Category Archives: Random science
Biodiversity at work
"Warmer temperatures speed up metabolism by allowing chemical reactions to occur at a faster rate, but this increased efficiency comes at a price: it produces higher quantities of charged atoms or molecules called ‘free radicals,’ which can damage proteins – including DNA," explains Ker Than at LiveScience. "Higher metabolism also speeds up DNA replication, which is just another chemical reaction, and this can increase the number of copying mistakes that can occur. Together, damage to DNA by free radicals and replication mistakes could result in mutations that, over time and through natural selection pressures, can form new species."
Group decision-making at the entomological level parallels our respective process
Excerpt:
Scientists had already known that honeybee scouts "waggle dance" to report on food. But now they have confirmed that they also dance to report on "real estate". This dance is part of their group decision-making process.
According toThomas Seeley, a biologist from Cornell University, this type of decision-making could also provide inspiration on how to devise better human committees that could "achieve collective intelligence and thus avoid collective folly."
Power, work, and resources: social problems and the wasps’ solution
"Scientists have now found that worker wasps are often reluctant to go out in the wild to perform their duties and other wasps have to go and bite them. Moreover, the recruitment of foragers itself is the result of biting from other, higher status wasps."
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Worker-Wasps-Are-Recruited-By-Force-20366.shtml
Shopping Science 101
"Consumers start with fuzzy shopping goals, which become more concrete as the shopping experience progresses," explain Leonard Lee and Dan Ariely. "Because of the initial lack of concreteness of their goals, consumers’ sensitivity to external cues is likely to be higher in the earlier stage of their shopping when their goals are more malleable."
"[R]esearchers from the Northwestern University have documented the so-called paradox of choice: customers generally want to have as many options as possible but at the same time want to be able to decide what to buy as easily as possible."
"[T]here exists an optimal size of the store, optimal in the sense that customers are spending in there the largest amounts of money buying the largest number of products."
A Selling Point for Older Dads?
"So, according to this theory, if the father is sick and doesn’t have much time to live (he is also relatively old) – and therefore doesn’t have much chances of having additional offspring spreading his genes even further – it is expected that his genes would tell him to take very good care of the offspring he already has. On the other hand, if the father is relatively young, the genes are expected to tell him to focus on himself in order to get well and have more chicks later in life."
Scientists model random motion of bouncing balls accurately asocial networks
"What’s interesting is that everything depends only on one factor: the collision rate. If the collision rate is higher than some ‘critical’ value the social structure emerges."
