I realize this study is SO last week, which is about two months in dog years and a decade in internet years, but seeing as I'm about to lend my dulcet tones and my delicate opinions to Skeptically Speaking on this topic, I feel I must needs blog this paper.
That, and it's about coffee. How could I NOT blog this paper!?
Freedman et al. "Association of coffee drinking with total and cause-specific mortality" NJEM, 2012.
Does seeing organic make you a self-satisfied jerk? At SciAm today, I'm covering the latest study that made it big over the weekend, on whether seeing organic labels influences your moral judgements. While the authors conclude that seeing organic DOES make you a self-satisfied jerk, I'm not so sure, and think there are too many confounds to know for certain. If you want to know why, head over there and check it out.
We all know what this song is trying to tell us:
And what about this one?
Yes, shocking as it might be to some, a lot of songs, classical, pop, or of any other genre...talk a lot about sex. But not just sex, there are a lot of reproductive messages in music. We might notice a lot of these lyrics, from Baby Got Back to Gilbert and Sullivan, but what do they mean? Why are they there? And do they make a song more popular?
SCIENCE is here to find out!
Hobbes and Gallup. "Songs as a Medium for Embedded Reproductive Messages" Evolutionary Psychology, 2011.
Note 1: Today's post comes courtesy of the Digital Cuttlefish, who turned me on to this truly awesome piece of the scientific literature.
Note 2: I would like to dedicate this post as a whole to the fantastic Danielle Lee, who I hope will remix it. 
Are you trying to get a date? Have you tried it all, cologne, flowers, playing it casual, nice dinners? And have you considered environmental enrichment?
What is environmental enrichment? Environmental enrichment is the idea that the brain responds to stimulating environments, with things like decreased anxiety-like responses, decreased cognitive decline with aging, increased coping mechanisms, and even increasing cortical thickness and the birth of new neurons in the brain.
And it turns out, it might just also make you dead sexy. At least, if you're a rat.
(This rat wants you to draw him like one of your french girls. Used with permission from MysticGaia, via DeviantArt)
Mitra and Sapolsky. "Short-Term Enrichment Makes Male Rats More Attractive, More Defensive and Alters Hypothalamic Neurons" PLoS ONE, 2012.
I've got an article up over at Sci Am Mind and Brain today, about recent advances in behavioral and cognitive therapies for ADHD, and how these therapies may be better than medication in the long run. And I have also included, at my Sci Am blog, a list of the references I used for the piece (for those who are curious). Head over and check it out!
Sci is at SciAm today, talking about a recent paper showing that exercise can change the methylation of your muscle DNA. What does that mean? How could it work? Head over there to find out.
I was alerted by the Neurocritic to a new paper out in PLoS ONE on research blogs and discussion of scientific information. It's an analysis of researchblogging.org bloggers, who there are, what they blog about, and who is significant. It's an interesting 'state of the blogsphere' type read (though I don't feel the significance of the research is really adequately discussed, what does this mean for both the blogging field and research science? How does it compare to other blogging areas?), and Neurocritic has a good breakdown (and mentioned me for my meta blogging! I am both flattered...I think...and amused, since I was hoping I didn't do that too often. As I am doing it now. Right). The only quibble I have with it is that they use Technorati as a measure of the 'best' science blogs. Guys, that is so 2007. As a matter of fact, many of the research blogs (especially those which have moved, say, since the breakup of ScienceBlogs, etc), are not even indexed on Technorati. That's because Technorati is something that you have to index yourself on, it's not a straight aggregator of hits. As such I think it's probably not the best metric of the 'best' bloggers (looking through the list, a good 20 in the top 200 I was able to immediately identify as defunct). I would think that a careful google search would have been a better metric (though much more time consuming).
But there was something interesting about this paper, and it was this:
The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.
So...I'm not average. Or I'm only 50% of average. The AVERAGE OF AVERAGE!!! YES!!!!
It does make me sad that there are fewer women out there blogging about scientific research. I know many women in the science blogsphere. There are a lot more female pseuds, a lot more women blogging about work/life balance, and so I think it's much more of a question of WHAT women in science are blogging about as opposed to whether they are blogging. Perhaps that would have been interesting to address in the discussion (oh my. Did I just post-peer-review a paper that is in effect a REVIEW of bloggers writing post-peer-review!??! The meta will open a black hole in the universe any minute).
As to WHY women in science blog less about science research? I have some guesses. First off, while the paper states that most real name bloggers see blogging as "if not as a career enhancer, then at least as career-neutral", this seems like a stretching assumption to me. I personally find that attitudes toward blogging as a scientist vary greatly according to field, with fields like exercise physiology being encouraging, psychology being more neutral, and biomedical fields being, in some cases actively hostile (though becoming less so, yay!). Being that women often feel themselves under extra pressure and at a disadvantage in their science training, why take on something that is, at best, neutral?
Secondly, there's this (courtesy of Astrokatie):
(Of course it's from XKCD)
I have seen some truly amazing vitriol leveled at female bloggers, and female science bloggers are no exception. I see far, far less aimed at men. Why would a woman willingly take on something career-neutral at best and which comes with free extra judgements of her looks and character? There are probably other reasons in addition to these two.
...all of this is making me wonder why I'm here. The answer being that I love SCIENCE, and I think you should too!
But the research raises some questions. What makes a science blogger influential and what makes them "real"? There are many people blogging about science who don't use ResearchBlogging as their stamp. I have no doubt that as the blogsphere continues to grow, that will only become more so. But right now it's an interesting picture, and raises some interesting thoughts. At least, enough for me to get super meta for a while.
*Note: technorati makes you put a little squibble of numbers in your blog so their trawler can find it and confirm you. That's what was here last night. I figured I might as well.
It's time to talk about bears again, my friends. We have already learned that, contrary to popular belief, they cannot smell the menstruation (or rather, they probably can, but don't care):
But there is another, more difficult question to answer: are bears safe!??!
At first you might be thinking "um, no, they are BEARS. Bears, like sharks and electric fences and parachuteless skydiving, are on the list of things labeled 'not safe'".
Well, sure, but we've got to test it with SCIENCE! And this means we need to get a bunch of people and ask them to walk right up to a bunch of bears. For science.
Any volunteers??
(C'mon over!!! Source)
Moen et al. "Behaviour of Solitary Adult Scandinavian Brown Bears (Ursus arctos) when Approached by Humans on Foot" PLoS ONE, 2012.
I realize it's been a while since EB 2012 ended and I left the not-so-sunny San Diego (at least, it wasn't sunny at the time). Conferences are always great for the development of ideas. You get new ideas about your research, new directions to go in or troubleshooting things to try.
And at EB this year, I also got some ideas about communicating science. Or at least, I had some ideas thrown at me. They crystallized what I believe to be one of the major issues facing scientists who blog: needless self-promotion.
(Source)
Sci is at SciAm blogs today, with a repost on depression, gene therapy, and p11. I've got some fabulous science cooking in the lab that needs all of my attention today, but please enjoy the repost and I'll be back soon!
Blogging all that is good, bad, and weird in physiology and neuroscience.
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