Map of the Moon's North Pole

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Now you can zoom and pan on a map of the moon as easily as you might check out an Earthly location on Google Maps. NASA has released a free, online, high-resolution map of the north pole of the moon. The images come from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which set out in 2009 to map the moon in detail; find landing spots for future missions; and assess minerals and water in the moon's soil.

For a sense of the map's power, may we suggest visiting the interactive map, then clicking on one of the thumbnails underneath the map. It just doesn't stop zooming.

Some fun facts about this map:

• Each pixel represents 2 meters.
• The map is made up of 681 billion pixels.
• To make the map, scientists collected 10,581 images over four years. The final map is a mosaic of those images.
• To gather each individual image, cameras on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter take a picture of the same latitude once every two hours over a month. As the moon rotates underneath the orbiter, this brings each part of the latitude within view of the cameras. The result is a "collar" mosaic, below. This technique ensures similar lighting for different parts of the map.
  Collar Mosaics

  NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
• Three years ago, NASA released an image of the same region of the moon. This new map has 50 times the resolution of that image.
• The overall map represents a pretty large surface area. NASA prepared this helpful guide:
  The Moon Map Represents An Area About One-Quarter That of the U.S.
• Portland-based GigaPan provided the storage and web interface for this map. We've long admired the company's ability to host super-zoomable, panoramic images. Check out this photo of a trading floor or this one of Dubai.

[NASA]

Signy Island

Ben Tullis via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists drilled into the permafrost beneath an old moss bank on Signy, an island northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula, finding a bit of brown moss that had been frozen for more than 1,500 years, according to radiocarbon dating. Just to see what would happen, they put it under a light and misted it. After a couple of weeks, it sprouted and came back to life.  

"It's basically the first record of anything regenerating of that sort of age," British Antarctic Survey researcher and study co-author Peter Convey told National Geographic. "There are records of microbes being pulled out of ice cores and permafrost, but nothing that's multicellular has ever been recorded to do it."

The finding raises interesting questions: What if mosses and other plants could come back to life after being exposed following the retreat of glaciers? "That gives you a very different way of understanding the biodiversity of a region,” Convey told the New York Times. Or, where can I buy a moss plant that lived at the dawn of the Roman Republic? 

The story of the moss, described in a study published in Current Biology, bring to mind other life-forms that have been revived after being frozen, as the Times noted: 

It also brings to mind these incredible leeches, which can survive immersion in liquid nitrogen, at temperatures of -321°F (-196°C).

A Now-Dry Portion of the Colorado River Delta

Some portions of the delta are greener and wetter than this. See this paper.

Photo taken January 2009 by Pete McBride for the U.S. Geological Survey

"Dampen" is the right word for it. Later this month, officials plan to release water from the Colorado River into the river's delta. It will be the first time in decades that people have released water into the delta for environmental reasons instead of, say, because a reservoir was too full, Nature News reports. Normally, the delta is mostly dry. Since the 1930s, successive dam projects have held back the river, so that folks in the U.S. and Mexico can use Colorado water for drinking, farming, and everything else.

This release certainly won't restore the delta to its former wetness. It represents less than 1 percent of the river's annual flow. Nevertheless, scientists think that even this amount of water—calculated to mimic days of light spring flooding, from the time before dams—will help. "The goal is to dampen broad swathes of the arid Colorado River delta," Nature News' Alexandra Witze writes, "allowing new cottonwood and willow trees to germinate and restore small patches of riparian habitat."

The release is timed to when native cottonwoods and willows drop their seeds, ScienceInsider reports. Ecologists hope those seeds will take root in the newly-wetted sand and drive out invasive salt cedars that have taken over.

Scientists themselves will proliferate in the area after the planned mini-flood. Hydrologists and ecologists will monitor where the water goes and how trees and birds react.

[ScienceInsider, Nature News]

Ivanpah Overhead

Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating system is the largest solar plant of its kind in the world. By "its kind," we mean a solar power tower system, which uses an array of mirrors to focus sunlight on single towers. So those thin concentric circles you see in this photo are actually rows upon rows of sun-tracking mirrors surrounding three towers. (The green patch on the right of the towers is a golf course.)

Ivanpah, located in California's Mojave Desert, began producing electricity this January. The plant powers more than 140,000 homes, according to the plant. 

Although they still harvest solar power, solar power towers work quite differently from photovoltaic solar panels. Ivanpah's mirrors reflect sunlight, instead of absorbing it. The light goes to the top of each tower, where it heats water in boiler pipes to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That hot steam then gets piped to a turbine at the base of the tower to generate electricity.

An Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System Tower

Business Wire

The project has prompted some worries over its effects on plants, animals, and people. The mirrors can kill passing birds by burning their bodies and feathers. More recently, the mirrors hit the news for blinding pilots with their brightness.

Perhaps it's all right, then, that the U.S. will probably not see a second Ivanpah power plant. Companies are unlikely to invest in such large solar power tower projects in the future because both natural gas and photovoltaic materials are getting cheaper, the Los Angeles Times reports. The U.S. government is also handing out fewer loans for big clean-energy projects, which have been controversial. 

Brain Freeze

Getty Images

In December, a highly publicized study declared that distinctive wiring in the brain explains different skill sets in men and women. After scanning hundreds of participants’ brains, the researchers reported that men have stronger connections within a given hemisphere, whereas women have stronger connections between the two. This makes sense, they speculated, because same-side connections are responsible for carrying out focused tasks, such as map reading, at which men excel, whereas cross-brain connections underlie the multitasking and social graces that are most often associated with women. Finally, evidence that men are from Mars and women are from Venus! The trouble is, the study is riddled with faulty assumptions and methodological flaws. Worse still, problems like these taint just about every study that claims to show a “hardwired” explanation for why men and women behave differently.

In 1854, German anatomist Emil Huschke reported that the brain’s frontal lobe, which he called the “brain of intelligence,” is larger in men than in women. (Scientists of this era made comparable proclamations about race, claiming, for instance, that the frontal lobe is smaller in “Negros” than in Caucasians.) Today’s neuroscientists are doing something similar: using new technologies to unwittingly perpetuate stereotypes that are just as unfounded and just as damaging.

In the past decade, several thousand papers have been published on sex differences in the human brain. Many physical differences are genuine, but oftentimes not meaningful. Take for example, an easily measurable characteristic: size. One study recorded men’s brain volumes at 1,053 to 1,499 cubic centimeters and women’s at 975 to 1,398. The overlap means you couldn’t tell the sex of a random brain from its size.

In addition, many supposed psychological differences between the sexes are as illusory as the physical ones. In 2005, Janet Hyde, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzed data from studies of apparent sex differences in traits such as aggression, social ability, math, and moral reasoning. Nearly four fifths of the traits showed only a minor or negligible difference between men and women.

In the rare cases where actual psychological differences exist, they cannot be attributed to innate neurology alone. Everything in the brain is a combination of nature and nurture. Culture comes into play, which affects behavior, which then affects the brain. From birth (and even in the womb), a baby is labeled as a girl or boy and treated a certain way as a result. For example, a 2005 study of 386 birth announcements in Canadian newspapers showed that parents tend to say they’re “proud” when it’s a boy and “happy” when it’s a girl. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist at Brown University, has shown that mothers talk to infant girls more than infant boys. This could partly explain why girls tend to have better language skills later on. “Some differences end up fairly entrenched in adult human beings,” Fausto-Sterling says. “But that doesn’t mean that you were born that way or that you were born destined to be that way.”

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science. 

Daniel Goldman runs the CRAB (Complex Rheology and Biomechanics) Lab. He’s worked with zebra-tailed lizards, wind scorpions, and fire ants, among others.

Harold Daniels

Daniel Goldman spends his days working with venomous rattlesnakes, baby sea turtles, and a dozen other types of animals. But he isn’t a zookeeper, or even a biologist. He’s a physicist, studying locomotion at Georgia Tech. In order to test his hypotheses, he builds robots that mimic the ways animals move. Jealous yet? 

Popular Science:Why do you have so many sandboxes? 

Daniel Goldman: No one has ever studied the complexities of a sidewinder rattlesnake’s movement on sand, its natural substrate. In principle, you can understand how a hummingbird stays aloft or how a shark swims by solving fluid-dynamics equations. We don’t yet have fundamental equations for complex terrain—sand, leaf litter, tree bark. To figure that out, we built giant sandboxes that are equipped with high-speed cameras and can tilt to mimic dunes.

PS:Which animals are the hardest ones to work with? 

DG: The rattlesnakes were a lucky break. You put them in a sandbox, and they just start sidewinding—the sideways slithering they do to cross sand. But most animals don’t do what you want. Ghost crabs, for example, are ridiculously fast. In the laboratory, you can get about 10 good trials out of them: They’ll run away from you down a track, where high-speed cameras record them. After that, they seem to decide they are no longer afraid and start trying to pinch you.

PS:Why do you build robots too?

DG: We want to figure out how animals move, but they’re too complicated to understand all at once. Robots let us systematically vary parameters, like the number of motors or the slickness of the skin, and see how movement changes. We can compare these observations to computer models and animals. I call it robophysics.  

PS:What’s your favorite bot?

DG: They’re like children; how can I pick? I’ll say our sand-swimming robot, which is made of several servo-motors packed in a sleeve and wrapped in a Lycra swimsuit. 

PS:How will these insights be used outside the lab?

DG: The locomotion lessons we learn can be fed back into more sophisticated robots. In the future, I think we’ll see robots with Watson-like smarts and squirrel-like mobility.

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but there are many ways we can be subconsciously influenced. At least, that’s the premise of ABC’s new series Mind Games. Christian Slater and Steve Zahn star as consultants who use psychological techniques to manipulate their clients’ bosses, co-workers, and family members. Writer and executive producer Kyle Killen pored over scientific research in marketing, psychology, and consumer behavior and found a number of real-world methods the characters can use to bend minds.

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Free Syrian Army Fighter

The rubble around him is in Aleppo

Scott Bobb for Voice of America, via Wikimedia Commons

Bashar al-Assad's beleaguered government of Syria announced yesterday that it is creating a space agency. This announcement comes as the long and bloody Syrian Civil War enters its fourth year.

The Syrian Space Agency will be a public body with a scientific and research nature, according to a state-run Syrian news service. But actually conducting science may prove difficult, as many Syrian scientists and academics have fled the country due to violence and persecution. Before the civil war, Syrian doctors left the country at a higher-than-expected rate. Since the war began in March 2011, universities in Syria have become contested spaces. A report on Syrian universities in the uprising notes, "Syrian human rights monitoring organizations estimate that more than 35,000 Syrian students have been arrested on campus since the start of the revolution."

Amal Alachkar, a Syrian neuropharmacologist who fled the country at the start of the war, explains how regime policies led her to flee.

My lab was targeted by Shabiha, [a militia that supports Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria]. They broke in and destroyed it while trying to catch students. The five main public universities, all under the government’s control, are still working somehow. But the education system has collapsed. My department has lost its entire staff — some fled the country, and others are not able to get to the university.

A U.S.-led survey on the situation found:

Scores of Syrian university students are living in refugee camps in Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries, [University of California at Davis professor Keith] Watenpaugh and other US researchers found during a survey of the camps. Many of those students do not have the money to study in Jordan or other countries.

The death toll in the Syrian Civil War so far is 140,000. In addition, millions more Syrians have fled the conflict and are living in refugee camps, like the Zaatri Camp in Jordan.

Clean stone

(A) shows the border between cleaned and uncleaned stone surface. The location of the area is shown by the white arrow in (B).

Gulotta et al. / Heritage Science

Researchers found that by merely coating stone with an agar gel, they could easily remove soot, salts, and other stuff that makes the stone appear dark and dirty. The agar, made up of polysaccharide extracted from red seaweeds, is inexpensive and very safe to work with, unlike some industrial solvents. And it does its thing rather quickly, as reported in Chemistry World. Agar is more commonly used as a substrate for growing microbes, for example in petri dishes, and is also commonly used in desserts like jellies and custards, especially in Asian cuisines. 

So far, scientists from Polytechnic University of Milan have used the agar to clean the grand Milan cathedral, and the difference between clean and unclean areas is rather striking. The new cleaning method is described in a study published in the journal Heritage Science.

How does the gel work? As Chemistry World noted: 

[Study author Davide] Gulotta explains that the agar gel works so well because it has a well-ordered microstructure with a high number of pores that are evenly distributed, which enhance water retention and allow liquid water migration within the gel.

When agar is applied as a water-based poultice, the solvent effect of water is promoted: in the presence of soluble deposits the dissolution is favoured and the dissolved material is drained into the gel structure, effectively soaking it up like sponge.

Researchers also found that they could add soaps and chelating agents to the gel to tailor it to specific areas of stone. 

Microscopic cleaning

Gulotta et al. Heritage Science

Reckless Ride

A total of 256 pneumatic LEGO Technic pistons drive four radial engines, which turn the driveshaft and power the oversize rear tires. The car can reach 18 mph—but there are no brakes.

Chris Sammartino

The Super Awesome Micro Project, a full-size car made of 500,000 LEGOs, sprung from an unlikely partnership between Romanian tinkerer Raul Oaida and Australian investor Steve Sammartino. The two met over Skype in 2012, and since then, Sammartino has helped Oaida raise money for his ambitious projects, including a jet-powered bicycle. After they saw a video of a Ferrari 599 GTB made of LEGOs, they set out to build something grander. “If you’re going to make a LEGO car,” Sammartino says, “you might as well make it a hot rod.” Oaida spent 18 months constructing the compressed-air-powered vehicle and then shipped it to Australia for a test drive. The throttle and steering wheel snapped off, and a few high-pressure air hoses blew, scattering LEGOs everywhere. Oaida’s quick fixes got it running again, but Sammartino thinks the seats still need work. “It might be the most uncomfortable car in automotive history,” he says.

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science. 

As the planet warms, the temperatures that trigger spring arrive earlier. But not everything’s adjusting on the same schedule. Flowers open before their insect pollinators come out, and birds return from migration too late to find their usual bug meals. Detailed study of ecological mismatch requires equally meticulous observations of historical timing—and a Boston University lab has found a trove in the journals Henry David Thoreau kept in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s. “They’re probably the oldest detailed records of flower and bird-migration times in the United States,” says Richard Primack, a conservation biologist who runs the BU lab. The diaries, together with more recent data, reveal an ecological system in flux.

1. Leaves appear earlier

In 2012, plants leafed out a full month early in some parts of the Northeast, as measured by satellite images that document levels of foliage. Scientists attribute the premature greening to abnormally warm weather. 

Source: Joshua Gray, Boston University

2. Cherry trees bloom earlier too

More than 1,200 years of cherry-blossom records for Kyoto, Japan, show a trend toward earlier blooms in the past 100 years.

Source: Yasuyuki Aono, Osaka Prefecture University

3. Flowers precede birds

Nearby Boston delivers extra heat to Concord, making the town a case study for global warming in the Northeast. Wildflowers [pink] seem to respond to the new spring temperatures more than migrating songbirds do [green].

Source: Elizabeth Ellwood Et Al., Boston University

4. Birds lag behind bugs

In Concord, insects, too, have responded to warming at a different rate. The BU lab has measured how many days each spring indicator shifts per Fahrenheit degree of warming [boxes]—though individual species vary [bars].

Source: Caroline Polgar Et Al., Boston University

5. The future is uncertain

The wildflowers in Concord bloomed three weeks earlier in 2012 than they did in the 1850s, when Thoreau observed them. Ecologists see three possible futures for how spring may continue to evolve.

Source: Elizabeth Ellwood Et Al., Boston University

Spring temperatures are an average of March, April, and May, except the bird trend line, which is March and April.

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Loblolly pine

Doug Goldman @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / USDA-NRCS-NPDT

Now, using new methods, scientists have succeeded, and found that the genome contains 22.18 billion base pairs, making it more than seven times longer than the human genome. A total of 82 percent of the genome was made up of duplicated segments, compared with just 25 percent in humans, Science Magazine reported: 

...its large genome was too cumbersome for conventional whole-genome shotgun sequencing, which sequences short fragments of the genome and then stitches the results together. In a new study, reported today in Genome Biology, researchers bolstered the shotgun approach by preprocessing the individual fragments using genetic cloning, allowing them to more easily assemble the complete genome.

Scientists don't know exactly why this pine (Pinus taeda) has such a large genome, nor do they know exactly how many genes it has that may code for proteins--though they did identify genes related to disease resistance and wood formation, which will be interesting to scientists and the lumber industry alike. One interesting recent study that is at least tangentially related found that humans likely have fewer (protein-coding) genes than worms. 

A stand of loblolly pines

Doug Goldman @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / USDA-NRCS-NPDT

TED XPrize

Previously announced XPrizes have involved challenges such as cleaning up oil spills or landing a lunar rover.

The originators of the prize are soliciting public input as to what the rules and criteria of the prize should be, apart from the talent-show-esque "a TED Talk so compelling that it commands a standing ovation from you, the audience."

We wait eagerly to find out what an AI will choose to talk about from the TED stage.

Noses

Dreamstime

“Ten thousand is kind of pathetic — it’s a pretty low number,” study author and molecular neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University told the Washington Post.

This study went like this, as the Post noted: 

Using a procedure similar to a hearing exam, in which listeners must try to distinguish between two tones, Vosshall and her colleagues put 26 noses to the test. Each individual was given three vials, two of them containing the same scent, and asked to determine which smell was the odd one out.

After hundreds of these tests on each subject, the researchers assumed that the subjects’ performances would be similar in recognizing all possible smells able to be made in the lab. They extrapolated that the average human should be able to distinguish at least 1 trillion odors.

The researcher came up with their number by creating mixtures of 128 different odorous chemicals and testing how well 26 different people could distinguish among them. The ability to distinguish between closely related compounds varied from one person to another.

[Washington Post]

Celestron Cosmos 90 GT Wi-Fi Telescope

Jonathon Kambouris

For non-astronomers, stargazing may seem simple: Just plop down a scope, and peer toward the heavens. It’s usually not quite that easy. Scopes can be tricky to set up and celestial objects elusive. The Celestron Cosmos 90 GT uses a Wi-Fi connection with a smartphone to do the hard work for you. To align it, users point it at any three bright objects in the sky; the scope uses them to triangulate its precise location. Through an app, users then select the celestial body they want to see from Celestron’s 120,000-entry database. Motors in the base position the scope in seconds.

Celestron Cosmos 90 GT Wi-Fi Telescope

Telescope aperture: 3.5 inches
Magnification: high-power eyepiece, 91x; low-power eyepiece, 36x
Astronomical database: 120,000 objects
Price:$400

This article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Anti-Smog Drone Over China

Here, a drone from the State-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China test-sprays a smog-dispersing catalyst into the air.

Xinhua

Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news, designed to capture the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.

Smog Warriors

According to state-owned media, China is using small drones to battle its disastrous smog problem. These drones assist in two ways. In emergencies, a parachuting drone can spray a catalyst to dissipate thick clouds of smog, as in the image above. Drones can also film the smoke coming out of factory smokestacks; the color of the smoke can reveal illegal pollution.

A Lark Over Gaza

The Skylark is an Israeli drone that is launched by hand and remotely controlled to send video down to troops below. The 17-pound drone can fly for up to three hours and is similar to the RQ-11 Raven, which American forces used in Iraq and Afghanistan for scouting. The AP recently interviewed Israeli soldiers and got a look at the Skylark in action. Watch the AP video below:

Nuclear Monitors

This drone system, made by researchers at the University of Bristol and tested at a uranium mine in Romania, provides a way for scientists and public health officials to monitor radioactive sites after they have fallen out of use, without sending humans into toxic areas. Here's a video explaining the system.

Impersonating Superheroes

Corridor Digital's short film "Superman With A GoPro," shot using a commercial drone, shows the last son of Krypton on a mission to return a GoPro camera. On the way, he flies over several Los Angeles landmarks (including the Griffith Observatory!), rescues a woman from a burning building, and assists a police officer with two muggers. 

International Spoilsports

This week, the United States boycotted a United Nations Human Rights Council discussion of drones. Said a State Department official: "But this particular resolution deals solely with the use of remotely piloted aircraft. We just don’t see the Human Rights Council as the right forum for discussion narrowly focused on a single weapons delivery system." Perhaps next time the HRC can instead have a debate about the targeted killing policy writ large, and not just one weapon used for part of it.

Did I miss any drone news? Email me at kelsey.d.atherton@gmail.com

Scientific Papers

Ryan Snook

Among Stanford University's palm trees and sandstone arches—the picture of ivory-tower—there's going to be a center dedicated to chipping away that ivory, The Economist reports. The university plans to open a Meta-Research Innovation Center: a center for the study of bad science.

The center will take aim at biomedical studies that are poorly designed, are redundant, weren't published because they report negative results, and/or independent scientists can't reproduce. The idea is that an enormous number of published studies showing that Drug X cures Disease Y, or that Gene A is related to Condition B, are actually incorrect. Drug X doesn't cure Disease Y, or isn't really better at curing Disease Y than Drug Z, which has been around forever. Nevertheless, because of poor statistical analysis or other problems, scientific journals publish these untrue studies. Doctors then read those studies and use them to help decide how to treat their patients.

Epidemiologist John Ioannidis will lead the Meta-Research Innovation Center, The Economist reports. Ioannidis is a well-known figure in the study of bad science. He's perhaps best known for publishing a study in 2005 in which he developed a statistical model of how often published papers are wrong. In a 2010 profile of Ioannidis, The Atlantic summarized the findings: 

His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. . . . 'You can question some of the details of John's calculations, but it's hard to argue that the essential ideas aren't absolutely correct,' says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.

Several scientists and journalists have tried to call attention to these problems in the medical literature. (They exist in other fields of science besides medicine, of course. However, people often focus on medicine because it affects how doctors treat patients.) The problems still persist. This new effort from Stanford will try to further develop the field of examining bad science, The Economist reports. In addition, the center will examine whether doctors even pay attention to projects that try to reproduce the findings from famous studies. In other words, the Meta-Research Innovation Center will investigate the impact of other centers dedicated to finding bad science. Meta indeed.

[The Economist]

Let's Get Weird

Flickr, L.C.Nøttaasen and Stephen Stills; Modified by Gabe Bergado

The intoxicating effects of alcohol and of marijuana have been widely studied, but their combined effect—getting "cross-faded"—is woefully underexplored scientific territory. Here's a look at what we know about how pot and booze together affect the brain.

First, the basics: Marijuana contains THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which acts on the brain's cannabinoid receptors. Alcohol depresses the central nervous system. Trying to compare the two isn't even like comparing apples and oranges, says Gary Wenk, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University. "It's apples and vegetables. They're very different drugs." An extremely simplified explanation would be to say that THC largely has cognitive effects, like paranoia and a distorted sense of time, while alcohol mainly affects motor skills, making it hard to walk in a straight line and causing slurred speech.

So does combining weed and alcohol just add their respective effects together? Not quite, says Scott Lukas, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and has researched the interaction of various drugs. In a study published in 2001, Lukas found that after individuals smoked marijuana and a drank large dose of alcohol, the equivalent to a couple of shots, the THC levels in their blood plasma nearly doubled compared with people who smoked pot and consumed a placebo drink. The buzzed people in the study also detected the effects of marijuana sooner than those who only got stoned, and rated their high as subjectively "better." This suggests that getting boozed up causes more THC to reach the brain, via the bloodstream, within the first few minutes of ingestion. One explanation for this finding is that alcohol may cause changes in blood vessels that boost the absorption of inhaled THC.

Lukas isn't worried that the combination could be lethal, but he says that getting cross-faded could be more risky that just getting drunk or high alone. With more THC hitting the brain thanks to the ethanol in alcoholic drinks, the usual effects of marijuana—like impaired judgment and increased heart rate—are stronger. Which means accidents like drownings and car crashes could be more likely, Lukas says. He also points out that the amounts of drugs approved for his research were lower than the levels that people often use while out partying.

More recently, a study from Duke University found that adolescent rats under the influence of ethanol and THC were less likely to explore than those under the influence of either ethanol or THC alone. The same study also found that adult rats given the ethanol/THC combination had more trouble remembering new objects compared with adult rats given either drug alone.

Further research is needed on the additive effects of munchies and drunchies.

Yawning

Juanedc via Wikimedia Commons

But a new study found that none of those things matter nearly as much as your age, and whether or not you are susceptible to yawning in the first place. The study, published in PLOS ONE, found that almost all the people who contagiously yawned (after watching a video of people yawning) again yawned when tested at a later date, or in a different location. And the younger the person, the more likely they are to contagiously yawn. 

Why might age be so important? Possible explanations "could include decreased attention to the stimulus with age, a reduced connection to the yawners in the video due to use of technology, or a general decline in susceptibility to contagious yawning as we age." 

The lack of connection between contagious yawning and measures of empathy (or intelligence, time of day and the like) conflicts with previous research, which involved fewer participants. These authors suggest that contagious yawning is a stable personality trait, which varies for unknown reasons, but may well be of genetic origin. 

Researchers studied 328 participants, giving them cognitive tests and measuring their capacity for empathy. They then had the participants self-report how many times they yawned, which they wrote was the preferred way to take count; if people are aware they are being watched, it can prevent them from yawning.

Naked Ladies, Naked Gents

Part of "The Birth of Venus" painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879

Bisexual folks have an image problem in America. Could science help?

A new feature, published in the New York Times Magazine, follows the efforts of the American Institute of Bisexuality to fund scientific studies on bisexuals. The institute works to combat damaging beliefs about bisexual people, including that they are actually gay, not bi; that they are just experimenting or going through a phase; and that they are unfaithful partners. The institute supports surveys of bi folks' sexual activity and mental health, as well as studies of bisexual people's arousal. Yes, that means those funny studies in which researcher show study volunteers porn and measure how their volunteers react.

You might think that institute-funded research would be kind of boring, adherent to the party line: Bisexuality exists, guys! Bi-identified folks, for the most part, aren't lying or actually gay! But the studies the Times article covers are fascinating, sophisticated looks into human sexuality.

There's one researcher that's looking into whether what makes some men identify as bi is their non-aversion to women. That is, when they're watching porn with two men, they don't lose steam when a woman joins in. Gay-identified men, on the other hand, may be the ones who won't stand for a lady in the scene.

There's a survey of 394 men and women that found that there are almost as many men who decide to identify as bisexual, queer, or "unlabeled" after identifying as gay earlier in life as there are men who first identify as bi, then as gay. The researcher who conducted that survey, Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, originally assumed women are more sexually fluid than men, the Times reports. Researchers are now finding, however, that men's attraction can be pretty complex, too. (O rly?)

Complexity can make things harder. As the Times points out, men who change identities provide fodder for those who tout damaging "gay cures." For journalists, complexity can make a science story harder to tell: Scientists found X is true, but only in these specific cases, and maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong? But probably they are right? In this case, however, it makes for a fun, thoughtful read. 

[New York Times]