Smiles are free.

A very interesting paper has just been published by Princeton researchers. The paper, titled Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion explores the relationship between money (how rich you are) and happiness. The abstract reads like a wise father talking to his son:

The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others.

In 2004, the researchers developed a tool to measure people's quality of daily life known as the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), which creates an "enjoyment scale" by requiring people to record the previous day's activities in a short diary form and describe their feelings about the experiences. Surveying 909 employed Texas women, their experiment extended previous studies in which people have exhibited a "focusing illusion" when asked about certain factors contributing to their happiness – attributing a greater importance to that factor once it has been brought to mind.

The women were asked to report the percentage of time they spent in a bad mood the previous day, they were asked to predict how much time people with certain income levels spend in a bad mood. Survey respondents expected women who earned less than $20,000 a year to spend 32 percent more of their time in a bad mood than they expected people who earned more than $100,000 a year to spend in a bad mood. In actuality, respondents who earned less than $20,000 a year reported spending only 12 percent more of their time in a bad mood than those who earned more than $100,000. So the effect of income on mood was vastly exaggerated.

To provide further evidence on the role that income plays in people's lives, the researchers conducted an additional DRM survey in 2005. Respondents reported their experiences from moment to moment as well as their annual household income and overall life satisfaction. The new survey found that income was more weakly correlated with individuals' happiness from moment to moment than it was with their overall life satisfaction.

Finally, the researchers examined data from a nationwide Bureau of Labor Statistics survey on how people with varying household income levels spend their time. These data show that people with higher incomes devote relatively more of their time to work, shopping, childcare and other 'obligatory' activities. Women surveyed by the researchers in Ohio associated those activities with "higher tension and stress." People with higher incomes spend less time on 'passive leisure' activities such as socializing or watching television, which the respondents viewed as more enjoyable.

So why study just women? It's a homogenous group, and so easier to statistically analyze. Current work is focusing on men and women from across the USA. The results of that should make for interesting reading!

Technorati Tags: happiness, money, women, DRM, science

Two news tidbits.

First off, we have the new Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) contains 7 million documents related to advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research of tobacco products. A quick search for 'science research' yielded more than 26 thousand documents. Enjoy!

Second up, although this is not entirely science related, it really is the best anti-smoking advert: the advert is basically painted on the ceiling of a smoking room, making it look like a grave. Very powerful effect.

Technorati Tags: smoking, tobacco, LTDL, science

More strength, less pain, in muscles.

A paper has just been published about the positive effects of drinking cherry juice on exercise. The details are very succinctly explained by the authors:

Fourteen male college students drank 12 fl oz of a cherry juice blend, or a placebo, twice per day for eight consecutive days. A bout of eccentric elbow flexion contractions (2 x 20 maximum contractions) was performed on the fourth day of supplementation. Isometric elbow flexion strength, pain, muscle tenderness and relaxed elbow angle were recorded prior to, and for four days following the eccentric exercise. The protocol was repeated two weeks later with subjects who took the placebo initially, now taking the cherry juice (and vice versa). The opposite arm performed the eccentric exercise for the second bout to avoid the repeated bout protective effect.

They nicely sum up the results for us too:

[The] data show efficacy for this cherry juice in decreasing some of the symptoms of exercise-induced muscle damage. Most notably, strength loss averaged over the four days after eccentric exercise was 22% with the placebo but only 4% with the cherry juice.

Now, if only we knew how cherry juice exerts these effects...

Technorati Tags: cherry, juice, exercise, pain, muscles, science

Least number of fatalities, even without a seat belt.

University at Buffalo researchers studied all auto crashes involving a fatality in the U.S. between 2000 and 2003 where someone occupied the rear middle-seat. After controlling for factors such as restraint use, vehicle type and weight, occupant age, weather and light conditions, air-bag deployment, drug results and fatalities per crash, the rear middle seat is still 16 percent safer than any other seat in the vehicle.

The study involved two different sets of fatal crash data. Researchers first analyzed a special class of car crashes in which there were occupants in the front seat and in the middle of the back seat, a total of 27,098 occupants. The second data set compared survival rates of back-seat occupants only in crashes in which there was at least one fatality. The middle-seat group contained 5,707 occupants, while the 'outboard' or window-seat group had 27,611 occupants, giving a total of 33,318 back-seat passengers. Looking at the fatalities statistics, it is clear that the middle seat is the safest.

Next, they looked at seat belt usage. 46.9% of the fatalities were not wearing seat belts and of these unrestrained passengers, 34.6% were fatally injured, compared to only 14.9% of seat-belt wearers. In general, back-seat passengers who wore seat belts were 2.4 to 3.2 times more likely to survive a crash than their unbelted back-seat companions.

There you have it: the crummiest seat in the car is the safest. And don't forget that seat belt!

Technorati Tags: cars, crashes, safety, accidents, fatalities, science, technology

Regonal economics of world-class universities.

Having a world-class university does wonderful things for the local economy, in a virtuous cycle: universities generate ideas that are spun-off into companies, while simultaneously teaching a lot of people. These educated people leave the university to set up new companies or work in existing ones. The pay taxes, which feeds (eventually) into university funding, and the cycle continues. On top of that, the actual university employs people (administration), hires local companies (for maintenance, building, etc), and buys goods and services. This adds to the regional economy surrounding the university.

Want examples? Stanford and Silicon Valley, Harvard and MIT and Route 128, Cambridge University and Cambridge, and many more.

So, just how big is this impact? How much of a positive effect does having a world-class university have? For Stanford, the effect is well documented, and there have been some general reviews (for Alaska, for example). Now, a famous venture capital firm in Cambridge, UK, called Library House, has quantified, in great detail the economic impact of Cambridge University. The short answer: Cambridge Uni adds over £50 BILLION to the UK economy. That's right, 50 billion pounds. To match this astounding number, Cambridge University created over 150 thousand jobs in the UK.

So what's the point of this post? Higher education requires funding, both from governmental entities and the industry. The funding is an investment into the future, and the returns can be mind-boggling. The funding cycle affects everyone in society, and that's the point.

Technorati Tags: economics, university, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, Stanford

All part of a blog's evolution.

If you can read this, thank you and congratulations: you are seeing the new and improved Blog of Science. Yes, I moved the hosting of blogSci to make it more reliable and faster.

But that's not all! There is a new design too, which you are seeing now. Hope you like it! And, I've added the article collections, which are themed collections of news posts on blogSci. The first two collections are people in love and human relationships and chocolate. More will be added as major themes emerge.

Of course, I am always available if you have feedback or want to chat about something. You can contact me through another site of mine using this email form or you can leave comments below. Either way, if you want me to email you back, please tell me your email address!

And what holds for blogSci in the future? In the coming few weeks, I'll be adding a major new section for your mental enjoyment

So, thank you dear readers for visiting blogSci. I appreciate it!

Pierre

The web is buzzing with the news that a cure has been found for Huntington disease. This is not exactly true — let me explain.

Huntington disease (HD for short) is a genetic disease. At the molecular level, the key player is the huntingtin protein. Ten years ago, researchers learned that huntingtin is cleaved (broken in two) by another protein called caspase-6. So a reasonable hypothesis was that the cleavage of huntingtin is important for disease progression.

Today’s news is that researchers confirmed that huntingtin cleavage is essential for disease progression. The way they did that is by creating mutated huntingtin proteins that cannot be cleaved by caspase-6; this was done in mice. The end result was that the mice were completely normal, when they would have been expected to develop HD.

This does not constitute a cure, no matter how much the press release wants us to believe that. What it does is tell us exactly what step we need to target to stop HD developing. What we can now do is find drugs that inhibit this step — that would be a cure. Actually, that’s what the researchers say: "Our findings are important because they tell us exactly what we need to do next", said Dr. Rona Graham, the lead author in the study.

So what does this mean? Very simple: we now have one of the best handles on a terrible disease. That’s exciting news as it is, but no need to spread wrong news as facts.

Technorati Tags: Huntington disease, huntingtin, caspase, cure, medicine, science

Mayo Clinic disagrees with some reports, agrees with others.

Fibromyalgia is a disorder considered disabling by many, and is characterized by chronic, widespread musculoskeletal pain and symptoms such as fatigue, joint stiffness and sleep disturbance. No cure is known and available treatments are only partially effective.

Now, Mayo Clinic researchers just published a report that concludes:

We found that acupuncture significantly improved symptoms of fibromyalgia. Symptomatic improvement was not restricted to pain relief and was most significant for fatigue and anxiety.

That’s good, but note that Mayo’s acupuncture study is one of only three randomized and controlled studies involving fibromyalgia patients. Of the other studies, one found acupuncture to be helpful, while the other reported it was ineffective for pain relief. So it’s not clear-cut yet; we need more research.

Mayo’s study involved 50 fibromyalgia patients enrolled in a randomized, controlled trial to determine if acupuncture improved their symptoms. Symptoms of patients who received acupuncture significantly improved compared with the control group.

Technorati Tags: Mayo, fibromyalgia, acupuncture, randomized trial, medicine, science

I just read the announcement of PLoS ONE which is essentially all the buzz and hype surrounding Web 2.0 applied to scientific publishing. I think it’s a terrific initiative. Here is what they say.

• Personalized content: Quoting the website:

  Users will be able to set up individual alerts to keep up to date in their areas of interest. Papers within PLoS ONE will contain links to related work in its own database and beyond.

  Sounds like Google or Yahoo! Alerts with a mix of Amazon ‘you might also want to buy this’ type of recommendation system.

• Encouraging discussion & debate:
  

  PLoS ONE will empower the scientific community to engage in a discussion on every paper and provide readers with tools to annotate and comment on papers directly.

  This one is buzzword intensive: commenting and tagging in response to an article… why didn’t they just come out and say it’s a blog. Really, what they are saying is that science publishing fits the blogging model and vice versa. This is certainly very true: scientific publishing is an on-going discussion with fights - ahem, debates - popping up in the literature between different ’schools of thought’.

• Interactive papers: This one is my favorite. Imagine you publsih something and then discover an error. The usual route would be to issue an erratum. Now, we just edit the original and so all future copies will be correct, but we keep the original for reference. That’s a wiki to you and me.

That’s quite an initiative. It’s basically bringing the latest ideas on the net together to apply them to one of the oldest establishments we know, namely scientific publishing. Good luck folks!

Technorati Tags: PLoS, PLoS ONE, science publishing, wiki, blogging, social bookmarking

Glove sales skyrocket.

New research published in the June 2006 issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that people can readily guess the age of a person by just looking at their hands. In the study, people examined unaltered photographs of female hands and were asked to estimate the women’s ages, i.e., younger than 20 years, 20 to 30 years, 30 to 40 years, etc. In the majority of cases, participants were able to accurately estimate the age of each woman in the unaltered photographs.

However, when the hand photos were digitally altered to remove blemishes and hand veins or to add jewelry and nail polish, everyone guessed that the hands belonged to a young person, regardless of their true age. However, alterations to photos of very elderly hands did not change the participants’ ability to distinguish the person’s age.The physical characteristic which most commonly gave away age was prominent hand veins.

Technorati Tags: plastic surgery, hands, photos, age, women, science