• Generation X More Loyal to Religion
• Drink Water to Curb Weight Gain? Clinical Trial Confirms Effectiveness of Simple Appetite Control Method
• Capacity for Exercise Can Be Inherited: Finding Suggests Pharmaceutical Drugs  Can Be Used to Alter Activity Levels in Humans
• Do-Gooders Get Voted Off Island First: People Don’t Really Like Unselfish Colleagues
• ‘Charitable’ Behavior Found in Bacteria
• Attention, Couch Potatoes! Walking Boosts Brain Connectivity, Function
• Starvation Keeps Sleep-Deprived Fly Brain Sharp
• Eating Berries May Activate the Brain’s Natural Housekeeper for Healthy Aging
• Roots of Gamblers’ Fallacies and Other Superstitions: Causes of Seemingly Irrational Human Decision-Making

Generation X More Loyal to Religion: Generation X, the set of Americans who came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is often branded as a rules-rejecting, authority-questioning group. But when it comes to religion, new research has revealed that Gen-Xers are surprisingly loyal to their faith — a finding that also suggests the rising non-religious tide in the United States may be leveling off. A new study showed that Gen-Xers are, in comparison with their Baby Boomer predecessors, far more likely to adhere to their religion. In fact, Boomers are 40 to 50 percent more likely than Gen-Xers to “disaffiliate” from their faith. As Generation X continues to grow older, this loyalty may translate into a more stable nation in terms of its religiosity, he said.
Though Generation X’s religious adherents are relatively durable, the generation as a whole is still more likely than previous ones to be raised with no religious preference, according to the research. Religious non-affiliation in the United States grew from between 6 percent and 8 percent in the 1970s and 1980s to nearly 16 percent by 2006.

Drink Water to Curb Weight Gain? Clinical Trial Confirms Effectiveness of Simple Appetite Control Method: Scientists report results of a new clinical trial confirming that just two 8-ounce glasses of water, taken before meals, enables people to shed pounds. “We found in earlier studies that middle aged and older people who drank two cups of water right before eating a meal ate between 75 and 90 fewer calories during that meal. In this recent study, we found that over the course of 12 weeks, dieters who drank water before meals, three times per day, lost about 5 pounds more than dieters who did not increase their water intake.”
“People should drink more water and less sugary, high-calorie drinks. It’s a simple way to facilitate weight management.” …Water may be so effective simply because it fills up the stomach with a substance that has zero calories. People feel fuller as a result, and eat less calorie-containing food during the meal. Increased water consumption may also help people lose weight if they drink it in place of sweetened calorie-containing beverages.
Diet soda pop and other beverages with artificial sweeteners may also help people reduce their calorie intake and lose weight. However, she advised against using beverages sweetened with sugar and high-fructose corn syrup because they are high in calories. A 12-ounce can of regular soda pop, for instance, contains about 10 teaspoons of sugar. Davy noted that that nobody knows exactly how much water people should drink daily. The Institute of Medicine, an agency of The National Academies, which advises the Federal Government on science, says that most healthy people can simply let thirst be their guide. It does not specify exact requirements for water, but set general recommendations for women at about 9 cups of fluids – from all beverages including water – each day, and men at about 13 cups of fluids. And it is possible to drink too much water, a situation that can lead to a rare, but serious, condition known as water intoxication.

Capacity for Exercise Can Be Inherited: Finding Suggests Pharmaceutical Drugs Can Be Used to Alter Activity Levels in Humans: Biologists have found that voluntary activity, such as daily exercise, is a highly heritable trait that can be passed down genetically to successive generations. Working on mice in the lab, they found that activity level can be enhanced with “selective breeding” – the process of breeding plants and animals for particular genetic traits. Their experiments showed that mice that were bred to be high runners produced high-running offspring, indicating that the offspring had inherited the trait for activity.
“Our findings have implications for human health. Down the road people could be treated pharmacologically for low activity levels through drugs that targeted specific genes that promote activity. Pharmacological interventions in the future could make it more pleasurable for people to engage in voluntary exercise. Such interventions could also make it less comfortable for people to sit still for long periods of time.”

Do-Gooders Get Voted Off Island First: People Don’t Really Like Unselfish Colleagues: You know those goody-two-shoes who volunteer for every task and thanklessly take on the annoying details nobody else wants to deal with? That’s right: Other people really can’t stand them. Four separate studies have found that unselfish workers who are the first to throw their hat in the ring are also among those that coworkers most want to, in effect, vote off the island. They found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they “raise the bar” for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad. It doesn’t matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone’s unselfish behavior. What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad.”
The do-gooders are also seen as deviant rule breakers. It’s as if they’re giving away Monopoly money so someone can stay in the game, irking other players to no end. The researcher would now like to look at how the do-gooders themselves react to being rejected. While some may indeed have ulterior motives, it’s more likely they actually are working for the good of an organization. Excluded from the group, they may say, “enough already” and simply give up. “But it’s also possible that they may actually try even harder.”

‘Charitable’ Behavior Found in Bacteria: In studying the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, the researchers found that the populations most adept at withstanding doses of antibiotics are those in which a few highly resistant isolates sacrifice their own well being to improve the group’s overall chance of survival. This bacterial altruism results when the most resistant isolates produce a small molecule called indole. Indole acts as something of a steroid, helping the strain’s more vulnerable members bulk up enough to fight off the antibiotic onslaught. But while indole may save the group, its production takes a toll on the fitness level of the individual isolates that produce it. “We weren’t expecting to find this. Typically, you would expect only the resistant strains to survive, with the susceptible ones dying off in the face of antibiotic stress. We were quite surprised to find the weak strains not only surviving, but thriving.” The fact that the full complexity of bacteria strains can now be more accurately understood has significant ramifications for the medical community. “Now, when we measure the resistance in a population, we’ll know that it may be tricking us. We’ll know that even an isolate that shows no resistance can put up a stronger battle against antibiotics thanks to its buddies.”

Attention, Couch Potatoes! Walking Boosts Brain Connectivity, Function: Even moderate exercise — in this case walking at one’s own pace for 40 minutes three times a week — can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging and increase performance on cognitive tasks. Previous studies have found that aerobic exercise can enhance the function of specific brain structures, Kramer said. This study shows that even moderate aerobic exercise also improves the coordination of important brain networks. “The higher the connectivity, the better the performance on some of these cognitive tasks, especially the ones we call executive control tasks — things like planning, scheduling, dealing with ambiguity, working memory and multitasking.” These are the very skills that tend to decline with aging.

Starvation Keeps Sleep-Deprived Fly Brain Sharp: As anyone who has ever struggled to keep his or her eyes open after a big meal knows, eating can induce sleepiness. New research in fruit flies suggests that, conversely, being hungry may provide a way to stay awake without feeling groggy or mentally challenged. …The findings add a new wrinkle to the complex relationship between sleep and dietary metabolism. Scientists recognized about a decade ago that inadequate sleep results in obesity and contributes to the development of diabetes and coronary disease. Until now, no one had connected genes linked to lipids with regulation of the need for sleep. Like humans, flies deprived of sleep one day will try to make up for it by sleeping more the next day, a phenomenon referred to as sleep debt. Sleep-deprived flies also perform poorly on a simple test of learning ability.
Studies in other labs have shown that starvation or, in the case of human volunteers, fasting leads to less sleep. More recent research has also shown that starvation can change the activity levels of genes that manage storage and use of lipids. Scientists tested the starving, sleepless flies for two markers of sleep debt: an enzyme in saliva and the flies’ ability to learn to associate a light with an unpleasant stimulus. Both tests showed that the starving flies were not getting sleepy. “From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. If you’re starving, you want to make sure you’re on the top of your game cognitively, to improve your chances of finding food rather than becoming food for someone else.”

Eating Berries May Activate the Brain’s Natural Housekeeper for Healthy Aging: Scientists have reported the first evidence that eating blueberries, strawberries, and acai berries may help the aging brain stay healthy in a crucial but previously unrecognized way. Their study concluded that berries, and possibly walnuts, activate the brain’s natural “housekeeper” mechanism, which cleans up and recycles toxic proteins linked to age-related memory loss and other mental decline. Previous research suggested that one factor involved in aging is a steady decline in the body’s ability to protect itself against inflammation and oxidative damage. This leaves people vulnerable to degenerative brain diseases, heart disease, cancer, and other age-related disorders. “The good news is that natural compounds called polyphenolics found in fruits, vegetables and nuts have an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect that may protect against age-associated decline.”
…Their past studies, for instance, showed that old laboratory rats fed for two months on diets containing 2 percent high-antioxidant strawberry, blueberry, or blackberry extract showed a reversal of age-related deficits in nerve function and behavior that involves learning and remembering. In the new research, they focused on another reason why nerve function declines with aging. It involves a reduction in the brain’s natural house-cleaning process. Cells called microglia are the housekeepers. In a process called autophagy, they remove and recycle biochemical debris that otherwise would interfere with brain function. “But in aging, microglia fail to do their work, and debris builds up. In addition, the microglia become over-activated and actually begin to damage healthy cells in the brain. Our research suggests that the polyphenolics in berries have a rescuing effect. They seem to restore the normal housekeeping function. These findings are the first to show these effects of berries.”
The study provides further evidence to eat foods rich in polyphenolics. Although berries and walnuts are rich sources, many other fruits and vegetables contain these chemicals ― especially those with deep red, orange, or blue colors. Those colors come from pigments termed anthocyanins that are good antioxidants. He emphasized the importance of consuming the whole fruit, which contains the full range of hundreds of healthful chemicals. Frozen berries, which are available year round, also are excellent sources of polyphenolics.

Roots of Gamblers’ Fallacies and Other Superstitions: Causes of Seemingly Irrational Human Decision-Making: Gamblers who think they have a “hot hand,” only to end up walking away with a loss, may nonetheless be making “rational” decisions. The study finds that because humans are making decisions based on how we think the world works, if erroneous beliefs are held, it can result in behavior that looks distinctly irrational. “The overarching idea is that there is typically structure in the world, and it makes sense that when we make decisions, we try to understand the structure in order to exploit it. One of the simplest kinds of ‘structure’ is when the outcome that just occurred tells you something about what is likely to happen next. Where people go astray is when they base their decisions on beliefs that are different than what is actually present in the world. In the coin example, if you toss a coin five times and all five times are heads, should you pick heads or tails on the next flip? Assuming the coin is fair, it doesn’t matter – the five previous heads don’t change the probability of heads on the next flip – it’s still 50 percent – but people nevertheless act as though those previous flips influence the next one.”
When things are actually independent over time, meaning they don’t have any structure, people will interpret results through possible structures, a way of thinking often seen among gamblers. For example, gamblers who win three hands in a row, may believe themselves to be “hot” and thus more likely to win the next hand. The research showed that similar behaviors are seen even in an optimal, fully rational computer learner given similar incorrect beliefs about the world. Furthermore, when the context of the task was changed so that subjects understood that the outcomes were actually independent, a drastic shift in their behavior was noted, with subjects all doing the “right” thing for the way the world actually worked. “This demonstrates that given the right world model, humans are more than capable of easily learning to make optimal decisions.”

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• People Reject Popular Opinions If They Already Hold Opposing Views
• To Make One Happy, Make One Busy
• What You Say About Others Says a Lot About You
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People Reject Popular Opinions If They Already Hold Opposing Views: A new study suggests people often grow more confident in some beliefs when they find out later that a majority of people disagree with them. “It may be that you feel proud because you were able to disprove, in your own mind, an opinion that most people have accepted. You actually become doubly sure you were right.”
Previous research has shown that majority opinion has the greatest influence on people when they consider issues that aren’t that important to them or issues they don’t want to spend much effort thinking about. Minority opinion does have influence sometimes, but mostly on issues which people are motivated to consider carefully. However, previous work had focused on situations in which people found out the majority opinion before they had given the issue much thought. “People may be thinking that ‘if I can find the flaws in a position that the majority of people believe, then my thoughts must really be good ones.’”
One key to this finding is that people have to think about the issue first, and develop their own ideas. Learning later that a majority of people hold a certain view, after you have already made up your mind, functions to help you validate what you already think about that issue.

To Make One Happy, Make One Busy: A new study found that people who have something to do, even something pointless, are happier than people who sit idly. …people like being busy, and they like being able to justify being busy — to benefit society.

~If you read the write-up, I’d love your opinion on how this conclusion was made. I basically agree with the conclusion that keeping busy leads to feeling happier than just being idle, but I question how the conclusion was made, at least from the write-up.

What You Say About Others Says a Lot About You: How positively you see others is linked to how happy, kind-hearted and emotionally stable you are. The researchers found a person’s tendency to describe others in positive terms is an important indicator of the positivity of the person’s own personality traits. They discovered particularly strong associations between positively judging others and how enthusiastic, happy, kind-hearted, courteous, emotionally stable and capable the person describes oneself and is described by others. The study also found that how positively you see other people shows how satisfied you are with your own life, and how much you are liked by others.
In contrast, negative perceptions of others are linked to higher levels of narcissism and antisocial behavior. “The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders. Given that negative perceptions of others may underlie several personality disorders, finding techniques to get people to see others more positively could promote the cessation of behavior patterns associated with several different personality disorders simultaneously.” This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing. The level of negativity the rater uses in describing the other person may indeed indicate that the other person has negative characteristics, but may also be a tip off that the rater is unhappy, disagreeable, neurotic — or has other negative personality traits. …By evaluating the raters and how they evaluated their peers again one year later, Wood found compelling evidence that how positively we tend to perceive others in our social environment is a highly stable trait that does not change substantially over time.

Breeding Is Changing Dog Brains: Scientists have shown that selective breeding of domestic dogs is not only dramatically changing the way animals look but is also driving major changes in the canine brain. The brains of many short-snouted dog breeds have rotated forward as much as 15 degrees, while the brain region controlling smell has fundamentally relocated. No other animal has enjoyed the level of human affection and companionship like the dog, nor undergone such a systemic and deliberate intervention in its biology through breeding, the authors note. The diversity suggests a unique level of plasticity in the canine genome. “Canines seem to be incredibly responsive to human intervention through breeding. It’s amazing that a dog’s brain can accommodate such large differences in skull shape through these kinds of changes — it’s something that hasn’t been documented in other species.” …”The next obvious step is to try to find out if these changes in brain organisation are also linked to systematic differences in dogs’ brain function.”

Synthetic Bone Graft Recruits Stem Cells for Faster Bone Healing: A new study shows how particles of a ceramic called calcium phosphate have the ability to stimulate promising bone regrowth by attracting stem cells and ‘growth factors’ to promote healing and the integration of the grafted tissue. “The rate of bone repair we see with these materials rivals that of traditional grafts using a patients’ own bone. And what sets it apart from other synthetic graft substitutes is its ability to attract stem cells and the body’s natural growth factors, which coincide to form new, strong, natural bone around an artificial graft.” …The study suggests that biomaterials-based bone grafts can manipulate cell behaviour in order to repair injury, and one day may be used to repair bone injuries in humans.

Latest ‘Green’ Packing Material? Mushrooms; Packing Foam Engineered from Mushrooms and Agricultural Waste: A new packing material that grows itself is now appearing in shipped products across the country. The composite of inedible agricultural waste and mushroom roots is called Mycobond™, and its manufacture requires just one eighth the energy and one tenth the carbon dioxide of traditional foam packing material. And unlike most foam substitutes, when no longer useful, it makes great compost in the garden.

Mining Bacterial Genomes Reveals Valuable ‘Hidden’ Drugs: Scientists successfully used a ‘genome mining’ approach to find and activate a group of genes in the bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor. This resulted in the production of a new antibacterial compound that was effective against several bacterial strains, including Escherichia coli. Streptomyces is a common soil bacterium that is well-known for its antibiotic-producing capabilities. In 2002, genomic sequencing of one Streptomyces species, S. coelicolor, revealed several groups of genes whose function was unknown. By digging deeper and removing a molecule that specifically inactivates one of the mystery gene groups, known as cpk, the researchers in this study were able to ‘awaken’ the genes, to find that they produced the new antibiotic, in addition to a bright yellow pigment. This is the first time a genome mining approach to drug discovery has been successfully used in Streptomyces. The same approach for ‘awakening’ new antibiotic production pathways could also be used to tap other micro-organisms, such as filamentous fungi, for sources of biologically active compounds. Aside from antibiotics, these compounds may include other antimicrobials or antitumour agents. “There are several thousand other uncharacterized groups of genes that have been found recently in microbial genome sequences. This opens up a rich treasure trove of new potential drugs for clinical use.”

One High-Fat Diet, Two Different Outcomes: The Path to Obesity Becomes Clearer: Why is it that two people can consume the same high fat, high-calorie Western diet and one becomes obese and prone to diabetes while the other maintains a slim frame? A study provides a simple explanation: weight is set before birth in the developing brain. The research team analyzed the question in specific groups of rats. …animals that become obese already had a significant difference in the feeding center of the brain. Neurons that are supposed to signal when you’ve eaten enough and when to burn calories, are much more sluggish in these animals because they are inhibited by other cells. In animals resistant to obesity, these satiety signaling neurons are much more active and ready to signal to the rest of the brain and peripheral tissues when enough food has been consumed. “These observations add to the argument that it is less about personal will that makes a difference in becoming obese, and, it is more related to the connections that emerge in our brain during development.”

Obesity Prevention Begins Before Birth: Excess Maternal Weight Gain Increases Birth Weight After Controlling for Genetic Factors: Expectant mothers who gain large amounts of weight tend to give birth to heavier infants who are at higher risk for obesity later in life. But it’s never been proven that this tendency results from the weight gain itself, rather than genetic or other factors that mother and baby share. “Since high birth weight, in turn, increases risk for obesity and diseases such as cancer and asthma later in life, these findings have important implications to general public health.”
…Animal studies suggest that excess maternal weight or excess weight gain during pregnancy affects the uterine environment, producing changes in the hypothalamus, pancreatic islet cells, fat tissue and other systems that regulate body weight. “Hormones and metabolic pathways, and even the structure of tissues and organs that play a role in body weight maintenance are affected.”

Gum Inflammation Linked to Alzheimer’s Disease: The study offers fresh evidence that gum inflammation may contribute to brain inflammation, neurodegeneration, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Brain Study Shows That Thinking About God Reduces Distress, But Only for Believers: Thinking about God may make you less upset about making errors, according to a new study. The researchers measured brain waves for a particular kind of distress-response while participants made mistakes on a test. Those who had been prepared with religious thoughts had a less prominent response to mistakes than those who hadn’t. The researchers showed that when people think about religion and God, their brains respond differently, in a way that lets them take setbacks in stride and react with less distress to anxiety-provoking mistakes. The results showed that when people were primed to think about religion and God, either consciously or unconsciously, brain activity decreases in areas consistent with the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area associated with a number of things, including regulating bodily states of arousal and serving an alerting function when things are going wrong, including when we make mistakes.
Interestingly, atheists reacted differently; when they were unconsciously primed with God-related ideas, their ACC increased its activity. The researchers suggest that for religious people, thinking about God may provide a way of ordering the world and explaining apparently random events and thus reduce their feelings of distress. In contrast, for atheists, thoughts of God may contradict the meaning systems they embrace and thus cause them more distress.
“Thinking about religion makes you calm under fire. It makes you less distressed when you’ve made an error. We think this can help us understand some of the really interesting findings about people who are religious. Although not unequivocal, there is some evidence that religious people live longer and they tend to be happier and healthier.” Atheists shouldn’t despair, though. “We think this can occur with any meaning system that provides structure and helps people understand their world.” Maybe atheists would do better if they were primed to think about their own beliefs, he says.

~My initial thoughts on this: Of course atheists were more agitated after reading the god related ideas! What did they expect? That the atheists would suddenly find comfort in that insanity? I think the conclusions for atheists is offensively patronizing. Maybe I’m just irritated by how the study was conducted. It would suggest to me that religious people can easily make mistakes and their religious thoughts make them more accepting of their mistakes. This doesn’t seem like a positive reaction. When you screw up you should have a reaction, in my opinion.

Also, is it true that religious people live longer and are happier? Is there evidence for that? Most atheists I know are quite happy, and more importantly, not delusional. Then again, in support of the study’s conclusions, the atheists I know who are relatively happy all have very strong value systems that give their lives meaning. I can also speak for myself that this is the case. Atheism only starts with a lack of belief in god. It doesn’t mean we don’t have strong values in the real world that give our lives meaning in other areas away from anything supernatural.

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Partial Transcript:

37:18 If the goal is not to score points, if the goal is actually to persuade people, if the morally superior goal is to win minds rather than just make people look stupid, then tone really does matter. Psychology has some things to say about how we should best go about trying to persuade people to really, any position, but even more specifically to a scientific position that they may otherwise feel threatened by,  or may conflict with their worldview.

38:07 It’s an empirical issue. What is likely to be persuasive or off-putting or not is a testable question. There are people right now researching how you package factual issues and seeing if that affects the rate at which people believe, disbelieve or deny them.

One of the examples of this, there is a researcher who’s name is Geoffrey Monroe from Towson University who has done some studies on peoples’ willingness to agree with belief consisting information as opposed to information that’s inconsistent with beliefs as a function of things like how the information is presented to them.

So he had a piece on Science and Religion Today where he folded this into the debate about, do you alienate people by using blunt language that offends them. The theory behind this that people don’t, as most people probably realize, they don’t simply make up their mind on the basis of factual, cognitive, cold type calculations. This is one aspect that frustrates us, is that when we are debating with somebody, it quickly becomes apparent that the facts of evolution in some cases won’t make a difference, if the person has an emotional investment.

So people hold attitudes because they are linked to aspects of your self-identity. As stated in Terror Management Theory, if you have a worldview that can be threatened, you get defensive. You circle your wagons as if attacked. In the same way, with factual issues like scientific-type things, religious people hold these as part of their broader self-identity.

So if you’re saying, “I’m a creationist”, you’re not just saying, “I favor the arguments for creation”, you’re saying, “I, as a person, my identity is as a creationist”. So if you’re attacking creationist claims, you’re attacking that person as well, their self-identity. So how do you challenge the beliefs, but don’t threaten them on a personal level?

40:14 Geoffrey Monroe did a study that is very sobering, because what he found was that, his particular study used stimuli that had to do with things like homosexuality and mental illness. He had people who thought homosexuality and mental illness were the same thing, and he had people who had the view that there’s no connection. Then he presented them both with statements that confirmed or disconfirmed that.

What he found was disturbing. People who’s views were challenged by this evidence, so believed disconfirming information, so if I thought that homosexuals have higher rates of mental illness, then I read a scientific article that said the opposite, those people tended to devalue science itself. That is, they rated lower the ability of science to answer questions like that, even beyond that, that it generalized to other issues other than the one that was challenged.

So it wasn’t even just, “this is a bad study”, or “I disagree with the conclusions” it was that “science itself cannot answer a question like this”. They become almost postmodernist. They would say, “well, you can have your science, but that doesn’t answer these questions.”

People at my university usually reserve two areas where “science can’t touch this”: religion and things like love or sexuality. They say, “Yes, you can have your data but these things are immune to faith or the wonders of the emotions, but science can’t address that.”

It seems also that a lot of pseudo-sciences tend to cluster together. You’re going to hear on a christian radio network, typically, obviously creationist stuff, but climate denialism comes in there, a lot of times there’s a lot of pseudo-science-y herbal remedies that you’ll hear late night on the christian talk shows.

It does seem to be that once you distrust one area of science, it’s not all that hard to start being more skeptical of others.

42:07 It spreads. So, what Monroe’s work is suggesting is the reason that happens is the person has some sort of cognitive dissonance. “My view is apparently disconfirmed by this study, so therefore this study cannot be valid, and studies in general probably aren’t valid.” They bring out things like, “even scientists disagree” or “facts can be twisted”.

What Monroe’s broader point to the debate of how information is presented is that often you can change that, or you can blunt that response by packaging the information in a less threatening way. That is, if somebody’s emotional factors are involved in this, if they are hurt, or if their worldview is challenged, if you present the information in a way that allows them to maintain part of their worldview, they are less likely to have that compensatory defensive response.

His argument is that you can use language that is relatively more accommodating. Like instead of saying, “we argue” that you instead frame it as, “here’s what the data says”. Or that you allow them to affirm part of their identity in another area.

So the way that some of these studies work is, let’s say you’re studying group boundaries like nationalism or patriotism. If you present the information like, write an essay on things that are good about America, and then present them with information that might be challenging, like slavery or something like that, then the person is more likely to accept that information because they’ve had the chance to affirm their broader values in a different context.

If I’m somewhere talking to a christian face to face, and we’re getting into a theological debate, I found myself instinctively but then later deliberately using a lot of morally loaded terms when talking to them. Instead of just saying, “you’re wrong on this position, that’s not the most valid argument”, you say things like, “well, I know you believe in integrity, I know you believe in worshiping god with all your heart soul,  and mind. I think integrity requires us to use the same standards to judge our own arguments that we would others.” Now what that’s doing, I’m still making a critique of their position, but I’m affirming some part of their moral identity. I’m not attacking them, “you’re a bad, ignorant person”, I’m saying “you’re a person who wants to live a life of integrity. Here’s an opportunity to have more intellectual integrity.”

45:05 The evidence suggests that if you frame a response within the person’s own worldview as much as possible, that it’s less likely to be alien to them and they can just dismiss it. For example, about the environmental movement becoming more christianized, or rather that the christian left movement, that if you package things in terminology like “creation carer” or “global warming stewardship”, that the persons are more likely to receive that rather than deny that.

The point is that if you frame an issue that is less likely to be threatening, or if you allow the person to affirm other things, like “religion is really great for you, it sounds like it’s done great things, but”, then that makes the person less likely to have a defensive response where they just say “No, I’m not going to listen”

45:54 So the question is, can we do this in a way that preserves our intellectual integrity? Do we have to lie to them, and coddle them and say, “oh this is really great” when we don’t think it is? Or can we frame things and still preserve our own beliefs?

~What follows is the RD guys hashing out their ideas and thoughts, which are interesting. They don’t really agree that it’s a good way to handle arguments with religious people, but have a listen for yourself to get their full thoughts.

What do you think? I want to mull it over some more, but I think affirming someone’s moral identity, appealing to their sense of integrity, would be a good way to go, to not alienate them. But I agree with the guys that winning a tiny little battle isn’t really that satisfying. Although part of me thinks it might help, another part thinks it might be harmful, as the guys mention how people mix pseud0-science with real science readily, which isn’t acceptable. I also don’t believe that science and religion can mix.

It’s a delicate issue. I look forward to hearing what you think about it, if you care to chime in.

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Keep Your Fingers Crossed: How Superstition Improves Performance: New research shows that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve your performance — by increasing your self-confidence. …Volunteers who had their lucky charm did better at a memory game on the computer, and other tests showed that this difference was because they felt more confident. They also set higher goals for themselves. Just wishing someone good luck — with “I press the thumbs for you,” the German version of crossing your fingers — improved volunteers’ success at a task that required manual dexterity.

~Of course, this is still a form of delusion. Everyone tested in the study was superstitious and had a lucky charm. I’d like to see a study or two that involved people who don’t rely on superstition as well. I think if a person understands the delusion of superstition, they will therefore not need the “lucky” feather in their cap. They will have appropriate self-confidence based on their actual abilities. Still, it’s an interesting study.

More Than Half the World’s Population Gets Insufficient Vitamin D, Says Biochemist: Half the people in North America and Western Europe get insufficient amounts of vitamin D. “Elsewhere, it is worse, given that two-thirds of the people are vitamin D-insufficient or deficient. It is clear that merely eating vitamin D-rich foods is not adequate to solve the problem for most adults.” Currently, the recommended daily intake of vitamin D is 200 international units (IU) for people up to 50 years old; 400 IU for people 51 to 70 years old; and 600 IU for people over 70 years old.
“There is a wide consensus among scientists that the relative daily intake of vitamin D should be increased to 2,000 to 4,000 IU for most adults,” Norman says. “A 2000 IU daily intake can be achieved by a combination of sunshine, food, supplements, and possibly even limited tanning exposure.” While there is now abundant data on vitamin D and its benefits, Norman believes there is room for more study.
Because vitamin D is found in very few foods naturally (e.g. fish, eggs and cod liver oil) other foods such as milk, orange juice, some yogurts and some breakfast foods are fortified with it. The fortification levels aim at about 400 IU per day.

Low Vitamin D Levels Associated With Cognitive Decline: An estimated 40 percent to 100 percent of older adults in the United States and Europe are deficient in vitamin D, according to background information in the article. This deficiency has been linked to fractures, various chronic diseases and death. Vitamin D may help prevent the degeneration of brain tissue by having a role in formation of nervous tissue, maintaining levels of calcium in the body, or clearing of beta-amyloid, the substance that forms the brain plaques and tangles associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Editorial: “Vitamin D has been known for many years to play a critical role in skeletal health. More recently, observational studies have reported inverse associations between levels of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the metabolite that best reflects overall vitamin D status, and the risk of a wide range of disease, including cancer, vascular disease, infectious conditions, autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes mellitus and obesity. …It is now time to test the various hypotheses generated by observational studies of vitamin D in adequately designed and conducted randomized controlled trials.”

Team Develops Non-Toxic Oil Recovery Agent: A team of chemists has developed a non-toxic, recyclable agent that can solidify oil on salt water so that it can be scooped up like the fat that forms on the top of a pot of chilled chicken soup. The agent could potentially be used to recover oil lost in the British Petroleum (BP) spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The gelling agent developed by his team is environmentally benign. It uses a sugar-based molecule that can be obtained from renewable sources and is biodegradable. In addition, only a relatively small amount of the agent — five percent of the volume of the oil being recovered — is required for the process, which handles a range of oil from crude to vegetable oil, to work.

Smoking Mind Over Smoking Matter: Surprising New Study Shows Cigarette Cravings Result from Habit, Not Addiction: The new study found that the intensity of cravings for cigarettes had more to do with the psychosocial element of smoking than with the physiological effects of nicotine as an addictive chemical. …Dr. Dar’s studies conclude that nicotine is not addictive as physiological addictions are usually defined. While nicotine does have a physiological role in increasing cognitive abilities such as attention and memory, it’s not an addictive substance like heroin, which creates true systemic and biologically-based withdrawal symptoms in the body of the user, he says. Dr. Dar believes that people who smoke do so for short-term benefits like oral gratification, sensory pleasure and social camaraderie. Once the habit is established, people continue to smoke in response to cues and in situations that become associated with smoking. Dr. Dar believes that understanding smoking as a habit, not an addiction, will facilitate treatment. Smoking cessation techniques should emphasize the psychological and behavioral aspects of the habit and not the biological aspects, he suggests.

Light and Moderate Physical Activity Reduces the Risk of Early Death: A new study has found that even light or moderate intensity physical activity, such as walking or cycling, can substantially reduce the risk of early death. the largest health benefits from light or moderate activity (such as walking and cycling) were in people who do hardly any physical activity at all. Although more activity is better — the benefits of even a small amount of physical activity are very large in the least physically active.
The good news from this study is that you don’t have to be an exercise freak to benefit from physical activity. Just achieving the recommended levels of physical activity (equivalent to 30 minutes daily of moderate intensity activity on 5 days a week) reduces the risk of death by 19%, while 7 hours per week of moderate activity (compared with no activity) reduces the risk of death by 24%. “This research confirms that is not just exercising hard that is good for you but even moderate everyday activities, like walking and cycling, can have major health benefits. Just walking to the shops or walking the children to school can lengthen your life — as well as bringing other benefits for well-being and the environment.”

New Antibacterial Material for Bandages, Food Packaging, Shoes: A new form of paper with the built-in ability to fight disease-causing bacteria could have applications that range from anti-bacterial bandages to food packaging that keeps food fresher longer to shoes that ward off foot odor. …They made sheets of paper from graphene oxide, and then tried to grow bacteria and human cells on top. Bacteria were unable to grow on the paper, and it had little adverse effect on human cells.

A Blood Test for Depression? Researchers evaluated blood gene expression profiles in healthy individuals and patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder, or MDD. They identified a set of seven genes in whole blood that was able to distinguish un-medicated MDD patients from healthy controls. “This is a first, but major step in providing a molecular diagnostic tool for depression.” Although psychiatry already has specific criteria for diagnosing mental health disorders, this type of diagnosis would be unbiased and particularly valuable for those with whom it is more difficult to have a conversation. It may also eventually assist in reducing the stigma associated with mental health problems.

3-D Gesture-Based Interaction System Unveiled: Scientists have developed the next generation non-contact gesture and finger recognition system. The novel system detects hand and finger positions in real-time and translates these into appropriate interaction commands. Furthermore, the system does not require special gloves or markers and is capable of supporting multiple users. This system detects multiple fingers and hands at the same time and allows the user to interact with objects on a display. The users move their hands and fingers in the air and the system automatically recognizes and interprets the gestures accordingly.
Cinemagoers will remember the science-fiction thriller Minority Report from 2002 which starred Tom Cruise. In this film Tom Cruise is in a 3-D software arena and is able to interact with numerous programs at unimaginable speed, however the system used special gloves and only three fingers from each hand.
The FIT prototype provides the next generation of gesture-based interaction far in advance of the Minority Report system. The FIT prototype tracks the user’s hand in front of a 3-D camera. The 3-D camera uses the time of flight principle, in this approach each pixel is tracked and the length of time it takes light to be filmed travelling to and from the tracked object is determined. This allows for the calculation of the distance between the camera and the tracked object.
“A special image analysis algorithm was developed which filters out the positions of the hands and fingers. This is achieved in real-time through the use of intelligent filtering of the incoming data. The raw data can be viewed as a kind of 3-D mountain landscape, with the peak regions representing the hands or fingers.” In addition plausibility criteria are used, these are based around: the size of a hand, finger length and the potential coordinates.
A user study was conducted and found that the system both easy to use and fun. However, work remains to be done on removing elements which confuses the system, for example reflections caused by wristwatches and palms which are positioned orthogonal to the camera.
“With Microsoft announcing Project Natal, it is likely that similar techniques will very soon become standard across the gaming industry. This technology also opens up the potential for new solutions in the range of other application domains, such as the exploration of complex simulation data and for new forms of learning.”

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I know not all of you like to listen to podcasts. So I went through it and transcribed a good chunk of what Luke said in his lecture, the parts that I thought were most important. I have a few thoughts afterward. By the way, I missed the beginning for reasons I can’t remember (this took me a couple of days to make it all make sense) but this is a lecture about Dr. Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory.

Partial transcript:

…This is where we get neurotic about death. It’s the ultimate inferiority complex. Our lifespan is limited. We realize we must die but in striving to overcome that, it creates more problems. We put a lot of energy into denying death.

One way to summarize Becker’s theory: It’s good to have a brain that can plan for the future and be self-aware, but the problem is that when we become scared of our own mortality it sets up a defense against that. Part of the defense involves symbols. We think symbolically and so our symbols set up a barrier. These symbols can be religious, political, symbols of our mastery over the world, symbols of making money, etc.

What Becker thought was that culture itself is a buffer against these threats to our self esteem. We set up our belief in culture and human culture really is an attempt to deal with threats to our own mortality and our self esteem. So first, what is self esteem?

Self esteem is not just a product of you, individually. What Becker thought was that self esteem was something you get a sense of only through other people. So you think of yourself as a valued person who has powers, who can act upon the world, but that is socially validated by parents, siblings, peers, a gradually expanding group of people. This gets more abstract and symbolic as the child grows up. So as a young adult you might latch onto ideologies. For many people this is religion. You join a church and get a sense of what you need to do to be good or bad from those groups too. The good thing is that these groups give you clear guidelines to derive your self esteem.

This can be positive or negative. So if you don’t get positive reinforcement, you’ll look for self esteem and validation in other ways. So this is why people join cults and gangs, etc.

Hero Striving System: whatever you use to seek pride and superiority. Everyone does this in different ways. The system is different for different people but it all boils down to wanting to feel worthwhile.

So cultural symbols can provide a buffer against our mortality fear. How can I transcend death? This is Immortality Striving. It all boils down to “the end is not the end.” This could also be more abstract. Your cultural striving could be symbolic striving against death. You believe your genes and your legacy will pass down even after you die through your children. You create something that will last after your death, like a pyramid, or a lot of money, etc. You’re saying, “I was here, I mattered.” This maintains your self esteem.

Here’s where the problem comes in. If you are so invested in these strivings, in these worldviews to drive your self esteem, that means any threat to those worldviews, to that symbolic system, if they are poked at, is not trivial. This will poke at your self esteem. This person is challenging my worldview. And someone doesn’t even have to be mean to threaten you, because there are different worldviews. Every time you encounter a different person, a different culture, you see the standards of normal differ.

What Becker thought was that being presented with a different worldview is inherently threatening. Because if that guy’s right, he has a different worldview, he seems perfectly happy with his system, and it’s contradictory to my system, there’s a problem for my system.

So a lot of war, strife and prejudice was really about more than just “you’re different, I don’t like you, you have funny gods”, but it’s a threat to our self esteem. So if he’s right, I’m not going to heaven, or there isn’t a heaven.

So an atheist’s world view is very different and therefore very threatening.

People, when confronted with different worldviews have to find a way to deal with it. You can denigrate people (call them stupid); try to convert them to your worldview (proselytize or missionary work) – which validates your worldview and your self esteem; assimilate people – neutralizes the threat by getting them to give up part of it (Native Americans, etc);  accommodation – declaw the other worldview by incorporating some of their elements into ours (like blue jeans, hippy symbols, etc) in a very sterilized sort of way; or annihilate the other worldview – genocide, stamping out everything about the American Indians, even their buffalo, don’t let them speak their own language, etc.

Here’s where Terror Management Theory comes in, with empirical testing. There are 2 main predictions to test:

1. If we threaten someone with mortality thoughts, if we remind them of death, that should result in compensatory response to bolster their worldview.

Mortality Salience Hypothesis (around the 30 minute mark)

2. If we poke at someone’s worldview and suggest that they may not be correct, we should see an increase in their death anxiety. They might become more fearful of their own mortality if their worldviews are challenged in some way.

From the clip of the video, Life and Death: Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality (video on demand), Flight From Death – The Quest for Immortality (dvd)

The first component of TMT states that individuals need to sustain faith in a meaningful worldview.  The second component states that individuals need to feel as though they are value protected members, objects of significance within this worldview. This is self esteem.

Talk of politics and what kinds of leaders people will choose when their mortality feels threatened: (39 minute mark). (there is a polarizing effect)

There is a reciprocal relationship between threats and my own mortality and worldview.

49:00 – more religious studies: Here’s an interesting one. A group of high fundamentalists (believing in biblical literalism) were confronted with contradictions in the bible, they unconsciously thought about their own mortality more.

What does that mean? What’s at stake? It goes a bit deeper than they just want the bible to be perfect and literal, or that they want to preserve a belief in doctrine. When people are defending religious concepts, their worldview is at stake. When someone pokes at their belief and says your belief isn’t true, or here is evidence against your views, it’s more than just a contradiction of these facts, it’s an emotional reaction the person is going to have because that is their ticket to immortality. It raises fears of their own death when those are challenged.

52:30 – creation and evolution worldview studied with similar results. Creationists who had their worldview threatened had higher unconscious death fears.

Implications: why won’t people accept data on evolution? This study would imply that it’s not simple bullheadedness or dogmatism, it cuts deeper than that. From a TMT perspective, these people are defending their worldview. This is what keeps mortality fears in check. If someone comes along and pokes at that worldview it’s not just a matter of intellectual debate anymore, this is an actual threat to their sense of symbolic immortality.

55:00 Dual nature to mortality salience. Studies show that if you show the positive aspects of a religion, for example, then expose them to mortality salience, the people end up defending a worldview that is more accepting. So religion and politics might contain mixed positive and negative messages. If the positive ones are primed and made more active, the person when under threat defends those more too.

So mortality salience isn’t all about doom and gloom and threats. What this would imply is that, it depends on what message is accentuated.

57:20 What about atheists, who don’t have a worldview of literal immortality? Does that mean that we’re immune from the effects of death threats because we’re not expecting to live for the resurrection, or be reincarnated? That is, we are probably not using that as a security blanket. Essentially Becker says it  doesn’t matter – “It doesn’t matter whether their cultural hero system is frankly magical, religious and primitive, or secular, scientific and civilized. It’s still a mythical hero system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of unshakable meaning. Civilized society is a hopeful belief and a protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense, everything that man does is religious.” So there are just as many non-theistic, nonreligious worldviews that can be defended as religious worldviews. For example, the cult of Stalinism and Mao. Or other things people value like human rights, humanism, science: these things are also worldviews that are defended because they give our life meaning.

Somebody might not say, “I’m going to go to heaven, that’s the only thing that would matter to me”, but they might say that they support these values. That’s their ticket to immortality. So this has the same effect. If anyone pokes at the Bill of Rights, messes with Jefferson, or says that science doesn’t matter, to many people who have a naturalistic worldview that would be just as threatening as people who have religious worldviews. So these theories don’t just apply to people who have supernatural or religious worldviews.

1:00:00 What should people do with this information? The denial of death in our culture is particularly strong. So one way to deal with that is to learn to have a worldview that acknowledges mortality on a regular basis. Live more consciously with those reminders everyday, not in a negative or morbid sense, but in a sense that this is part of life. “This is going to happen to me, and I’m going to make life count now, instead of saying I can transcend and cheat death.”

Also, choose ideologies that don’t rely upon the strident defense of “that guy is threatening my worldview, I’m going to wipe him out”. Ideologies don’t have to be threatening to other people. Make the unconscious conscious. Recognize that this is a bulwark to my worldviews, to recognize when you see a commercial, a political package, or a doctrine that this is really more than what it says. It’s actually a worldview defense. If we make that conscious, we can recognize what it is that we’re doing when we do it. So then we can take a step back and say, “I’m going too far. I’m defending myself against my own sense of insignificance by doing this action.”

1:02:13 There are ways you can strive for immortality in a nondestructive way. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to strive against other peoples’ worldviews. Find positive ways to find meaning for your lives through positive ways to defend your worldview; charity, supporting other people, etc.

~

If you’ve made it through the transcript and are still with me, congratulations. This isn’t the most fun topic, and this post is really long. But it does have huge implications and can really help us in understanding our own motivations as well as how other people are dealing with their own fears and thoughts.

I have a followup, also by Dr. Luke Galen and the rest of the Reasonable Doubts crew, that will give us some very practical advice in dealing with people and their dogmatic beliefs. But this post was plenty long enough, so I thought I’d save it for later.

I welcome your thoughts.

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Dark Chocolate Lowers Blood Pressure: For people with hypertension, eating dark chocolate can significantly reduce blood pressure. …There have, however, been conflicting results as to the real-life effects of eating chocolate. We’ve found that consumption can significantly, albeit modestly, reduce blood pressure for people with high blood pressure but not for people with normal blood pressure.” The pressure reduction seen in the combined results for people with hypertension, 5mm Hg systolic, may be clinically relevant — it is comparable to the known effects of 30 daily minutes of physical activity (4-9mm Hg) and could theoretically reduce the risk of a cardiovascular event by about 20% over five years. The researchers are cautious, however, “The practicability of chocolate or cocoa drinks as long-term treatment is questionable.”

Anxiety May Be at Root of Religious Extremism: Anxiety and uncertainty can cause us to become more idealistic and more radical in our religious beliefs. …Anxious conditions caused participants to become more eagerly engaged in their ideals and extreme in their religious convictions. …Researchers found that religious zeal reactions were most pronounced among participants with bold personalities (defined as having high self-esteem and being action-oriented, eager and tenacious), who were already vulnerable to anxiety, and felt most hopeless about their daily goals in life. …A basic motivational process called Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) is responsible. “Approach motivation is a tenacious state in which people become ‘locked and loaded’ on whatever goal or ideal they are promoting. They feel powerful, and thoughts and feelings related to other issues recede.”

Brain Differences Found Between Believers In God And Non-Believers: Compared to non-believers, the religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a portion of the brain that helps modify behavior by signaling when attention and control are needed, usually as a result of some anxiety-producing event like making a mistake. The stronger their religious zeal and the more they believed in God, the less their ACC fired in response to their own errors, and the fewer errors they made. “You could think of this part of the brain like a cortical alarm bell that rings when an individual has just made a mistake or experiences uncertainty. We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors. They’re much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error.” Their findings show religious belief has a calming effect on its devotees, which makes them less likely to feel anxious about making errors or facing the unknown. But Inzlicht cautions that anxiety is a “double-edged sword” which is at times necessary and helpful. “Obviously, anxiety can be negative because if you have too much, you’re paralyzed with fear. However, it also serves a very useful function in that it alerts us when we’re making mistakes. If you don’t experience anxiety when you make an error, what impetus do you have to change or improve your behaviour so you don’t make the same mistakes again and again?”

Honey as an Antibiotic: Scientists Identify a Secret Ingredient in Honey That Kills Bacteria: Bees make a protein that they add to the honey, called defensin-1, which could one day be used to treat burns and skin infections and to develop new drugs that could combat antibiotic-resistant infections. After analysis, the scientists concluded that the vast majority of honey’s antibacterial properties come from defensin-1. This information also sheds light on the inner workings of honey bee immune systems, which may one day help breeders create healthier and heartier honey bees.

Honey Bee Venom May Help Design New Treatments to Alleviate Muscular Dystrophy, Depression and Dementia: Apamin, a natural peptide toxin found in bee venom, is known for its ability to block a type of ion channel that enables a high-speed and selective flow of potassium ions out of nerves. The blocking of these channels in brain causes nerves to become hyperexcitable, producing improved learning that has implications for the treatment of dementia and depression. In addition, injection of apamin improves the symptoms experienced by sufferers of myotonic muscular dystrophy (MD).

How Fast Can Microbes Break Down Oil Washed Onto Gulf Beaches? A new Florida State University study is investigating how quickly the Deepwater Horizon oil carried into Gulf of Mexico beach sands is being degraded by the sands’ natural microbial communities, and whether native oil-eating bacteria that wash ashore with the crude are helping or hindering that process. …”Crude oil is a natural component that constantly seeps out of Gulf of Mexico sediments –obviously in much smaller quantities than those now caused by the drilling accident — so native microbes have evolved that consume this oil and thereby degrade it. If oxygen is present — as it is in the water and in the upper layers of the beach sand — the microbes decompose the oil aerobically (by using oxygen). This degradation process is much faster than the degradation under anaerobic conditions (when no oxygen is available), such as those found in deeper sediment layers of the beach. That’s why at the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, oil can still be found deeply buried in the gravel beach sediments, because anaerobic microbial degradation is slow and, in Alaska, slower still because of the cold climate.”

Bicycling, Brisk Walking Help Women Control Weight; Researchers Call for More Bike-Friendly Environments to Combat Obesity: Premenopausal women who make even small increases in the amount of time they spend bicycling or walking briskly every day decrease their risk of gaining weight. For premenopausal women of any weight, riding a bicycle was effective in helping to maintain weight, and overweight and obese women appeared to benefit the most. The researchers found that among women who did not originally bicycle in 1989 but bicycled in 2005, even a small increase in bicycling time — as little as five minutes each day — helped to control weight. Among the walkers who had increased their daily activity by an average of 30 min/day over the years, only those who walked briskly (≥3 mph) were able to control their weight. Walking slowly (<3 mph) had no effect. …In the U.S., 66% of adults are overweight or obese, 16% of children and adolescents are overweight, and 34% of children and adolescents are at risk of becoming overweight. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicine recommend that every adult accumulate 30 minutes or more of moderate-intensity activity on most, preferably all, days of the week to prevent obesity and improve health.

Nano-Sized Advance Toward Next Big Treatment Era in Dentistry: Scientists are reporting an advance toward the next big treatment revolution in dentistry — the era in which root canal therapy brings diseased teeth back to life, rather than leaving a “non-vital” or dead tooth in the mouth. In a report in the monthly journal ACS Nano, they describe a first-of-its-kind, nano-sized dental film that shows early promise for achieving this long-sought goal.

Complex, Multicellular Life from Over Two Billion Years Ago Discovered: The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago. While studying the paleo-environment of a fossil-bearing site situated near Franceville in Gabon in 2008, El Albani and his team unexpectedly discovered perfectly preserved fossil remains in the 2.1 billion-year-old sediments. They have collected more than 250 fossils to date, of which one hundred or so have been studied in detail. Their morphology cannot be explained by purely chemical or physical mechanisms. These specimens, which have various shapes and can reach 10 to 12 centimeters, are too big and too complex to be single-celled prokaryotes or eukaryotes. This establishes that different life forms co-existed at the start of the Proterozoic, as the specimens are well and truly fossilized living material.

Cocoa Flavanols Improve Vascular and Blood Pressure Measures for Coronary Artery Disease Patients: A new study found that high concentrations of cocoa flavanols decrease blood pressure, improve the health of blood vessels and increase the number of circulating blood-vessel-forming cells in patients with heart disease. The findings indicate that foods rich in flavanols — such as cocoa products, tea, wine, and various fruits and vegetables — have a cardio-protective benefit for heart disease patients. Flavanols are phytonutrient compounds that are found naturally in apples, grapes, tea, cocoa and cherries, which account for the antioxidant effect provided by red wine and green tea. The study found a protective effect from a cocoa drink with 375 mg of flavanols, but according to researchers, a standard or recommended dosage has not yet been defined to achieve optimal health benefit. In the current study, the benefit seen from the two-fold increase in circulating angiogenic cells was similar to that achieved by therapy with statins and with lifestyle changes such as exercise and smoking cessation. The benefit demonstrated with cocoa flavanol therapy occurred in addition to the medical regimen already being taken by study participants. “Our data support the concept that dietary flavanols at the levels provided — in tandem with current medical therapy — are safe, improve cardiovascular function, and increase circulating angiogenic cells, which have previously been shown to correlate positively with long-term cardiovascular outcomes. Long-term trials examining the effects of high-flavanol diets on cardiovascular health and function are warranted, but these early findings help us understand how these compounds impact the function of damaged blood vessels.”

Road Surface Purifies Air by Removing Nitrogen Oxides: Around 1,000 square meters of the road’s surface were covered with air-purifying concrete paving stones. For comparison purposes, another area of 1.000 square meters was surfaced with normal paving stones. The use of air-purifying concrete does not have a major impact on the cost of a road, Brouwers has calculated. Although the stones themselves are 50 per cent more expensive than normal concrete stones, the total road-building costs are only ten per cent higher. Vehicle exhaust gases contain nitrogen oxides (NOx), which cause acid rain and smog. The air‑purifying concrete contains titanium dioxide, a photocatalytic material that removes the nitrogen oxides from the air and converts them with the aid of sunlight into harmless nitrate. The nitrate is then rinsed away by rain. These stones also have another advantage: they break down algae and dirt, so that they always stay clean.

Cell Phone Microscope Poised to Begin Trials in Africa: The lensless imaging platform behind the cell phone microscope is nearing readiness for real world trials, after receiving prestigious awards in the past month from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, National Geographic, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). “We can leverage the fact that eighty percent of the world’s population lives in areas covered by cell phone networks to bridge the gaps left by a lack of health care infrastructure in developing countries.” That lack of health care infrastructure includes not only buildings, but also trained personnel. For telemedicine tools to effectively fill in for hospitals, the devices have to meet several criteria. They must be cheap enough for widespread use in poor areas, be simple enough for a minimally trained person to correctly operate, and be able to easily transmit information over existing cellular networks. Optical microscopes, a key diagnostic tool in hospitals, are too bulky for telemedicine applications. In optical microscopes, one of the elements which limits the miniaturization possibilities and drives up the cost is the lens. Ozcan’s telemedicine microscope avoids both these constraints by capturing an image with a lensless system. This innovative engineering means that the microscope can be miniaturized to the point where it fits on most cell phones, while remaining inexpensive enough for widespread use in developing countries, costing only about ten dollars each. The cell phone microscope is also easy to use, and versatile. Samples (blood smears or saliva) are loaded into single-use chips that easily slide into the side of the microscope. Because the microscope uses the entire detector array to capture an image and has a relatively large aperture, it has a wide imaging field-of-view. Samples do not need to be precisely aligned for images to be captured, and the chance of debris clogging the light source is lessened. Alternate uses of the technology include testing water quality in the field following a disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.

Tibetan Adaptation to High Altitude Occurred in Less Than 3,000 Years: Tibetans have mutations in numerous genes related to how the body uses oxygen. A comparison of the genomes of 50 Tibetans and 40 Han Chinese shows that ethnic Tibetans split off from the Han less than 3,000 years ago and since then rapidly evolved a unique ability to thrive at high altitudes and low oxygen levels. The new findings could steer scientists to till-now unknown genes that play a role in how the body deals with decreased oxygen, and perhaps explain some diseases, including schizophrenia and epilepsy, associated with oxygen deprivation in the womb.

Cross-posted from ZeNeece’s World

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I heard about this on The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, episode 254, from May 26th. If you want to listen to Dr. Steven Novella talk about the three studies, start around the 23:30 minute mark. This segment goes to about 35:20, but the whole episode is good, of course.

The attitudes of parents toward the MMR vaccine and autism: The study concluded that parents had a significant bias toward believing information that they heard from other parents. The parents were mostly affected by their peers, and did not seem to be affected at all by what the scientific evidence said, and they seemed to inherently distrust information that came from the government. Not a surprising result.

Raising a general level of scientific literacy would be the best thing we could do to help this mess we’re in. My fear is that people are so anti-science and anti-intelligence these days that I don’t know how we could go about it, that people aren’t interested in learning anything that goes against their narrow world views. Another thing we could do (as recommended by Steven) is to change regulation so that it’s rational and evidence-based, not based on public opinion.

Popular Appeal vs Scientific Belief study using ESP: It concluded that people are much more likely to accept ESP based on whether they were told it was popular. And, when they were told that science rejects it versus accepts it, they were more likely to accept ESP if they were told scientists reject it. So they went against the scientific consensus.

The Rogues talked briefly about Social Norming, where you use peer pressure of contemporaries instead of scare tactics from authority figures on people (teens, youth, etc) to try to get kids or people to not do something harmful, like smoking or drugs. They also mentioned Scared Straight which didn’t work. People are influenced by social pressure, not rational arguments.

The last study (no working link): If people were presented with scientific evidence which dis-confirmed something they already believed, their response to that generally was to conclude that science itself is untrustworthy. Not just the science that they are being presented (in the study), but the scientific method in general. Therefore confronting people with tightly held beliefs with the scientific evidence, not only does that not work, it turns them off to science in general, even about unrelated topics. It has a huge negative influence.

A related study found that if you tell somebody, “here’s a myth and the myth is wrong”, three weeks later, a significant percentage of people remember the myth as being correct.

To me, science is so amazing and wonderful and exciting. Sure, the daily experiments can be dry and tedious, but it’s all worth it when the results come in. Discovery, observation, exploration, and the creation of new technologies and other neat things that improve our lives or somehow make life better in this universe, well that’s all just fantastic. Sure, we have to be careful to keep in mind that human beings are doing the science and can make mistakes. But that’s where peer review comes in, and other scientists verifying experiments, results and evidence.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the best thing we have to understand the universe and get the most out of our precious time in this world. I wish I could convey the excitement I get just walking through my yard, which I’ve seen for almost 6 years, when I find a new insect or see some plant that wasn’t there last year. That’s just mere observation. That’s not even experimentation or research, and yet still it’s exciting (ok, I’m a science geek, but that’s compliment, not an insult!)

But I guess if you don’t have science and the idea that the universe is a marvelous place in your mind, then how can we interest you? How can we make science exciting and fascinating and part of everyone’s lives? How can we show people that they use the scientific method in some form in their daily lives? Is there any way to turn things around and make science and scientific discovery fun and cool and exciting?

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