January 8, 2009
Category: Psychology • Social science
Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research Picture the scene - you sit in a room with two other people, one white and one black, waiting for a psychological test. As the black person leaves to use their mobile phone, they bump the knee of the white person on their way out. While they're gone, the white person turns to you and says, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that." How would you feel? Would you be shocked? Angry? Indifferent? And would you want to work with that person later?
800px-Yes_it_does.jpg This was the scenario that Kerry Kawakami from York University used to try and understand the state of race relations in 21st century America. Kawakami found that people are very bad at predicting their responses to racism. They may claim to shun hypothetical racists or be upset by their actions but when confronted by such people and events in reality, their predictions turn out to be dramatic overestimates of their actual feelings. This discrepancy may help to explain why racism is such a widely condemned but remarkably prevalent part of modern society.
Kawakami recruited 120 volunteers of various races (apart from black), sat each one in a room with two actors - one white, one black - and watched as the white student reacted to having their knee bumped. In some trials, they said nothing; in others, they said, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that," and in the most extreme cases, they said, "Clumsy nigger." When the black partner returned, all three were asked to fill in a survey about their current state of mind and the real volunteer was asked to pick one of the other two to help them complete a word task.
Only half of the volunteers - the "experiencer" group - actually sat through these events. The other half - the "forecasters" - were only told about it and asked to put themselves in the shoes of an experiencer. Kawakimi found that their forecasts of their feelings and reactions bore little resemblance to the way the experiencers actually behaved.
Expectedly, forecasters said that they would be very upset by either racist slur. In reality, the experiencers were largely indifferent, and those who heard negative remarks were actually no more distressed than those whose partners hadn't said anything at all. Likewise, only about 10-20% of the forecasters said that they would choose the white person as their partner over the black one but a much higher 63% of the experiencers actually did so. If anything, they were more likely to pick their white associate if they made a racist slur than if they said nothing.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 2:00 PM • 0 Comments
January 7, 2009
Category: Reptiles • Sex and reproduction
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Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research For humans and other mammals, sex is neatly determined by the X and Y chromosomes. If you have a Y you are male, and without it you are female. Reptiles however, use a variety of strategies, and the mammalian X/Y system is just one of them.
Bearded dragons use two methods of sex determination.
In some species, the female is the one with different chromosomes, in this case Z and W, and the male has two Zs. And some reptiles ignore sex chromosomes altogether. For them, an individual's sex is determined by the temperature that their eggs were incubated at.
Scientists had long believed that these strategies were mutually exclusive with each species choosing one of the other.
But Alexander Quinn and colleagues form the University of Canberra have found that an Australian lizard, the central bearded dragon (Pogona vitticeps), flouts this rule. It has become the first animal known to use two separate methods to determine the sex of individuals.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 9:30 AM • 15 Comments
January 6, 2009
Category: Personal
I'm honoured to have been included in this year's OpenLab - a compilation of 50 of the best posts from the last year, taken from a diverse array of science blogs.
My piece on Space Invader DNA has made the cut (although not as ironically so as Abel's vasectomy liveblogging meisterwork). I was always quite proud of this - it's a great story, it deals with horizontal gene transfer, which is a pet-favourite topic of mine, and the scientist who did the work actually commented and took questions from other commenters! And already, the extra attention from the piece has drawn the notice of a creationist moron. Huzzah!
Incidentally, I also helped to judge the competition (no, not my own piece!) and I want to extend a hearty thanks to Jenny Rohn, who coordinated the whole process and made it run like a well-oiled machine. The quality of the entries I read was really high and the final product should earn a worthy spot on your bookshelf.
Posted by Ed Yong at 9:30 AM • 4 Comments
January 5, 2009
Category: Animals • Evolution • Reptiles
Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research One hundred and seventy-four years ago, Charles Darwin first set foot on the Galapagos Islands aboard the Beagle. Since then, the islands and the unique species they house have been a source of inspiration for many an evolutionary biologist. Even so, it is gratifying to see that even now, on the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, the Galapagos have not yet finished yielding their secrets.
Yellowpink.jpg During Darwin's five-week stint on the Galapagos, he observed two types of iguana. One was a marine version that, uniquely for lizards, swam and fed in the ocean, and the other was a cactus-eating landlubber, which we now know to be two separate species. But Darwin's adventures never took him as far north as Volcan Wolf, the northernmost volcano of the large Isabela Island. And that's why he never described the distinctive pink land iguana that lives only on that volcano.
To be fair to Darwin, even scientists who actually visited Volcan Wolf failed to spot the pink land iguana for the better part of a century. Despite its striking pink head and black-striped flanks, it was only discovered when park rangers accidentally stumbled across it in 1986. They must have thought that they were the victims of some elaborate practical joke.
Atheists will no doubt chuckle at the existence of a pink animal that's so hard to find it may as well be invisible. The fact that it lives in the Galapagos of all places is just the icing on the irony-cake. But I digress.
The elusive iguana has since been christened the "rosada" form, after the Spanish word for "pink". And according to Gabriele Gentile, it's a species in its own right, genetically distinct from the more common yellow versions. Gentile's team of international scientists from Italy, the USA and Ecuador have analysed the pink lizard's genes to show that it is a relict, older even than many of the current Galapagos Islands themselves.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 5:00 PM • 4 Comments
January 3, 2009
Category: Psychology • Social science
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Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research
When battles are waged over values and ideologies, you can't bribe or reason your way to peace. That's the stark message from a new psychological study of people in the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The fight over the land of Israel/Palestine has raged for over a century and the peace process has been difficult, lengthy and often stagnant. All the while, lives continue to be lost in skirmishes and suicide attacks, as the past weeks have painfully demonstrated. Perhaps it's time to put the situation under some scientific scrutiny.
A huge number of modern conflicts are fuelled by differences in opinions and beliefs, rather than grabs for power or land (at least on the ground level). Even if the foundation of a dispute is not initially a moral issue, it can quickly become one. Land, for example, is a solid resource that can be completely transformed into something much more by adding the word 'holy' in front of it.
In these situations, people tend to forgo a rational weighing up of pros and cons in favour or making decisions with an intuitive moral compass. Jeremy Ginges and colleagues from the New School for Social Research studied the effects of this switch against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Through a series of psychological experiments, they worked out that in these circumstances, the power of symbols is far greater than that of currency or logic.
They surveyed over 1,800 from three different groups: Jewish Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian students (half of whom were members of Hamas or related organisations). Ginges asked the participants to consider hypothetical scenarios where they would have to compromise over issues that were particularly relevant to them. The Israeli settlers were asked about their willingness to exchange their land for peace, which would involved them having to relocate. The Palestinian refugees had to consider giving up their right to return to their former homelands. And the Palestinian students were asked to consider Palestine relinquishing sovereignty over Jerusalem.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 10:01 AM • 7 Comments
January 2, 2009
Category: Animals • Climate change • Conservation • Corals • Invertebrates
Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research It's not a good time for corals. Last year, a third of coral species went straight into the endangered lists after being assessed for the first time, and it looks like 2009 isn't going to bring any reprieves to the doom and gloom. In particular, a new study provides hard evidence that the mightiest of coral super-colonies - the Great Barrier Reef - is in trouble.
Like reefs across the world, the Great Barrier Reef faces many threats, including pollution, physical destruction, predatory starfish and perhaps most importantly, the many effects of climate change. Glenn De'ath and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Marine Science have found that the corals among this greatest of reefs are starting to yield under these multiple assaults, adding new material to their limestone skeletons at ever-declining rates. The Reef's growth is slowing to a worrying degree, the likes of which are unprecedented in at least the last 400 years.
De'ath's group focused on one group of corals called Porites. They are a widespread and important group, and like most of their kin, they build reefs by laying down external skeletons of aragonite, a version of calcium carbonate or limestone. Like trees, they have annual growth rings that reveal how quickly they expand. And because coral growth depends on a variety of environmental conditions, the skeletons of the Porites provided a potted history of environmental changes, recorded in unchanging limestone.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 8:38 AM • 2 Comments
January 1, 2009
Category: Animals • Bacteria • Insects • Invertebrates • Medicine & health
Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research The mosquito Aedes aegypti sucks the blood of people from all over the tropics, and exchanges it for the virus that causes dengue fever - a disease that afflicts 40 million people every year. The mosquito has proven to be a tough adversary and efforts to drive it from urban settings have generally failed in the long-term. So how do you fight such an accomplished parasite? Simple - use a better parasite. In fact, try the most successful one in the world, a bacterium called Wolbachia.
Lolbachia1.jpg Wolbachia's success rests on two traits. First, it targets the most diverse group of animals on the planet, the insects, infecting the majority of species and about one in eight individuals. Second, it spreads like wildfire by using several extremely self-serving strategies, all of which screw over male insects in some way or other. Wolbachia passes from one generation to the next in the eggs of infected females. But without similar access to sperm, males are useless to it and has evolved a number of ways of dealing with that. Sometimes it kills males outright before they're even born; sometimes it turns them into females.
In other subtler cases, it ensures that infected males can only mate successfully with infected females. If they try to breed with uninfected ones, the embryos die at an early stage of development. This strategy is known as " cytoplasmic incompatibility" and while it's still unclear how it works, there's no doubt that it does. It gives infected females (who can mates with any male they like) a competitive advantage over uninfected females, who are restricted to uninfected males. With this upper hand, massive swathes of a given population eventually become Wolbachia-carriers.
Conor McMeniman and colleagues from the University of Queensland have found a way to use that to their advantage. They have found a strain of Wolbachia that can halve the lifespan of the Aedes mosquito and that induces complete cytoplasmic incompatibility. If introduced into a natural population, it should invade with tremendous zest.
Shortening a mosquito's lifespan may seem like a flimsy victory, but McMeniman recognises it as an important one. Only old mosquitoes really pose a threat to human health because it takes about two weeks for an individual to become infectious after it first sucks up a mouthful of infected blood. The virus first need to reproduce in its gut before travelling back to its salivary glands, where it can spread further. Because mozzies are short-lived anyway, most die before they reach that point, which means that any technique that slashes their already limited lifespan will have a huge impact on controlling the diseases they carry.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 5:12 PM • 6 Comments
December 30, 2008
Category: Brain & Behavior • Life Science
Fireworks.jpg Phew. Another year almost over and it's been a really good one. This time last year, I was still blogging at Wordpress, and it was only in late February that I beamed aboard the mighty ScienceBlog mothership. It's been a great experience and all in all, I've managed to rack up about 190 posts on new research (excluding reposts and random stuff), over 1,500 comments and over 400,000 page views in a year. Elsewhere, I published a book based on this blog, I wrote about 2% of another book called " Defining Moments in Science", and I wrote three features and several news pieces for New Scientist.
And given all that, it's nice to take some time for reflection and with that in mind, I'm going to continue a tradition that I started last year - choosing some of the favourite stories from 2008. This list has no pretensions to be a catalogue of the year's biggest stories or its most important breakthroughs. It's just what I personally deemed to be the most interesting and just plain, downright cool.
So, without further ado, here are my picks. Once again, a massive thanks to anyone who read, commented on, or linked to this site over the last year. I hope you'll join me for 2009.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 5:25 PM • 3 Comments
Category: Animals • Evolution • Fish
Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research In the twilit waters of the deep ocean, beneath about 1000m of water, swims the brownsnout spookfish (Dolichopteryx longipes). Like many other deep-sea fish, the spookfish is adapted to make the most of what little light penetrates to these depths, but it does so with some of the strangest eyes in the animal kingdom.
For a start, each eye is split into two connected parts, so the animal looks like it actually has four. One half points upwards and gives the spookfish a view of the ocean above. The other points downwards into the abyss below and it's this half that makes the spookfish unique. The eyes of all other back-boned animals use a lens to divert the path of incoming light and focus it onto a specific point of the retina. But the spookfish's downward-facing eye uses mirrors instead, forgoing a lens in favour of hundreds of tiny crystals that collect and focus light.
This bizarre animal was first described 120 years ago, but no one had discovered its reflective eyes until now because a live animal had never been caught. Hans-Joachim Wagner from Tubingen University changed all of that by netting a live specimen off the Pacific island of Tonga.
The spookfish's eyes are similar in structure to many other fish that swim in the ocean's twilight zone, where darkness is heavy but not quite total. The main part of each eye is tube-shaped and points to the surface, like a vertically mounted telescope. In photos A and B below, this upward-facing half has a yellow-orange shine because the camera's flash has bounced off a reflective layer at the back of the eye.
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Posted by Ed Yong at 8:00 AM • 1 Comments
