Blue whales can weigh over a thousand times more than a human being. That’s a lot of extra cells, and as those cells grow and divide, there’s a small chance that each one will mutate. A mutation can be harmless, or it can be the first step towards cancer. As the descendants of a precancerous cell continue to divide, they run a risk of taking a further step towards a full-blown tumor. To some extent, cancer is a lottery, and a 100-foot blue whale has a lot more tickets than we do.

Aleah Caulin of the University of Pennsylvania and Carlo Maley of the University of California, San Francisco, have done some calculations of the risk of cancer for blue whales thanks to their huge size. We don’t know a lot about cancer in blue whales, because blue whale oncology wards would be a wee bit awkward for everyone involved. So Caulin and Maley extrapolated up from humans.

About thirty percent of all people will get cancer by the end of their life. (…)

Blue whales do get cancer, but it’s hard to believe that they get it at the rates that come out of Caulin and Maley’s calculations. Blue whales are known to live well over a century. Bowhead whales have reached at least 211 years. If blue whales really did get cancer as fast as the models would suggest, they ought to be extinct.

The failure of the model means that blue whales must have some secrets for fighting cancer. (…)

The mere existence of whales is the most glaring example of what biologists call Peto’s Paradox. There seems to be no correlation between body size and cancer rates among animal species. We run a thirty percent risk of getting cancer over our life time. So do mice, despite the fact that they’re 1000 times smaller than we are.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

related { When the end of life comes later in life, the consequences are often unexpected — and often painful. | The Walrus }

People with full bladders make better decisions.

Researchers discovered the brain’s self-control mechanism provides restraint in all areas at once. They found people with a full bladder were able to better control and “hold off” making important, or expensive, decisions, leading to better judgement. (…)

Dr Mirjam Tuk, who led the study, said that the brain’s “control signals” were not task specific but result in an “unintentional increase” in control over other tasks.

“People are more able to control their impulses for short term pleasures and choose more often an option which is more beneficial in the long run,” she said. (…)

They concluded that people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger rewards later.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading | Thanks Tim! }

{ Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Eleven, new exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery | T Magazine | full story }

{ MIT Scientist Captures Son’s First 90,000 Hours and First Words on Video, Graphs It }

A Gömböc (pronounced [ˈɡømbøts], simplified to Gomboc) is a convex three-dimensional homogeneous body which, when resting on a flat surface, has just one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium. Its existence was conjectured by Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold in 1995 and proven in 2006 by Hungarian scientists Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi. (…)

The balancing properties of the Gömböc are associated with the “righting response”, their ability to turn back when placed upside down, of shelled animals such as turtles and beetles.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Thanks to James T. }

Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.

{ Vanity Fair | full story }

New findings provide further evidence that abstract concepts are grounded in sensory metaphors. Just as holding a heavy object makes us perceive an issue as being more important,  and physical warmth makes us perceive an interpersonal relationship as also being warm, so does touching something tough or tender influence our mental representation of social categories such as sex.  

{ Neurophilosophy | Continue reading }

photo { Jill Freedman }

Researchers looked at whether simple restoration of justice (“an eye for an eye”) is enough for us or if we also want the offender to understand just what they did wrong.  (…)

They concluded that simple equalization of suffering is not enough—we also want the offender to know just why they were punished (for their bad or mean-spirited behavior).

{ Keene Trial Consulting | Continue reading }

It’s about Professor Daryl Bem and his cheerful case for ESP.

According to “Feeling the Future,” a peer-reviewed paper the APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology will publish this month, Bem has found evidence supporting the existence of precognition. (…)

Responses to Bem’s paper by the scientific community have ranged from arch disdain to frothing rejection. And in a rebuttal—which, uncommonly, is being published in the same issue of JPSP as Bem’s article—another scientist suggests that not only is this study seriously flawed, but it also foregrounds a crisis in psychology itself. (…)

Over seven years, Bem measured what he considers statistically significant results in eight of his nine studies. In the experiment I tried, the average hit rate among 100 Cornell undergraduates for erotic photos was 53.1 percent. (Neutral photos showed no effect.) That doesn’t seem like much, but as Bem points out, it’s about the same as the house’s advantage in roulette. (…)

“It shouldn’t be difficult to do one proper experiment and not nine crappy experiments,” the University of Amsterdam’s Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, co-author of the rebuttal, says. (…)

Before PSI, Bem made his biggest splash in the nonacademic world with a politically incorrect but weirdly compelling theory of sexual orientation. In 1996, he published “Exotic Becomes Erotic” in Psychological Review, arguing that neither gays nor straights are “born that way”—they’re born a certain way, and that’s what eventually determines their sexual preference.

“I think what the genes code for is not sexual orientation but rather a type of personality,” he explains. According to the EBE theory, if your genes make you a traditionally “male” little boy, a lover of sports and sticks, you’ll fit in with other boys, so what will be exotic to you—and, eventually, erotic—are females. On the other hand, if you’re sensitive, flamboyant, performative, you’ll be alienated from other boys, so you’ll gravitate sexually toward your exotic—males.

EBE is not exactly universally accepted.

{ NY mag | Continue reading }

photos { Irina Werning, Back to the future, Mechi 1990 & 2010, Buenos Aires | more }

The Kepler observatory was launched into orbit in early 2009. Its mission: to search for planets in solar systems other than our own. Their recent results point to a staggering number of planets that share the galaxy with us, many of which orbit their sun in a habitable temperature zone: between 0 and 100 °C. This means that water-based life such as ourselves would neither freeze nor boil away, assuming that the planet has atmospheric pressure similar to Earth. (…)

Based on the approximate value of 100 billion stars in our galaxy, scientists with Kepler estimate at least 50 billion planets (one out of every two stars is expected to have a planet). And 500 million or so of those planets are in the habitable temperature zone.

{ Berkeley Science Review | Continue reading }

New research out of Brigham Young University finds that couples who wait to have sex are happier, and that delaying sex could lead to a healthier marriage. “I think it’s because [those who waited] learned to talk and have the skills to work with issues that come up,” says scientist Dean Busby, the study’s lead author. (…)


It’s possible for a man to be allergic to his own semen, according to Dutch scientists who have been studying post-orgasmic illness syndrome, a condition in which men develop flu-like symptoms after ejaculating.

{ The Week | Continue reading }

photo { Dominico Albion | more }

How Systems Design Themselves

A given system can be divided into a number of subsystems. Conway gives the example of the public transportation system, which consists on the top level of buses, trains, planes, etc. On the next level an airplane can be split up into subsystems for structure, propulsion, … and so on.

To illustrate this concept the author draws the following picture. The circles represent a (sub)system and the lines the connections between them. (…)

The system and its design group are related. For a given subsystem x there will be a design group (X) which designed this subsystem. The same holds true for the connections between subsystems (eg. x and y). If they are connected, we know that the design teams X and Y had to communicate at some point in time to design the interface.

So the design of the finished system is dependent on the preexisting design of the design group.

{ Supply Chain Risk Management | Continue reading }

photo { Tony Stamolis }

{ Google Street View goes off road with tricycle to capture more images. }

When adding up the benefits from three centuries of species discoveries, I’m tempted to start, and also stop, with Sir Hans Sloane.

A London physician and naturalist in the 18th century, he collected everything from insects to elephant tusks. And like a lot of naturalists, he was ridiculed for it, notably by his friend Horace Walpole, who scoffed at Sloane’s fondness for “sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!” Sloane’s collections would in time give rise to the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, London.

Not a bad legacy for one lifetime. But it pales beside the result of a collecting trip to Jamaica, on which Sloane also invented milk chocolate.

We still scoff at naturalists today.  We also tend to forget how much we benefit from their work. (…) Large swaths of what we now regard as basic medical knowledge came originally from naturalists.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photos { Simen Johan | Roxanne Jackson }

A review of more than 160 studies of human and animal subjects has found “clear and compelling evidence” that – all else being equal – happy people tend to live longer and experience better health than their unhappy peers.


{ News Bureau | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon, Veruschka, New York, 1972 }

Not only do insincere apologies fail to make amends, they can also cause damage by making us feel angry and distrustful towards those who are trying to trick us into forgiving them.

Even sincere apologies are just the start of the repair process. Although we expect the words “I’m sorry” to do the trick, they don’t do nearly as much as we expect.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Misrach }

Jay Traver had begun to notice an uncomfortable crawling sensation under her skin. Scalp spots had bothered her for years but despite her best efforts – she was, after all, a renowned professor of zoology – she couldn’t identify the parasites.

Over the seasons the bugs had spread across her body and eventually invaded her eyes, ears and nostrils, raising her discomfort to fever pitch. Doctors seemed mystified but by the summer of 1950 she had made a breakthrough.

Strong caustic soaps seemed to help control the infestation and she had dug some of the bugs out of her skin with her nails to identify them as dermatophagoides – a mite never previously known to infect humans.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

photo { Süleyman Gezgin }

Piracy is the Future of Television

The convergence of television and the Internet is in its early stages, and the two media will increasingly interconnect over the coming years. A number of services are currently competing to become the dominant protocol for consumption of TV content via the Internet. This paper examines the major services that are currently available for downloading or streaming television programs online, both legal and illegal. We propose that, of the options now available to media users, illegal downloading is the most usable and feature-rich, and bears the greatest potential for pioneering new modes of audience engagement, as well as new global revenue streams, related to television products.

{ Abigail De Kosnik, University of California, Berkeley | PDF | Continue reading }

photo { William Eggleston }

Today, any brand has a potential army of credible, unpaid spokespeople that are willing to work on its behalf. And this army is the exact same group of people who are willing to work against it.

This is the new world of what I call the “post-positioning era” of branding. In the post-positioning era of branding, what you say about your product or service matters almost nothing at all, and what I, the consumer, can do with it matters completely.

The new conditions of brand success:

1. Deliver a kick-ass product.


2. Be honest.


Our ability as advertisers to contrive and disseminate an emotional response through advertising is diminishing rapidly. And brand exposure is not the same as brand experience. A single one-star review on Yelp trumps 60 seconds of Super Bowl airtime.

{ Jamie Monberg/Fast Company | Continue reading | Related: poster }

{ Charlie Engman }