Category: Science

The other Chinese bug plaguing the country

The spotted lanternfly is native to China and has been spotted in the American east coast as early as 2014 but is recently more rapidly spreading (theoretically by people moving due to Covid and unknowingly transporting lanternfly egg masses with them). Local governments are asking citizens to kill and report it to wildlife if they see it as it is a danger to ecosystems outside of Chyyna, India and Vietnam.

Technically, this is a depiction of Mothra, the Godzilla movie monster, but it also serves as a warning of how bug problems can get out of hand

I know you’ve never heard of this, because I haven’t, and that means you probably haven’t – so if you’re wondering what this thing is:
Although its called a “fly” and looks like a moth, the spotted lanternfly is a hopping tree bug. It’s considered invasive and dangerous because it deposits “sticky honeydew secretions” that then grow mold that prevents plants from photosynthesizing and causing the plants to die according to USA Today. This makes it dangerous to trees and cash crops, marking it as a threat to orchard, grape, and logging industries.

This “stomp to kill” order is no joke. Watch how local government twitter accounts request you to assassinate these things as it creeps from the far east coast into the midwest:

Then it appeared in a Kansas students entomology entry at a state fair display (the student correctly identified the insect, by the way). One of the fair’s judges was familiar with the insect — and the requirement of reporting it to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Story developing. Godzilla on standby.

Electric vehicles are cool but they’re not the environment savers people think

Just a friendly reminder (and I do mean friendly. no one should be angry or jerky about this) that “clean energy” uses dirty energy. Specifically: electric cars use fossil fuels…

In case you are wondering: yes, coal is a fossil fuel…

Some just try to fool the public about this but others acknowledge the dirty fuel use in clean energy but claim that vehicles reduce carbon dioxide emissions cuz they use less fossil fuel than burning gas in a vehicle engine to make it go, but… the data isn’t conclusive that that is true:

The Greenpeace / Transport & Environment report’s research states that while PHEV manufacturers cite official test results showing CO2 emissions averaging 44g per km, they actually emit more like 117g per km in real use, which is much closer to the value for petrol and diesel cars of 164-7g per km. This is because the true emissions of a PHEV depend on how you drive it. If you don’t plug it in, a PHEV behaves like a conventional hybrid, except with about 200kg more batteries, which are being lugged around for no reason. Also, if you drive a PHEV fast, the fossil-fuel engine will fire up anyway, negating the emissions benefits of battery power.

Based on these findings, Greenpeace is arguing that car manufacturers are simply using PHEVs as an excuse not to stop manufacturing polluting internal combustion engines, and that this vehicle type should be banned alongside pure petrol and diesel in a decade or so as a result. Their arguments are not completely lacking in merit. Lots of people will have purchased a PHEV for the reduced tax due to their low official CO2 emissions, and once they’ve bought the car don’t care about driving it in a way that actually produces this ecological outcome. Both the manufacturers and owners can pretend to adopt green behaviour without actually bothering to do so.

“Fat but fit” feel-good propaganda is hurting people

There’s a cultural trend that soothes people’s (lets face it: mostly women’s) image of themselves despite being terribly overweight that underneath it all, they are still healthy. As if carrying sacks of fat around their body is just a personal quality like a bump in your nose or a wide pelvic bone and has nothing to do with the actual health of that person. So take THAT, societal/medical standards! You can’t use giving-a-crap-about-me-killing-myself as an excuse to point out that that’s exactly what I’m doing anymore because “despite being fat, I’m still healthy” and so on. Science even backs it up, they say, so boo-ya.


I’m not making fun of the person in this stock photo courtesy of the UK Daily Mail & Ocean/Corbis because cardio exercise is exactly how to aid a diet in burning off and shedding fat – but maybe more than a half-pound weight would be a little more ambitious? maybe? Actually forget it – do whatever works for you. Sorry I said anything. I just couldn’t help but notice that homegirl is lifting a Q-tip in the photo and couldn’t hold back the constructive criticism. 

Of course, it doesn’t, but the hope that it does comes from research that some suggested showed “metabolically healthy obesity” – which describes an obese person who doesn’t have “obese people problems” like insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Good for you if that’s the case – but carrying excess fat on your frame still hurts you, bro – and we’re not saying so to make you feel bad – it’s important that it is known and avoided.

Reality isn’t shaming unless you make it so, and denying reality to make yourself feel better about over-indulging is not a net help to your well being. Stop kidding yourself.

But the lack of metabolic problems, also know as metabolic syndrome, may not mean that the lucky few “healthy” obese people are doing fine in the long run, according to a new study published in the European Heart Journal. In the review, researchers looked data linking coronary heart disease and bodyweight from a 12-year study on more than 7,500 people. They discovered that people classified as “unhealthy”—those with three or more markers like high blood pressure, waist size over 37″, blood glucose abnormalities—had twice the risk of CHD, no matter their weight.

People in the “healthy” column, however, showed a big contrast between those of normal weight and the overweight. Overweight subjects (BMI 25–30), had a 26% higher risk of CHD, while the obese (BMI over 30) had a 28% higher risk of heart problems.

Your heart can only push out so much blood before it collapses under the stress you’re putting on it just because sugar is delicious. Joe Rogan (or maybe it was someone on his show, idk, so forgive the loose credit giving here) phrases it well by pointing out the costs you’re giving yourself just for “mouth pleasure”. The allure is so great that the mentality becomes “how could something so good be bad?” and the excuses come rolling in to justify packing pounds. Break that mental cycle, bruh. Your heart can’t handle it.

Being overweight leads to greater risk of heart disease.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham said doctors should no longer use the term ‘healthy obesity’ to reassure overweight people that they have no signs of type 2 diabetes or heart disease.

Dr Rishi Caleyachetty, who is to be presented today at the European Congress on Obesity in Portugal, said: ‘The idea of being healthily obese is a myth.’

His team found that excess fat increased the risk of heart disease by half – even when blood pressure and cholesterol levels are normal, made a stroke more likely and almost doubled the risk of heart failure.

Research shows that hookah’s are smokey murder machines

I’ve always been wildly skeptical of hookahs only because my dopey Los Angeles friends who don’t appear to be making the most health conscious of choices frequent these hookah lounges so much so the patterns and associations to me connect it to being a poor risk/reward indulgence despite my not knowing anything about the actual science of how it even works.

Turns out hookahs are filthy nasty body killing death pipes or something.

Sounds over-stated, especially after my fair disclosure of my existing confirmation-bias, but how else am I supposed to read the findings that 1 hookah session has 25 times more tar than a cigarette?

There’s a common misconception that hookahs aren’t very dangerous. A recent Rutgers University study revealed that 24 percent of both smokers and nonsmokers under age 25 believe hookahs— shared pipes that allow users to inhale tobacco smoke that’s been passed through a water basin—are safer than cigarettes. But according to a new study from the journal Public Health Reports, this is an even bigger myth than thought.

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that one hookah session produces 2.5 times more nicotine, 10 times more carbon monoxide, 25 times more tar, and 125 times more smoke than a single cigarette.

I didn’t even know how hookahs work but it sounds horrifying:

He says studies indicate that more oxygen being pulled through the Hookah bowl could be causing the release of more toxins.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in recent years, smoking Hookah is becoming more popular among young people, with more U.S. high school students saying they smoked Hookah than cigarettes within a 30 day window.

“It’s much more palatable, it’s easier,” says Dr. Primack, referring to Hookah’s appeal.

The process of smoking from a Hookah pipe starts with a hot coal, which is placed over tin foil that heats up dense and often flavored tobacco. The smoke then travels down a stem into a bowl, where it is pulled upwards through water and then through a hose to the consumer. Hookah pipes are also known as “Water Pipes.”

Repent, you hookah hooligans. Cut the habit and find a new way to socially enjoy something.

 

Non-Surprise: Your house cat really wants to kill you

Science shows what those of use not blinded by the allure of moving-stuffed-animals already knew:

The study is entitled “Personality Structure in the Domestic Cat (Felis silvestris catus), Scottish Wildcat (Felis silvestris grampia), Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), Snow Leopard (Panthera uncia), and African Lion (Panthera leo)” (PDF). Truly, I love these academic titles.

The researchers set out to discover whether there were any consistent similarities in personality between these disparate types of felines.

What they found was that each had three dominant personality types. The Scottish wildcat, for example, had at its core dominance, agreeableness and self-control. Which is not dissimilar to many of my Scottish friends.

How is this all not totally obvious and easily observable? –

In order to better understand cat personalities, cat experts rated a number of animals’ behaviors using the “Big-Five” human personality traits:

1- Openness to Experience
2- Conscientiousness
3- Extraversion/Introversion
4- Agreeableness
5- Neuroticism

According to the research, domestic house cats and African lions have similar personality structures. Both have strong characteristics related to dominance, impulsiveness and neuroticism.

If you have ever thought your cat was anxious, insecure, tense, suspicious, or aggressive toward you, you aren’t making it up. If they were bigger, your cats would probably consider killing you.

But the news isn’t all bad: just like lions, house cats are also playful, excitable and impulsively hilarious.

Thirst for approval makes you a weirdo

No one trusts people who try too hard to be liked because we all naturally assume they’re up to no good. Everyone is drawn to people who appear not to care about their acceptance for the same principals. I realized this in 8th grade when I literally wrote analysis down in a notebook one night trying to compare myself to the cool kids in my class and figure out why the hell despite my best efforts for the past 3 years I had completely failed to advance into that group. After realizing the difference between “I want people to like me” and “I’m not at all worried about whether or not people like me, I’ll just do me” I felt like I had wasted a significant portion of my life, but that is only because I was a dumb teenager. Many people continue to not realize and notice this into adulthood and actually *do* end up wasting precious years and missing out on experiences and relationships because of the lack of self awareness.

This aspect of human psychology is articulated well in an interview in the Washington Post with behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan about how scarcity and insecurity lead people to make more desperate decisions because… they are more desperate.

The title is “Being poor changes your thinking about everything” but that thesis seems too obvious to most people I think. Instead, I find his articulations about behavioral reactions in regards to scarcity to be more enlightening when applied to social interactions. Mainly that most lonely people don’t actually lack social skills, they just find themselves in lonely situations that activate survival instincts that make them offputting and weird because they’re trying so hard to make people like them. This traps them in isolation because their response to their loneliness is literally perpetuating their loneliness…

Another tragic example concerns lonely people. The lonely are interesting because it’s so tempting to say: “Oh, lonely people. Yeah, those are just losers, or whatever. Those are people who can’t make friends.” Actually, the data suggests that the vast majority of lonely people don’t lack any social skills at all. It’s just they found themselves in lonely situations.

You move to a new town and you don’t really know anybody. How do you meet people? It’s hard to meet people. The longer that persists, now the longer you’ve been lonely, and then ‑‑ this is the key part with the lonely and the busy and the money and the poor ‑‑ now that you’re in that state, your behavior changes, and the way your behavior changes seems to keep you in that state.

There are, I think, a few ways in which your behavior changes. Scarcity draws a lot of attention to itself. That’s the key finding that I think motivates everything. When you’re experiencing scarcity, your mind automatically focuses on that thing. That focus brings benefits, which we talk about. But it has some costs, too, which help create the scarcity trap.

One cost, for the lonely: If you want to be interesting, the one thing you shouldn’t do is really focus on the fact that “I want this person to like me.” That’s going to make you very uninteresting. But the lonely, they just can’t help but focus on that.

There’s this beautiful study in which subjects speak into a microphone and they either think that someone else listening to them, or they think they’re just talking. Among the non-lonely, there’s very little difference in how third parties would rate subjects’ responses. A third party rates subjects as equally interesting in both conditions. Yet lonely people become less interesting when they think someone is listening. It’s sort of a choking effect. That’s one kind of scarcity trap.

More people should learn this about themselves and others.

Research Saves

Not a hard choice. The rat is cute and that is it’s entire worth to the world. The girl has more to offer, even if you don’t believe in an inherent or divinely given worth to humans.

It’s not all lab rats of course. There is testing on beagles and chimps and other mammals. But if it saves human lives, there is no argument.

You want passion and truth? Okay. Teller and I would personally kill EVERY chimp in the world, with our bare hands, to save ONE street junkie…with AIDS.

-Penn Jillette

Good News: “Minority Report” (Movie) reality might be coming soon

Alternate Headline: Scientific Study suggests precognition may be possible.

If you never saw Minority Report, it’s a Tom Cruise movie where he plays a cop who arrests people before they commit the crime they’re being arrested for based on reports printed from data mined from 3 physics kept in a pool. yeay!

In one experiment subjects, all of whom were students, were briefly shown a word list and then asked to recall as many as they could. Later, they were asked to copy a list of words randomly selected from the same list by a computer. The surprising result of this experiment was that in the recall section of the experiment the subjects recalled at a significantly higher rate words they were later asked to type, even though they had no way of knowing which words would be on the list.

In another experiment subjects were shown images of two curtains alongside each other on a computer screen and told one was concealing a picture (sometimes of an erotic nature), while the other concealed a blank screen. They were then asked to click on the one they “felt” was hiding the picture. When the curtain was selected it was opened to reveal what was behind it. This was repeated 36 times for each subject, and the picture positions were computer-selected and random.

In the 100 sessions subjects consistently selected the correct curtain 53.1 percent of the time for the erotic pictures, significantly over the 50 percent expected by pure chance. For the non-erotic pictures, the success rate was only 49.8 percent.

In a third experiment Bem reversed a common test in which subjects are shown one of the words “Ugly” or “Beautiful,” and then shown a picture of something unpleasant (such as a snake), or pleasant (such as a puppy or kitten), and the subject is asked to quickly decide if the picture is pleasant or unpleasant. In Bem’s reversal experiment the subject was shown the picture first and was required to respond as fast as possible and was then shown the word, which was randomly selected by the computer.

Whatever Happened to the Hole in the Ozone Layer?

As Lewis Black says: “We’ve got men, we’ve got rockets, we’ve got Saran Wrap… FIX IT”.

All I heard about via the environment in the 90s was “the hole in the ozone layer”, the hole, the HOLE! Well, its not actually a hole, its an area that is thinner than the rest, and its not actually a big deal apparently since no one says a damn word about it anymore. LiveScience says the size of the hole has stabilized.

Yes, the ozone has thinned over the North Pole and is expected to keep doing so for 15 years due to “due to weather-related phenomena that scientists still cannot fully explain” (thats helpful). But theres good news:

Since the 1989 Montreal Protocol banned the use of ozone-depleting chemicals worldwide, the ozone hole has stopped growing. Additionally, the ozone layer is blocking more cancer-causing radiation than any time in a decade because its average thickness has increased, according to a 2006 United Nations report. Atmospheric levels of ozone-depleting chemicals have reached their lowest levels since peaking in the 1990s, and the hole has begun to shrink.

The most hilarious part for the hippies freaking out over Global Warming is that the article says recent studies show that the size of the ozone hole affects the global temperature…but not in the way you probably think…

“Closing the ozone hole actually speeds up the melting of the polar ice caps, according to a 2009 study from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research”.

bahaha. awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A

“The brain of an addicted smoker treats nicotine as if it is essential for survival.”

The summary: The brain of an addicted smoker treats nicotine as if it is essential for survival. Genetic traits may predispose some smokers to stronger addiction. Most smokers try to quit unaided, resulting in a high failure rate.

If you smoke, no one needs to tell you how bad it is. So why haven’t you quit? Why hasn’t everyone?

Because smoking feels good. It stimulates and focuses the mind at the same time that it soothes and satisfies. The concentrated dose of nicotine in a drag off a cigarette triggers an immediate flood of dopamine and other neurochemicals that wash over the brain’s pleasure centers. Inhaling tobacco smoke is the quickest, most efficient way to get nicotine to the brain.

“I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to give it up,” said Dr. David Abrams, an addiction researcher at the National Institutes of Health. “It’s more difficult to get off nicotine than heroin or cocaine.”

Smoking “hijacks” the reward systems in the brain that drive you to seek food, water and sex, Dr. Abrams explained, driving you to seek nicotine with the same urgency. “Your brain thinks that this has to do with survival of the species,” he said.