Sharon Begley — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:51:24 GMT

The most famous dancers in nature are honeybees, whose “waggle dance” tells hive-mates where to find food. But although the basics of the dance are the same for honeybees the world over (more on this below), different species seem to have different dance dialects, as it were. This evening scientists are reporting that Asian bees can understand the dance of European bees, and vice versa.

Honeybees have three basic dance moves, depending where the food they just found is located. If it’s close to the hive, the forager dances in little circles, clockwise and counterclockwise. Although the dance conveys no information about the direction to the food, the message “close by” (usually, closer than 150 feet away) is apparently sufficient. If the food is about 150 to 450 feet away, the forager does a “sickle dance,” tracing the shape of a crescent. For food more than 450 feet away, the bee does the famous waggle, which is the most sophisticated and complicated—especially when you consider that bee brains are, shall we say, modest. It conveys information about both distance and direction. The bee runs straight ahead, loops around in a semicircle back to where she started, dashes straight ahe ad again, then loops around in the opposite direction, making a figure-eight circuit. The length of the straight portion indicates distance, while the angle of the line represents the angle to the flowers from the sun.

Scientists have now used video cameras to confirm that Asian honeybees (Apis cerana cerana) and European honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) "have significantly different dance dialects, even when made to forage in identical environments," Shenglu Chen of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and colleagues report in the journal PLoS One. The difference lies in how far the bees run during the straight portion of the waggle dance: the Asian bees run farther to convey a given distance than European bees do. Yet “when reared in the same colony, these two species are able to communicate with each other,” the scientists report, even though the sub-species diverged from one another (evolutionarily) 30 to 50 million years ago.

You can find fascinating clips of an Asian queen laying an egg, with European workers, around her, here. Others show Asian bees (with dark midsections)following the dance of European foragers and European and Asian bees following the dance of an Asian forager.

Quantum Dances: World Science Festival

Sharon Begley — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:02:16 GMT

Nothing against the ancient and beautiful Italian port city of Genoa, but physicist Brian Greene wasn’t going to stand idly by while it had a world-renowned science festival and New York did not. When Greene spoke at the 2005 Genoa festival, he recalled over a recent breakfast with me, “it was enormously impressive: science was filling the streets, science was taking over. We stood in the square and said, ‘this should be happening in the U.S.’”

“We” are Green and his wife, award-winning news- and documentary-producer Tracy Day, and together they are on the verge of pulling it off. Enlisting Nobel laureates and actors, artists, choreographers, musicians and kids, they have organized the World Science Festival, which kicks off with an invitation-only “world science summit” tomorrow and then opens the doors to all comers for four days of events from May 29 to June 1 throughout New York City.

From the science of sports and of Disney Imagineering (want to know how they engineer those roller coasters at Disney theme parks?) to the brain basis of morality and the neurobiology underlying the Bourne trilogy, the festival aims to be entertaining and fun, Day said, “communicating real science ideas with integrity. We want kids to see the pyrotechnics and the animated dinosaur [from the Disney Imagineers] and say, ‘huh, so that’s science?’, and see that with a degree in science you can go work for Disney.”

Never quite grasped the probabilistic nature of quantum physics? A dance performance at the Guggenheim Museum, inspired by Green’s best-selling book The Elegant Universe, includes a giant die: to demonstrate the random nature of the physical world, the dance progresses according to which side the die lands on. Puzzled about the parallel/multiworlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed by the late physicist Hugh Everett? Hear from his son Mark Everett, an indie rocker, and two physicists to explore whether there are kazillions of you's in parallel universes.

The goal, says Greene, “is to create an excitement and buzz around science that it usually doesn’t have, to change how people talk about science, to change the zeitgeist so that science becomes something people want to engage with.”

Moving science toward the center of the larger cultural landscape is a tall order, especially in a time (now) and place (the U.S.) where what political conservatives call (contemptuously) the “reality-based community” (the earliest reference I find is in this 2004 story about a 2002 conversation with a White House adviser) includes scientists.

You can wow people all you want with gee-whiz science. At the end of the day, and the end of the festival, the challenge that science poses to the world view of millions of people—among whom the Bible and not Einstein or Darwin holds the correct account of the birth of the universe and the history of life on Earth, to name just two—ain’t going away. But if science can be made warm and fuzzy or cool and edgy, maybe the visceral animosity between the two opposed world views will dissipate like the smoke form those Imagineers’ pyrotechnics, at least a little.

What Am I Bid for This Rainforest?

Sharon Begley — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:22:38 GMT

Two questions: what bids do I hear for Guyana’s rainforest—and why is Harrison Ford having a patch of his chest hair ripped off with what looks like duct tape?

The answer to the second is simpler. In a 30-second video produced for Conservation International, Ford, looking not at all Indiana-y, lies on his back while a woman in white applies goop to his chest and covers it with a cloth. Ford intones that “every year, tropical forest equal to an area the size of England disappears. That’s a jungle the size of Manhattan lost every four hours. Saving forests is more than helping wildlife survive. It combats climate change, and allows people to continue getting the fresh water and food and medicines they need from healthy forest ecosystems.” As the woman secures the cloth, Ford tells us that “every bit of rainforest that gets ripped out over there”—cue the cloth ripping off his chest hair—“really hurts us over here.”

“Save the rainforest!” never went away as an environmental cause, and has been a front-burner issue since at least 1992, when the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in part to highlight the importance of the Amazon rainforest to mitigating climate change. (The Earth Summit was where the first President Bush signed a climate treaty committing the U.S. to reducing greenhouse gases. Oh well.)

But as scientists do the math and despair of countries controlling their emissions of carbon dioxide before it’s too late, the importance of rainforests has grown. Burning and clearing tropical forests emits some 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases every year, more than all the cars, trucks and airplanes combined. But virtually all the money pouring into projects aimed at stabilizing the climate is going into alternative energy; less than 1 percent of the investments in the global carbon market created by the Kyoto Protocol is going to preserve tropical forests.

This is where Guyana comes in. The South American country still has some 80 percent of its original Amazon forest cover. At a press conference organized by Conservation International this week, President Bharrat Jagdeo basically asked the world, “what am I bid to keep it that way?”

Or, to quote him, “we are willing to place almost our entire rainforest, which is larger than England, under the supervision of an international body to ensure compliance” with standards of sustainable forestry, which basically mean preserving the forest’s ability to absorb and store carbon dioxide. (Guyana’s forests store 250 to 400 tons or more of CO2 per hectare, for a total of hundreds of millions of tons. For comparison, energy use in all the homes in the U.S. caused the emission of about 300 million tons of CO2 in 2000.)

How much will it cost? The market will determine that, but economists estimate about $10 per ton of CO2. If the world wants to preserve, say, 500 million tons of CO2 in Guyana’s forests, it will cost $5 billion.

Worth it? That depends on what other methods of carbon sequestration cost, but it’s in the ballpark for other forms of forest sequestration and way cheaper than geologic storage, though cost estimates vary widely, as Figure 6 in this report shows.

As things now stand, the Kyoto Protocol says countries can claim carbon credits (which can be applied toward the amount they have to reduce their CO2 emissions) only if they replant or restore degraded or deforested areas. According to the concept of avoided deforestation, although a mature forest is not absorbing as much carbon from the atmosphere as when it was young, it is still storing a huge amount that we better keep out of the atmosphere. Countries with lots of intact forest could, in theory, blackmail the world: "want to keep rising oceans out of the lobbies of your high-rises and away from the pricey condos along your coasts? Pay up."

Let the bidding begin.

Global Warming: It's Fat People's Fault

Sharon Begley — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:01:53 GMT

If the mail I get from readers is any indication, the issue of climate change is a dastardly conspiracy to “redistribute global wealth,” as one memorably explained to me. Now greenhouse deniers can imagine another conspiracy: it is all a plot to get rid of fat people.

The link between obesity and climate change has come up before, although subtly. An AP story last year noted that people could combat both of these problems by walking or bicycling rather than driving (so they burn calories, not gasoline). And writing in the Huffington Post, filmmaker Bryan Young (“Killer at Large”) cited a scientist who told him that “for every pound the average American is overweight, we use an additional 938 million gallons of gasoline per year. That's enough to fill 2 million cars with gasoline every year.” It’s straightforward physics: it takes more energy to move a lot of weight than it does to move a little weight (which is also why, everything else being equal, big cars get worse gas mileage than subcompacts).

Now a paper in The Lancet today puts a scientific stamp on this. The logic goes like this: Fat people consume more food than thin people, it takes energy to grow and transport food, ergo fat people are responsible for more global warming than thin people. Or, more precisely, for 18 percent more food energy than normal people, calculate Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The standard definition of “overweight” is having a body mass index of 25 or greater (you can calculate yours here). A population with BMIs of 24.5 consumes, on average, 1550 calories of food per person per day just for basic metabolism and another 950 calories for daily activities. That’s 2500 calories each. A population with BMIs of 29 needs 1680 calories per person for basic metabolism, plus 1280 calories for daily activities, or 2960. That’s 18 percent more food energy.

In addition, it takes more fuel to move an obese person than a slender one, the authors note, something that “will increase further if, as is likely, the overweight people in response to their increased body mass choose to walk less and drive more.” The authors therefore advocate policies that promote walking and bicycling to reduce obesity and, hence, global warming.

But I can’t help reading in their paper the latest pretense for feeling greener-than-thou: it won’t be enough to drive a Prius, air-dry your laundry, become a vegan and ditch your air conditioning to feel smug about your tiny carbon footprint. Now you’ll have to be waif-thin, too.

Which Orphans Do You Want to Starve?

Sharon Begley — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:19:58 GMT

Here’s a moral dilemma that seems tragically timely, given the chaos surrounding attempts to deliver aid to Burma’s cyclone victims. There are 60 orphans at the Canaan Children’s Home in Buziika, Uganda, and their meal allotment has to be cut. What do you want to do: take six meals away from each of two kids, or 10 meals away from one? You have eight seconds to decide.

In this and similar moral dilemmas, efficiency (the total number of meals lost) is pitted again against equity (how evenly the burden of lost meals is shared among the children). You have to take away a total of 12 meals if two children share the loss, but only 10 (which would seem better) if a single orphan bears the entire burden. You have to decide whether to sacrifice efficiency (losing fewer meals) to equity (spreading the loss over more children).

Here’s another way to think about it. You are driving a truck to the Burmese cyclone victims. It holds 1,000 pounds of rice. The time it will take to deliver the rice to everyone in the Irrawaddy Delta village you are headed for means that 200 pounds will spoil. If you deliver the rice to people you meet en route, you will be distributing it to only half the population of the village, but only 50 pounds will spoil. Do you deliver the rice to only half the number of victims, maximizing the total amount of food provided (efficiency), or do you sacrifice 150 pounds to distribute it to more people (equity), giving rice to more people but also causing more rice to go to waste?

In a study reported online today in the journal Science, researchers posed the orphan dilemma to people while scanning their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Unlike most studies of the brain basis of ethical decision making ("neuroethics"), this one was grounded in reality: the volunteers’ choices would determine how many meals the research team actually donated to the Ugandan orphans. The volunteers knew this, which made the dilemma painful in the extreme. “Quite a few came out saying: ‘This is the worst experiment I’ve ever been in. I never want to do anything like this again!’,” said study co-author Ming Hsu of the University of Illinois’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

So, which is more critical to our sense of justice, equity or efficiency? And how does the brain decide?

In the experiment, the volunteers (26 men and women, ages 28 to 55) first read short bios of the orphans. Then they watched a video on a computer screen, showing a ball rolling toward a lever. By moving the lever, they could steer the ball toward either of two depictions of the moral choices: photographs of the actual orphans who would be affected by that choice, with numbers for the number of meals that would be lost to those children if that option were chosen.

By an overwhelming margin, people chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency—lose a few more meals, but spread the burden among as many children as possible, rather than making one hungry child—whose imploring little face stared back at them from the screen--shoulder the entire loss.

According to the fMRI, different brain regions became active at different points in the decision-making. The insula, which is involved in processing emotions and the awareness of bodily states as well as (in some studies) evaluating fairness, was active when the volunteers wrestled with questions of equity. The putamen, which is activated during learning that brings rewards, lit up when people thought about efficiency.

Since equity won, it suggests that decisions about fairness are rooted in emotion more than in cold-eyed cost-benefit analysis. “That the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity,” Steven Quartz of Caltech and co-author of the study said in a statement. “The emotional response to unfairness pushes people from extreme inequity and drives them to be fair,” suggesting that “our basic impulse to be fair isn’t a complicated thing that we learn,” but an instinctive one.

And whoever said scientists have no heart? After the experiment, and based on the volunteers’ decisions, the team donated $2,279 to the orphanage.

The Platypus: God's Little Joke

Sharon Begley — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:31:36 GMT

The 1999 comedy Dogma opens with a disclaimer, exhorting the audience to remember that “even God has a sense of humor. Just look at the Platypus. Thank you and enjoy the show. P.S. We sincerely apologize to all Platypus enthusiasts out there who are offended by that thoughtless comment about Platypi. We at View Askew respect the noble Platypus, and it is not our intention to slight these stupid creatures in any way. Thank you again and enjoy the show.”

God expressed his sense of humor, of course, in assembling a creature that is a little bit mammal (the platypus, a native of Australia, produces milk and is furry), a little bit reptile (it lays eggs and has venom, released from spurs in the hind legs) and a little bit bird (eggs again, plus it has a bill like a duck as well as webbed feet). Its cognitive capacity and/or nobility we’ll leave to the guys at Dogma, but one particular platypus—Glennie, from New South Wales, Australia—has made scientists smarter: an international team of researchers from the U.S., Australia, England, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and Spain collected her DNA and from it sequenced the platypus genome, they’re announcing today in papers in Nature and Genome Research.

The platypus genome consists of roughly 2.2 billion pairs of chemical “letters,” those As, Ts, Cs and Gs that spell out a species’ genetic code. (Humans have about 3 billion.) Within those letters are some 18,500 genes, compared to maybe 24,000 in humans.

Not surprisingly, the platypus genome is an amalgam of mammal, reptile and bird DNA, too.

Like reptiles, the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) has genes for egg laying. Its venom comes from genes that are duplicates of genes that evolved in ancestral reptiles, which is also the source of venom in today’s reptiles. Like mammals, it has genes for lactation (though, lacking nipples, it nurses its young through the abdominal skin). Like birds, it has a weird way of determining sex: of its 52 chromosomes, 10 are sex chromosomes (in humans, the X and Y, of 23 chromosomes, are sex chromosomes), and the platypus X resembles the sex chromosome of birds, called Z. A female platypus has five pairs of X chromosomes, while males have five Xs and five Ys. The platypus genome contains both reptilian and mammalian genes involved in the fertilization of eggs. Unlike most mammals, which have a pretty good sense of smell, the platypus doesn’t—and its genome has about half as many odor receptors as the mouse and other mammals.

Just one request, please. In the PR avalanche preceding this announcement, one talked about the medical benefits that would surely come from this feat. ("What does this discovery mean for the public? The very real potential for advances in human disease prevention and a better understanding of mammalian evolution.") Aren't we beyond that yet? There have been virtually no medical benefits from sequencing the human genome (yet), for goodness sake; can't we, just occasionally, celebrate a feat of pure science without raising hopes that it will, you know, cure cancer or something? Sometimes a platypus genome is just a platypus genome.

Hearts and Minds: Voters' Feelings About the Candidates

Sharon Begley — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:14:39 GMT

The thrill is gone.

Maybe voters are simply tired of the seemingly endless campaign for the Democratic nomination. Or maybe their excitement about the new (Barack Obama), the suddenly emoting (Hillary Clinton, in New Hampshire) or the coming-back-from the-politically-dead (John McCain) can’t last forever. But whatever the reason, voters are feeling much less excitement and fewer positive emotions about all three of the remaining presidential candidates than they once did, finds a poll that, uniquely, measures voters’ emotional reactions.

If the trend continues, that’s bad news for the candidates, because research keeps showing that voters base their decisions more on their hearts than their heads and are easily swayed by anxiety, fear and other negative emotions. Latest evidence: anyone who feels—the key word—that Obama doesn’t understand “people like me” because he said that voters embittered about their economic plight “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” If that loses him any votes, it will not be because of a rational analysis of his record and positions, but because of how it made people feel about him.

Anyway, a company called AdSam measures what it calls “Emotional Temperature,” which gauges people’s emotional engagement with a product, website or advertisement. Since, as we all know from Joe McGinniss’s 1969 book, “The Selling of the President, 1968,” candidates are marketed and sold just like detergent, the same technique should work with politicians.

In its latest study, AdSam measured how strongly voters feel about each candidate, and how engaging they find them. Since last September, Clinton’s “emotional temperature has been on a continual steep decline with voters,” says AdSam president Jon Morris, a professor at the University of Florida, dropping from 93 to 70 (where 173 is how emotionally positive voters say they would like to feel about a candidate). “Her emotional cool-off is a sign that she is not relevant and not making connections with voters. This is a significant barrier for her and will be very difficult for her to turn around.”

Clinton trails both McCain and Obama, whose emotional temperatures are very similar (85 and 88, respectively, this month) and have not fallen off a cliff the way Clinton’s has. Obama dropped 8 points from September to January (97 to 89), and has stayed at about that “temperature” since. McCain moved up 9 points from September to January (79 to 88), but is down 3 points since.

Obama generates the most positive emotional response among Democrats (beating Clinton 120 to 97) and beats McCain among Independents (97 to 81), with Clinton at 74 among Independents. McCain has finally excited and united Republicans, however, zooming from 101 last September to 145 now.

Clinton is leaving more voters cold, says Morris. Compared to last September or even January, fewer voters feel “interested/excited” by her, while more feel “reluctant,” “uninterested/unexcited” and even “disgusted.” The biggest reason for the turnaround, Morris finds, is that more voters perceive Clinton as dishonest.

Obama is making more Democrats “interested/excited” now than he did in January, but more are also feeling “ambivalent” about him. In follow-up interviews, voters use words such as “truthful,” “honest,” “trust” and “inspirational,” but more and more cite his scant experience on the national stage. The Illinois senator has further to go with Independents: 21 percent feel strong positive emotions about him, compared to 32 percent last September. Equally worrisome, 28 percent now feel “ambivalent,” the most of any emotion among Independents asked about Obama.

More Democrats (20 percent) were disgusted by Clinton’s dishonesty about coming under fire during a trip to Bosnia than by Obama’s links to his controversial pastor (10 percent). We'll see how this translates into votes in Pennsylvania next Tuesday.