Scientific Method —

Weird Science waves its phantom limb in the air like it doesn’t care

The annoyance of halfalogues, vaccinating against a heart attack, and how a …

You don't need to lose a limb to get a phantom one: Phantom limbs are a pretty well-known after-effect of the loss of a real limb. Individuals unfortunate enough to lose the real thing often experience the sensations associated with an actual limb, including movements and pain. But it turns out you've got another option if you want to experience a phantom limb: have a stroke, instead. Individuals with strokes experienced everything from simply losing track of their actual limb to experiencing the sensation that one of their limbs was performing voluntary movements directed towards a specific goal. Overall, a stroke may be the better option, given that the only person to experience phantom limb pain in the study group was someone who actually did have a limb amputated prior to having a stroke.

Yes, we're looking at you: Here's a paper that attempts to answer a very serious question, laid out in the first sentence: "Why are people more irritated by nearby cell-phone conversations than by conversations between two people who are physically present?" The authors define the portion of a cell phone call that many of us suffer through as a "halfalogue," and then demonstrate that, in contrast to a normal dialogue, people find the unpredictable nature of a one-sided conversation really distracting—so distracting, in fact, that it lowers their performance on cognitive tests.

Inaction speaks louder than words: Most of us talk about getting more fit and, for some of us, that means talk about moving somewhere where outdoor activities like hiking and biking are convenient options. But it turns out that simply wanting to be fit can be more important than actually making it easier to get fit. A paper looks at people who express interest in moving to take advantage of recreational activities. Those who actually make that move end up with higher body mass index compared to people who expressed interest but stayed in place.

Oddly, the exact opposite was seen when the choice was to move to a neighborhood that had lots of walking opportunities; here, the people who wanted to move someplace where they could walk a bit more and then actually moved ended up with a lower BMI than their peers who stayed put.

Your career choice may determine the site where your brain decays: And when we say site, we're not talking about your desk. A form of dementia called Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration results from the, well, degeneration of specific areas of the brain, but may strike the left-hand side of the brain worse than the right, or vice versa. Some researchers looked for factors that might be linked to which side was affected, and found an unusual correlation. "Patients whose professions placed high demands on language and mathematics had relatively preserved left temporal relative to right temporal volumes," according to their findings. They can't tell whether early problems with degeneration help ease people into appropriate careers, or whether exercising that part of the brain heavily at work ends up being protective.

Decoupling the predator-prey relationship: One of the findings of a recent ecological study isn't very surprising: in a rural environment, the more predators around a bird's nest, the lower the survival rate of the chicks being reared in that nest. The surprise came when the analysis shifted to an urban setting, where this relationship went away entirely. The authors suspect that, with all the human-supplied food around, the predators simply can't be bothered with expending the energy to actually hunt down prey.

A vaccination against heart attacks is already on the market: Well, actually, it's more that vaccines against the seasonal flu help reduce the risk of heart attacks. The connection is more logical than it might sound at first. Often, heart attacks are triggered by respiratory distress, and the flu tends to cause that. There are a couple of odd things about the results, though. One is that having the vaccination prior to November seemed to have a much larger effect; the other is that a vaccination against pneumococcal infections, which can also cause respiratory distress, was ineffective.

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