Sandy art, kids futures

The company that makes OMO washing machine detergent wanted to have a fun ad showing how it’s OK for kids to get dirty. They commissioned JOOheng Tan, an award-winning sand sculptor, to make three huge backdrops for the ad campaign, showing the[...]

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Do 'world religions' make cuckoldry easier

You may have seen this one recently - perhaps under a headline such as How Religion Promotes Confidence About Paternity. It's an eye-catching headline, but that's not actually what the study showed - for a start, they didn't compare religious with non-religious people.

Actually, what the data reveal is a more complex and rather more interesting picture.

First, to summarize what was done. Beverly Strassman (University of Michigan) and colleagues have been studying the Dogon of Mali in West Africa, who practice a range of different religions. Most of them hold on to their traditional beliefs, some are Muslim, and increasing numbers have been converted to Christianity.

They've built up a large genetic database, allowing them to test 1,706 father?son pairs in 29 patrilineages to see if they match.

What they found was that the Dogon had the lowest odds of non-paternity, followed by the Muslims (although this difference was not statistically significant), while the Catholics had the highest rates of cuckoldry.

Strassman looked into several possible explanations (polygamy, poverty etc) but the one that stood out was a particular cultural practice that marks out traditional Dogon culture: menstrual huts.

Dogon women have high fertility. Typically they are either pregnant or lactating, so menstruation is a rare event that is usually rapidly followed by pregnancy. Traditional Dogon culture demands that menstruating women relocate to special huts, close to where the men of a single patrilineage live. It's an effective way to control the reproductive options for these women.

Dogon Muslims have abandoned these huts, but Muslim women must notify their husbands and are not allowed to pray. So they clearly signal their fertility.

Christians don't have any such safeguards, which likely explains their higher rates of cuckoldry.

That's not to say that Christians tolerate cuckoldry. Far from it. In fact these religions strictly forbid it and warn of supernatural punishment (certainly that's the case for Christianity and Islam).

All of this got me thinking. After all, one popular argument is that world religions helped to bring about complex societies. They did this by facilitate interactions between strangers by increasing trust - by threatening cheaters with supernatural punishment.

Maybe what we're seeing here is the flipside of that. Christianity, a religion designed for the complex urban societies of the late Roman period, has fewer rules and regulations designed at forcing honest behaviour. It relies, instead, on assumptions of trust backed up by threats of supernatural punishment.

As a result, world religions - and the  relative personal freedom they allow - actually make cheating easier, compared with the controlling traditionalist religions. Just a thought.

---

Strassmann, B., Kurapati, N., Hug, B., Burke, E., Gillespie, B., Karafet, T., & Hammer, M. (2012). Religion as a means to assure paternity Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1110442109

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

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Canadas Stem Cell Legacy

Filed under: Stem Cell Tagged: Canada, canadian biotechnology, canadian scientists, stem cell research

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Natures cellular computers

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A New Breed of Planet Hunters

Amateur scientists find niche in locating new planets.


The field of view for the Kepler spacecraft, which is collecting data for the search for exoplanets.Image Credit: Carter Roberts
By Brian Jacobsmeyer, ISNS Contributor

(ISNS) -- Over the past decade, scientists have found evidence of hundreds of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. A group of volunteers has also joined the search, and they have found several additional planets that initially fell through the cracks.

Exoplanets can be detected through a variety of ways, and scientists have increasingly looked for small, regularly repeating dips in light from a star-- a sign of planets passing in front of, or transiting, their home star. This same phenomenon happened in our own solar system earlier this month when Earth-based viewers saw Venus transit the sun for the last time this century.

But the sheer number of exoplanets means there's plenty of transits to track; consequently, scientists have acquired huge amounts of data to process. That?s partly why a research team at Yale University has recruited over 150,000 volunteers to help sort through publicly released data from the Kepler space telescope.

Called Planet Hunters, the project has led to the discovery of several new planets while also confirming many findings made by Kepler scientists. Earlier this year, project leaders unveiled two new exoplanet candidates that NASA?s computer data crunching failed to detect.

Most recently, 24,000 of the volunteers helped find seven more exoplanets that computer algorithms initially missed. Although updated data-processing algorithms detected these planets, scientists working to refine the algorithms have found the citizen volunteers' contributions invaluable.

"Firstly, it's educational and engaging. More importantly, it's having a real scientific impact," said Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center who works on the algorithms used to find exoplanets with Kepler data.

After a brief tutorial, Planet Hunter volunteers can peruse light curves -- graphs of a star's light intensity -- with 30 days of Kepler data on the project's website. When enough planet hunters flag a potential planet candidate, the project scientists review this pared down data before formally recognizing a new alien world.

Although planet candidates detected by algorithms are eventually scrutinized visually, relying entirely on visual detection from the beginning has its advantages. Planet Hunters can identify planets with subtle orbital meanderings that may fly under a computer program's radar.

For instance, neighboring planets can tug on an exoplanet, leading to slight changes in its orbit around a star, and algorithms might miss this difference. Also, planets revolving around binary stars -- a set of two stars that orbit each other -- can be easier to detect by sight rather than with algorithms.

"You can never underestimate how important the human eye is at finding things," said Barclay.

Even the relatively untrained eye can be an effective planet detector. Volunteers of all ages have contributed to the Planet Hunters project, including participants as young as 13. Don?t be fooled by the volunteers' lack of experience, however. Citizen scientists detected 85 percent of large exoplanets in the data, according to a recent analysis accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

To test the efficiency of the planet hunters, the project leaders injected simulated exoplanet transits into the Planet Hunters datasets, unbeknownst to the volunteers. Because the scientists knew these simulations looked like actual transits, they could evaluate the volunteers? detection ability.

While the citizen scientists found most large exoplanets, they had more difficulty detecting smaller Earth-sized planets. Algorithms are better at finding tiny dips in light from smaller planets when visual detection isn?t sensitive enough.

"There's a niche for Planet Hunters," said Meg Schwamb, an astrophysicist at Yale University and lead author of Planet Hunters' most recent analysis. "We're very sensitive to large planets."

As scientists and citizens both race to find exoplanets with similar sizes and orbits to Earth, they'll be using a variety of methods. Before scientists detected the first transiting exoplanet in 1999, they looked for slight wobbles in distant stars that indicated a planet was exerting a very small gravitational pull, and this method has remained popular.

Telescopes can now directly image exoplanets as well, and this method will become more important in coming years according to Jonathan Fortney, an exoplanet researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz. Even if new detection methods flourish, however, Fortney believes Planet Hunters will continue to contribute valuable findings.

"I think the citizen science stuff is incredibly interesting, especially in astronomy," said Fortney. "There?s a big amateur community."

Regardless of the method used, scientists are anxiously awaiting confirmation of a cosmic home away from home. Planet Hunters may not be the first group to find a truly Earth-like planet outside of our solar system, but scientists are using every tool available.

"I think we're only a year or 18 months away from finding an Earth analog," said Barclay. "We're getting very close."

-Brian Jacobsmeyer is a contributing writer for Inside Science News Service


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Patent pressure who does intellectual property
protect

Greg Aharonian has said for many years that the patent system is bust. If it weren’t how could there possibly be tens of thousands of software patents given that so many of them are simply variations on the spreadsheet, word processor, file compression, and image editing? I followed Aharonian’s patent news service from around 1994-5 [...]

Patent pressure – who does intellectual property protect? is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

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Becoming a PubMed Expert

PubMed is probably the most important database used by scientists across the globe. Most[...]

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What a dramatic sunspot!

Active sunspots are pretty dramatic all by themselves, but a little over-the-top music can’t hurt. This spot has been spitting out some low-level activity, but the Sun is tricksy. We’ll see if we get some bigger ones as this thing rotates in[...]

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Can Intel's Thunderbolt Go Mainstream With
Help From Apple and Acer

From Crave: gorgeous gadgets and other crushworthy stuff. - CNET: Thunderbolt ports, marked with a lightning-bolt icon, first arrived on Apple's 2011 MacBooks, iMacs, and Mac Minis. In 2012, Apple added a second Thunderbolt port port to its top-end 15-inch MacBook Pro models. To some,

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Weekly Space Hangout happening NOW

Tune in to to the Cosmoquest Google+ Space Hangout, happening now, with me, Fraser Cain, Amy Teitel, and Nicole Gigliucci.

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