Ig Nobels for a funny Saturday

The Ig Nobels have been announced!
[Via Observations of a Nerd]

Every year, the crew behind the Annals of Improbable Research honor research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think.” These awards, known as the Ig Nobels, honor some of the most entertaining research published in the past year. The competition is fierce, and the prizes highly coveted. But without further ado! This year, the winners are…

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Some of these are great – using remote controlled helicopters to collect while breath – while at least one, for Economics, is simply snark:

The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

Always fun to hear about.

Another infectious disease completely eliminated

by greg westfall.

Virus Deadly in Livestock Is No More, U.N. Declares
[Via NYT > Health]

In only the second elimination of a disease in history, rinderpest — a virus that used to kill cattle by the millions, leading to famine and death among humans — has been declared wiped off the face of the earth.

Rinderpest, which means “cattle plague” in German, does not infect humans, though it belongs to the same viral family as measles. But for millenniums in Asia, Europe and Africa it wiped out cattle, water buffalo, yaks and other animals needed for meat, milk, plowing and cart-pulling.

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First smallpox. Then Rinderpest. Another victory for immunization.

Water usage affects more than humans

by Pete McBride

A River Ran Through It
[Via NSF News]

Rivers and streams supply the lifeblood to ecosystems across the globe, providing water for drinking and irrigation for humans as well as a wide array of life forms from single-celled organisms up to the fish humans eat.

But humans and nature itself are making it tough on rivers to continue in their central role to support fish species, according to new research by a team of scientists including John Sabo, a biologist at Arizona State University.

Globally, rivers and streams are being drained due to human use and climate change. These and other human impacts alter the natural variability of river flows.

Some affected rivers have dried and no longer run, while others have seen increases in the variability of flows due to storm floods.

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I wrote earlier about the effect of drought on human uses for water. This research shows what happens to the fish populations as rivers dry out – as can be seen in the dead, dry Colorado River delta near the Sea of Cortez in the photo above.

Essentially, the food webs are simplified and the top predators disappear. We will have to answer this:

“The question becomes: can you have fish and tomatoes on the same table?” Sabo asked.

“They compete for the same resources, and society depends on both: agriculture for grain, fruits, vegetables, and fish for protein, particularly in the developing world.

“Humans may need to make hard decisions about how to allocate water so that we grow the right food, but still leave enough in rivers to sustain fish populations.”

Crazy glue gets a big award for its inventor

White House Announces National Medal of Science Laureates
[Via NSF News]

President Obama today named 10 researchers as recipients of the National Medal of Science, and three individuals and one team as recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honors bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers and inventors. The recipients will receive their awards at a White House ceremony tentatively scheduled for mid-November.

“The extraordinary accomplishments of these scientists, engineers and inventors are a testament to American industry and ingenuity,” President Obama said. “Their achievements have redrawn the frontiers of human knowledge while enhancing American prosperity, and it is my tremendous pleasure to honor them for their important contributions.”

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I have heard of many of the winners for the National Medal of Science but this one for the National Medal of Technology caught my eye:

Harry Coover for his invention of cyanoacrylates, a new class of adhesives that have influenced medicine and industry, and are known widely to consumers as “super” glues.

Cool.

Are we talking about the Bar Maid and the Baron here or something more serious?

by Alaskan Dude

New Sex Roles
[Via Daily Ideafeed | Big Think]

“For more than three decades evolutionary psychologists have advanced a simple theory of human sexuality: because men invest less reproductive effort in sperm than women do in eggs, men’s and women’s brains have been shaped differently by evolution. As a result, men are eager for sex whereas women are relatively choosy. But a steady stream of recent evidence suggests this paradigm could be in need of a makeover. ‘The science is now getting to a point where there is good data to question some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology,’ says social psychologist Wendy Wood of the University of Southern California.”

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It may well be that social attitudes provide greater pressures on sexual behavior than purely instinctual processes, such as easy male-choosy female. As the article says:

The eager males–choosy females paradigm doesn’t imply that men and women literally make conscious decisions about how much effort they should put into short- and long-term mating relative to their costs of reproduction—minutes versus months. Instead the idea is that during human history, men and women who happened to have the right biochemical makeup to be easy and choosy, respectively, would leave more offspring than their counterparts.

But for humans, having more offspring is not enough, as a very high proportion has historically dies in the first year. Actually getting more offspring to a reproductive age is more important.

This recent study, which seems to have provided better measures to the actual ‘value’ men and women put on their mating practices, show that both men and women place about the same value on short term relationships and that men put a lot of investment into their offspring.

Men do not purely follow a love em and leave em approach. The goal is to get more offspring to a reproductive age. Investing in that provides reasons for why men and women do what they do.

The interesting thing they found was that men are much more concerned about physical infidelity from their women partners than emotional infidelity. This makes sense if there is a real investment of men in the possible offspring.

And recent research seems to indicate that these sexual attitudes are determined by social pressures. Different pressures and you get different attitudes. This is too surprising. Human sexuality has some basic needs but different societies provide very different outlets for that need to reproduce.

The approach of Genghis Khan and his sons – conquer a large amount of territory and have lots of wives/concubines – resulted in perhaps 16 million descendants. Not a strategy that would be looked on favorably today.

Thinking about water in the Southwest

Lake Mead now very near its lowest level in history
[Via CEJournal]

Eleven years of low flows and growing consumption are draining the reservoir. Meanwhile, much of the rest of the West is slowly aridifying too.

Lake Mead shimmers in this photo shot by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, with thirsty Las Vegas sprawled across the desert at upper right.

In as little as the next few days, Lake Mead, the giant reservoir on the Colorado River that serves millions of water users, will drop to record low levels.

To be more precise, it is all but inevitable that its elevation above sea level will drop below 1,083.19 feet, the historic low reached in 1956. And when that happens, the reservoir will be at a level that has not been seen since the reservoir was filling up in the 1930s. (For the current level of Lake Mead, click here.)

Lake Mead is, in essence, a giant hydrological bank account from which California, Nevada and Arizona — the “lower basin” states of the Colorado River — make withdrawals to slake the thirst of cities like Las Vegas, and millions of acres of farmland. But 11 years of dry conditions, combined with ever growing demand, have steadily drained Lake Mead.

During the next century,  one of the most pressing environmental issues we’ll face will be “the intersection of carbon and climate change with all these other problems. And water is one of the first ones that’s arising. The Colorado River Basin is the classic case in the United States.”

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Almost every week brings new research regarding the altering water cycle in our world. There will have to be some changes in the laws governing water management.

Even with a changing climate, there have been periods in the past where these drought conditions lasted 60 years, instead of the current 11 years.

Because this is the sort of projection that does not inspire a lot of hope:

It shows the relative changes in water runoff of the 2090-2099 period compared to 1990-1999. Looks like the Columbia and Frasier flows will be doing okay but the Southwest will not be doing so good.

Making good decisions about water use will be critical for even making it to 2090 in any sort of reasonable shape.