Fighting for Success


Stand and fight often means more than stand your ground. Many species who walk on all fours will often stand up on their rear leg to fight. Grizzly bears, for example look pretty ferocious on all fours, but become positively awe-inspiring after they rear up to attack. Carrier of the U of Utah in a paper published on Wednesday (1) suggests that gaining a fighting advantage by waling on each other from our hind legs may be a reason that our ancestors became bipedal.

There is a big advantage in the force delivered by a blow if we are standing and striking down compared to that when we are on all fours and striking up or sideways. In addition when you become good on your two hind legs, you can in the words of Ali “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”

Everybody likes a winner, don’t they? Carrier goes on to propose that as we get taller, our advantage in striking force and reach gives us an advantage and that in turn makes us more attractive to the females of the species. Apparently tall men get more responses in dating advertisements than short men, and also have more children than short guys. Now where did I put those cowboy boots with the big heels? I know they're here somewhere.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019630

Zombie Apocalypse


Do you know what to do or have on hand in the advent of a zombie apocalypse occurring? No?  Well, the Center for Disease Control is giving us some advice in what we need to have in our emergency pack and what to include in our emergency plan when faced with a zombie apocalypse (1).

The pack includes the sort of things that those wise people amongst us would have their people keep in order for them, in case they need to get out of town fast. “Getting out of town fast” is one of the emergency actions that are flagged up in the plan advice. The CDC warns that if you don’t, those hungry critters will gobble your brains. Hence you need to have multiple routes planned to avoid losing your mind.

The CDC promises to investigate any outbreak of zombies as they would any other plague or infestation. The news media are starting to talk about the 2012 US elections and the caucuses and primaries, with candidates opting in and opting out. We are soon going to have to keep a wary eye out for the infestation of bodies wanting your vote without using your brain. I hope the CDC is vigilant.

I guess we need to get those emergency packs ready today, though. We have one more day left to do this if we listen to the Rev. Camping who tells us that Judgment Day is May 21, 2011 (2). The next 5 months of terrible tribulations will start when the ground will give up the dead. I’m not sure if the CDC have time to get ready to start their investigation.

  1. http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp
  2. http://www.familyradio.com/index2.html

A Calculated Risk


What do you do when you are concentrating really, really hard? You know, when you are drawing something, trying to get the right words of a story down or are doing difficult sums. As kids we would unconsciously stick our tongues out. The more difficult the problem, the farther out our tongues would go. If it was really difficult, we might even screw our faces up.

Clenching our teeth wasn’t something that I remember doing in the face of difficult sums. However, there may well be cultural differences in clenching proclivities in different nationalities. Mizumori at al of U of Osaka have investigated  the effect of clenching on the results in mental arithmetic tests of twenty young adults.

The tests went like this. The participants were given sets of hundred-square calculations to do mentally, four times in all. One of the test series was carried out with the participants clenching and un-clenching their teeth in a rhythmic fashion. The activity of the left jaw muscle (the masseter muscle) was monitored electronically to ensure that clenching activity was absent or rhythmic as appropriate.

The result? Well, clenching doesn’t help with mental arithmetic. Interestingly, the conclusion drawn was that “the results indicate that it may not be harmful for clinicians to encourage their patients to refrain from clenching their teeth.”

It certainly wasn’t harmful to the arithmetic test result and exercise is usually good for the muscles, so maybe it was considered harmful to the teeth. So maybe the best compromise is that if you must clench rhythmically, do it on chewing gum.

  1. doi:10.1016/j.jpor.2010.12.004 

Playing Polly Politics


Why is it surprising to many people that animals that live in groups will co-operate when it comes to something as important as food? We are all familiar with the co-operative hunting practices of groups of predators, and of the highly organized co-operative lifestyle of insect species such as bees and ants. Surely if a species is hanging together for the common good, they are already co-operating in some aspects of their life.

If we put them into the laboratory and train them to do tricks to obtain food, then maybe we should expect them to have some facility to work together. Péron et al, U of Paris ONLD have published a study on three African Grey parrots (1,2) that showed that they could co-operate to get food treats. Two had to work together in pulling strings to gain their just rewards.

In the first experiment, two birds had to simultaneously pull strings to slide some treats on a tray out from under a set of bars. In a second experiment, one bird had to jump on a perch to release the tray pulled by the other. So far, so good. The birds had the experimenters well trained putting goodies on the tray so they could stuff themselves with treats. No surprises here. Chimps can do it, as can elephants and crows. Even humans are good at pulling strings to help each other.

This is where it gets interesting, though. Just like in our offices where personality comes into play, so it is with parrots. The bird that had got the job of jumping on the perch to release the tray couldn’t/wouldn’t re-train to become a mere puller of strings.

Even more fun in terms of parrot prison political personality propensity to work together was the final experiment where they could work on their own to get some food, or choose to work with a colleague to get twice as much for each.

Well Shango was a loner. Zoe had a long-standing affair with Leo and would only work with him. She would have nothing to do with Shango. Leo was the pragmatic one. He would work with anybody who would give him twice as much. Leo is obviously destined for high office.



  1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/j7r6473t145xh05h/
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12913981

But On The Other Hand


Take a look at your hands. There is far more information about you hidden there than most of us would like to think. The palms and calluses only tell what you have been doing with them, or not doing with them if they are soft and delicate. There is much more telling information available, though. Get a ruler out and measure your fingers. Just the index and the ring fingers will do. Some of your traits can be seen there. Built in at birth, are our tendency to be physically aggressive, to suffer from attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder, alcoholism, our ability to perform in examinations and, not so bad, our tendency to be left-handed.

This very scary piece of information is the result of a study by Kornhuber et al carried out in Germany (1). The ratio of the lengths of our index to our ring fingers is crucial. An added indicator is the difference between the two hands.

These finger ratios are smaller in males and reflect the prenatal exposure to hormones, mainly testosterone. The right hand is the prime indicator and the closer the ratio is to 1 the less likely you are to have an alcohol problem. Apparently, because women tend to have digit ratios closer to 1 than men, they are less likely to become alcoholics.

Examination marks for guys with ratios closer to 1 are generally higher than those for guys with a ratio close to 0.95. Women didn’t fit this model, though. But it is interesting to note that women in academia tend to have ratios closer to the male population than the general female population. (Nails don’t count of course.)

I have to go for my annual physical today, and will try and keep my hands firmly in my pockets in case I come away with prescriptions for Ritalin and Naltrexone, just because we shook hands. Sympathy for my exam results wouldn’t go amiss though.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019332

A Drop Too Much And Too Often


Whether you are a man or a mouse, or a rat come to that, drinking too much alcohol is bad for you. Many of us have observed at first or second hand the effects of ethanol on the central nervous system. Those effects are over a broader spectrum than we realize. One interaction is with the μ-opioid receptor giving a feel good effect from an increase in dopamine. A study by He and Whistler of U of California (1) has shown a downside to this in that a tolerance to morphine (the μ in μ-opioid) can result.  

The study was carried out with a team of alcoholic rats. These were indulged with an open bar on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when booze equivalent to 50/50 vodka/water was available. Plain water was always on tap as well, of course. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, they were on the wagon. Curiously, no mention was made of their drinking habits over weekends. I guess gentlemen wouldn’t ask about that, after all, they wouldn’t be working and would be on their own time.

The analgesic effect of morphine was checked on both teetotal and alcoholic rats by shining a heat lamp on their tails and measuring the time it took them to flick it out of the way. A maximum of 10 seconds was allowed so as not to produce damage for those enjoying a morphine high.

The first item of bad news for the alcoholic rats is that all that booze reduces the effect of morphine, so they felt the heat. The other item of bad news is that the primary therapeutic for mending alcoholics, naltrexone, is also blocked so they’d be going cold turkey for longer. However, that didn’t end up as their problem; their destiny was elsewhere.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019372

Put 'em Up


We are told that animals will fight over things ‘worth fighting for’ such as food, water, nest sites or mates. These are all demonstratively important resources to the animals involved. We, on the other hand, suffer from ‘big brain syndrome’, and will readily fight over ideologies, especially those that include religion and honor. Of course, that doesn’t preclude us from fighting over resources, just like the all the rest of our cousins out there.

The question to ask, at least I hope that we ask it, is “what is the value of the resource that we are going to fight over?” As you are squaring off, your perception of the value may be incorrect. You perception can change with your recent situation. For example, you might fight over a pile of dollar bills if you were broke, but might not value the pile very highly if you had just won the lottery. And you can see that when it comes to fighting over a potential mate, that the decisions become clouded in the mists of one imagination.

The Dugatkins from Louisville have just published a study on fighting decisions (1). They use food as the ‘resource’ to be fought over, and instead of have a class of students duking it out over beer and burgers, they used a computer simulation so that the results would be applicable to other species, whether more enlightened or not. They set up the rules to include over or underestimation of the value of the resource as well, as decisions made on a full or empty belly. The results were analyzed on the will to fight, and a random curve ball was thrown in in the form of whether a unit was a winner or a loser.

The key factor in success was the overestimation of the value of the resource. Those units that consistently overvalued the resources at stake, whether hungry or not, fared best in the predicted outcome of the model fights. 

Now I really, really like chocolate chip cookies, so if there is only one left on the plate, look out!

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019924