The Bad Boy: Girls Really DO Like Them Best

The “bad boy” has a long-standing place in YA literature. He’s mysterious, alluring, dangerous, sexy—and it’s deliciously thrilling to experience the vicarious thrill of a heroine falling for him, whether it’s a good idea or not.

*Photo credit

But I’ve always thought that, in real life, women wouldn’t find the “bad boy” image quite as appealing. It turns out I’m wrong.

A new study from the University of British Columbia suggests that women find happy guys less sexually attractive than either moody or arrogant men. From the press release:

In a series of studies, more than 1,000 adult participants rated the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of images of the opposite sex engaged in universal displays of happiness (broad smiles), pride (raised heads, puffed-up chests) and shame (lowered heads, averted eyes).

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Handwriting, Learning, and the Science of Writing Longhand

Longhand? Keyboard? Pen on parchment? Number 2 pencil on graph paper? Blood on strips of birch bark?

Ask a roomful of writers for their methods of putting words on the page, and you’ll spark a debate as passionate as the outline vs. seat-of-the-pants writing methods.

For speed, you can’t beat typing your story straight onto the computer—and that’s a skill I’m working on. When I hit a creative slump, though, I find that writing longhand lets me tap into my subconscious in a way that clicking keys don’t.

*Photo courtesy of D Sharon Pruitt at the Flickr Creative Commons

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Cool Science: Landing Lights for Bumblebees

How cool is this?  

Caption: Gardeners could help maintain bumblebee populations by growing plants with red flowers or flowers with stripes along the veins, according to field observations of the common snapdragon, Antirrhinum majus, at the John Innes Centre in the UK. Bees are important pollinators of crops as well as the plants in our gardens

Wolves take the highway now?

This is pretty amazing (via Ecorazzi):

The Most Influential Tweeters

If you Tweet, you might be interested in recent research from the laboratory of Alok Choudhary at Northwestern University, where grad student Ramanathan Narayanan and colleagues created a website that "uses a specialized algorithm to rank the most influential people tweeting on trending topics".

The result? While celebrities like Britney Spears and Lady Gaga gather huge numbers of Twitter followers, people are paying more attention to tweets from those with greater knowledge.

The website, http://pulseofthetweeters.com/, is an interesting resource for those of us trying to figure out what’s going on in the Twitterverse. Although I haven’t quite figured out how to apply it to what I tweet…which has nothing to do with Britney Spears, Desperate Housewives, or #welcometoChicago :P.

:) Cheryl

* Photo courtesy of Giles Gunthier, Flickr Commons

Music and Mood: Emotion Classification in Contemporary Music

Music is a recurring theme in my writing, so it was with great interest that I read recent news from the Glasgow Caledonian University on how music can impact mood, stress, and even the experience of pain:

 

In a study titled “Emotion Classification in Contemporary Music”, researchers had volunteers listen to a variety of contemporary music that isn’t available to the public, then rank the music in terms of its emotional impact. Project leader Dr Don Knox says, "We look at parameters such as rhythm patterns, melodic range, musical intervals, length of phrases, musical pitch and so on. For example, music falling into a positive category might have a regular rhythm, bright timbre and a fairly steady pitch contour over time. If tempo and loudness increase, for instance, this would place the piece in a more 'exuberant' or 'excited' region of the graph."

I think of music as a language* that we humans don’t fully understand, but one that speaks to all of us. It’s a language birds use to fight, defend territory, boast and brag…a language we humans use to inspire, soothe, comfort, trigger memories, rile up a crowd…I find it fascinating that particular arrangements of sound waves, performed in particular rhythms, volumes, and pitches can influence so many different people in so many different ways.

Music is magical.

At least, it is if you’re writing fantasy :).

Cheryl

*NYC’s Radio Lab produced a fascinating radio show titled “Musical Language,” in which they discuss topics such as research showing that people from multiple different cultures use the same “song” in their words when speaking to infants and “musical illusions”. Check it out!

Cool Science for the Day: DNA Extracted from Dolphin “Blow”

A group of scientists from Georgetown University, the National Aquarium, and the University of Queensland have pioneered a new technique for gaining DNA samples from dolphins: they’ve extracted DNA from dolphin “blow”—that is, the misty breath dolphins blow out when they surface.

This is pretty cool because the current best method, the “dart biopsy”, is invasive (see the “dart” part), can’t be used on young animals, and requires a great deal of skill to carry out. Both techniques can only be used on nearby animals, but since dolphins enjoy the occasional frolic in a boat’s wake, they often approach boats of their own volition.

So far, scientists have obtained blow samples from captive dolphins by training them to exhale on command, into test tubes. Now that they know the technique works, they’re working on taking the method into the field—specifically, a population of bottlenose dolphins in Western Australia’s Shark Bay.

I’d like to watch this. How the heck do you get a a bow-riding wild dolphin to exhale into a test tube? It’s a great idea that sounds very tricky to put into practice. I’ll be waiting to see if they can get it to work!

:) Cheryl

More on Computer Games…

To add to my angst about all the time my kids are spending in front of the screen, I just read this report on how “Video games lead to faster decisions that are no less accurate.”*

Researchers at the University of Rochester tested students ages 18 to 25 who didn’t usually play video games. Half of them were required to play 50 hours of the high-action games “Call of Duty 2” and “Unreal Tournament”; the other half played the slow-moving game “The Sims 2”. Afterward, they tested students’ ability to make quick decisions—and found that the action game players were up to 25 percent faster and just as accurate as those who played the slower-paced game. Researcher Daphne Bavelier says, “It's not the case that the action game players are trigger-happy and less accurate…[they] make more correct decisions per unit time. If you are a surgeon or you are in the middle of a battlefield, that can make all the difference.”

Do me a favor: don’t tell my kids about this, okay?

:) Cheryl

*This research will be published in the journal Current Biology in a paper authored by Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green.

Depression Prevention

In the past few years, an entire new field of psychology has sprung up known as Positive Psychology. Positive Psychology “is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive”. It focuses on what’s right with people instead of what’s wrong. Positive psychology research has identified numerous practices that can help make people more emotionally resilient:

1. Exercise: Research shows that aerobic exercise (3 times a week for 30 minutes) has the same affect on depressive symptoms as antidepressants. In addition, regular exercise can reduce anxiety by 20%
2. Be thankful—keep a gratitude journal. Science backs it up: research at Kent State University found that regularly writing expressions of gratitude improved happiness.
3. Meditation: Dr. Marsha Lucas writes and blogs about how meditation actually “rewires” the brain to improve relationships and develop emotional resiliency. Recent research also shows that meditation can thicken an area of the brain involved in pain sensation—decreasing pain sensitivity.
4. Apply chocolate (of course)—and if anyone gives you a hard time, point them to research on chocolate’s benefits here, here, and here.

Additional Resources

1. The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center’s website, Authentic Happiness, offers questionnaires to measure depression symptoms and to assess your current happiness, overall happiness, and enduring happiness.
2. Signal Patterns offers numerous web- and mobile-based applications for inserting positive psychology practices into your life, including my favorite, the Live Happy application for iPhone.
3. On The Happiness Project website, author Gretchen Rubin explores what does and does not contribute to happiness. She also offers The Happiness Project Toolbox to help readers create their own Happiness Project.
4. Numerous free how-to-medicate podcasts are available through iTunes, such as Lisa Dale Miller’s Mindfulness of Breath Meditation for Beginners. Dr. Lucas also offers a free meditation download on her website.

The bonus to many of these activities is that they boost creativity as well as fending off depression. I’m much more likely to take up a positive habit than to kick a bad habit, and the evolving field of positive psych helps us do just that.

What positive habit can you add to your life?

:) Cheryl

More on crochet for the science geek

In 2004, the mathematics journal Mathematical Intelligencer published instructions for crocheting your very own chaos model. Two professors in Bristol University’s Department of Engineering Mathematics, Dr. Hinke Osinga and Professor Bernd Krauskopf, were trying to create a computer model of the paths a leaf might take in a turbulent river. They used something called the Lorenz equations, which can be used to describe chaotic systems.

The result? A thing of curves and beauty containing more than 25,000 crochet stitches—or about as many stitches as a large-ish, dense afghan. 

Pretty cool, isn’t it?!

:) Cheryl

Picture from press release, EurekAlert!, December 16 2004

Cool science info for the day…

Question for the day: Why do you breathe harder when you exercise?

If you’re like me, you probably think it’s because your body needs more oxygen. And that’s no doubt part of the truth, but there’s another piece of the puzzle that I didn’t know until today: you breathe more rapidly in order to keep your blood from becoming too acidic.

Here’s how it works (in Cheryl’s condensed and oversimplified science version):

When your muscles work, they metabolize energy-storage compounds to release energy and—in the process—they release acidic products like lactic acid.

Lactic acid moves into the blood stream where, if nobody does anything about it, it will make the blood acidic. Too acidic = bad.

Luckily, your blood contains a buffering system made up of carbonic acid (H₂CO₃) and the hydrogen carbonate ion (HCO₃^-)

In your bloodstream, there’s a constant back and forth reaction between these two guys. H₂CO₃ loses a proton (H⁺) to form HCO₃^-; HCO₃^- picks it back up again to form H₂CO₃.

When lactic acid comes on the scene, it adds more protons to the mix, which get picked up by HCO₃^-; the tricky part is that these compounds are a sort of teeter-totter. If there are too many on one side of the teeter-totter (equation), then they’ll slide back over to the other side. Interpretation: add more protons and it forms H₂CO₃, but if too much H₂CO₃ builds up, it will break apart again.

The solution is that the body has to get rid of the H₂CO₃. Which it does by means of another reaction that converts H₂CO₃ to water and carbon dioxide (CO₂.) This reaction is on a teeter-totter, too, though. They body has to get rid of that extra CO₂ or the whole process backs up like a tube slide full of kids.

How do you get rid of CO₂? You breathe.

So when you breathe harder when exercising, just think: you’re not just gaining oxygen. You’re lowering your blood pH!

(And when you think that, you may count yourself a true science geek :).)

Cheryl

Friday’s Funky Fact

Your nose might look like a single entity, but when it comes to smelling, the two nostrils seem to operate independently. Denise Chen of Rice University pumped two different odors into a volunteer’s nose. One nostril got a whiff of roses; the other, felt-tipped marker.

The result wasn’t what you might expect. The subject didn’t smell a blend of the two odors. Instead, the smell flip-flipped between the two: they’d smell rose, then marker, and so on.

Seems as if the nostrils have to take turns sending their signals to the brain. Who knew?

I learned this funky fact by listening to the AAAS Science Update podcast, September 24, 2009. Hope you think it’s as cool as I do!

:) Cheryl

The data’s in: nice guys DON’T always finish last

Recent research at Binghamton University and the University of Arizona casts new light on the nice guy versus aggressive jerk question. Who is more successful, the polite gentleman or the pushy fellow who won’t take no for an answer? The answer appears in the November 6 issue of Science Magazine.

This is a very important question for YA writers, don’t ya think?

It turns out that these scientists study attraction in water striders rather than in humans, but their findings seem to translate to human culture pretty well. When a male jerk (water strider) approaches a group of female water striders, the females bug out (bad pun intended, and no, water striders aren’t really bugs, my fine fellow science geeks…) If a female happens upon a gentleman of a strider, though, she sticks around. Pretty soon, the nice guys are surrounded by females while the jerks…I don’t know, maybe they get into a bar fight?

Take heart, all you sweetheart males in the world. As soon as the gals notice you, you’ll be the center of attention.

I’m not sure this is good news for the girls, though. It might explain why most of the good guys are taken….

:) Cheryl