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This Thanksgiving, Be Thankful for Science

By Michael Roston

Look, we’re not saying you can’t talk about politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But it’s been quite a November so far, following a seemingly never-ending campaign, and the anxiety in the air is thicker than your mom’s gravy. Some people are sitting out Thanksgiving with their loved ones altogether. Others are preparing themselves for acts of civil disagreement.

We think there’s a better way. So we’re offering a selection of some of our favorite science and health stories from 2016 that should bring together your Trump-loving uncle and your Hillary-hailing cousin for a thought-provoking, scream-free conversation. They’ll go great with white meat, dark meat or even a tofurkey.

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Global Warming Alters Arctic Food Chain, Scientists Say, With Unforeseeable Results

By Carl Zimmer

The Arctic Ocean may seem remote and forbidding, but to birds, whales and other animals, it’s a top-notch dining destination.

“It’s a great place to get food in the summertime, so animals are flying or swimming thousands of miles to get there,” said Kevin R. Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University.

But the menu is changing. Confirming earlier research, scientists reported Wednesday that global warming is altering the ecology of the Arctic Ocean on a huge scale.

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Life Driven Purpose, pg 67

“Reason is not a thing. It is a function of the brain. Our brains have a hugely complex new layer, or set of layers, that have evolved to the point where we now have the ability to use language and to think more broadly about behavior. We can think about our thoughts. We can think about thinking about our thoughts. We can think about other people thinking about us thinking about their thoughts. (This is sometimes called Theory of Mind.) We can deliberate, compare, anticipate, contrast, imagine, and prioritize. We can run “what if” scenarios. We can refrain from acting and wait for more information. (That is one of the functions of the frontal lobe, which checks our actions in social settings. It is what keeps you from burping loudly at a wedding or funeral, for example.) We can investigate, read, and ask for help. We can search our memories for consequences to similar situations, past lessons, previous mistakes.”

–Dan Barker, Life Driven Purpose, pg 67

Discuss!

This Week in Science (Nov. 13 – 20)

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Trump understands what many miss: people don’t make decisions based on facts

By Julia Belluz and Brian Resnick

Donald Trump made an “unusual degree” of blatantly false and misleading statements for a presidential candidate. And he won. Since then, we’ve seen the continuation of the pattern: On November 10, a day after the election, he insisted, with no credible evidence, that election protesters were paid actors. On Sunday, he described elements of his first 100 days’ plan — the deportation of 3 million “illegal immigrant criminals” — that are, as Vox’s Dara Lind has reported, based on faulty statistics.

This track record doesn’t portend an era of truthfulness at the Trump White House. And many are questioning if facts are under genuine assault. NPR’s senior VP of news, Michael Oreskes, recently reminded listeners, “Our first principle is that facts exist and that they matter.”

But Trump was actually just trading on something psychologists and political scientists have known for years: that people don’t necessarily make decisions based on facts. Instead, we are often guided by our emotions and deeply held biases. Humans are also very adept at ignoring facts so that we can continue to see the world in a way that conforms to our preconceived notions. And simply stating factual information that contradicts those deeply held beliefs is often not enough to combat the spread of misinformation.

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A Muslim Version of New Atheism

By Taner Edis

Atheism is rare in Muslim populations. Moreover, even more than among Christians, atheists are distrusted and associated with immorality. Public expressions of non­belief often risk prosecution, and nonbelievers who escape blasphemy laws face severe social disapproval, risking livelihoods and family ties.

Still, there is a Muslim tradition of religious skepticism, particularly among intellectuals with a modern education. Most Western nonbelievers know little about Muslim atheists, who have typically been leftists or secular nationalists, fans of the European Enlightenment but critics of Western imperialism. Much of what they have said, therefore, has not been interesting or acceptable to a mainstream American audience.

Ali Rizvi’s The Atheist Muslim presents a more relatable version of dissent from Islam. Coming from an educated, prosperous, and liberal Pakistani Shia family, Rizvi grew up with the experience of being a religious minority both in his homeland and in Saudi Arabia, where his parents worked for some years. Both Shia and conservative Sunni practices shaped Rizvi’s perception of Islam. He eventually trained as a physician and settled in North America, and though many applied scientists gravitate toward religious nationalism or a mushy liberal spirituality, Rizvi went in a more skeptical direction.

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FTC Issues Enforcement Policy Statement Regarding Marketing Claims for Over-the-Counter Homeopathic Drugs

By FTC Staff

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a new “Enforcement Policy Statement on Marketing Claims for Over-the-Counter (OTC) Homeopathic Drugs.” The policy statement was informed by an FTC workshop held last year to examine how such drugs are marketed to consumers. The FTC also released its staff report on the workshop, which summarizes the panel presentations and related public comments in addition to describing consumer research commissioned by the FTC.

The policy statement explains that the FTC will hold efficacy and safety claims for OTC homeopathic drugs to the same standard as other products making similar claims. That is, companies must have competent and reliable scientific evidence for health-related claims, including claims that a product can treat specific conditions. The statement describes the type of scientific evidence that the Commission requires of companies making such claims for their products.

Homeopathy, which dates back to the 1700s, is based on the theory that disease symptoms can be treated by minute doses of substances that produce similar symptoms when provided in larger doses to healthy people. Many homeopathic products are diluted to such an extent that they no longer contain detectable levels of the initial substance. According to the policy statement, homeopathic theories are not accepted by most modern medical experts.

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Overcoming Your Negativity Bias

By Tony Schwartz

Does this sound familiar? You’re feeling a bit uneasy – say, a tightness in your chest or a rumbling in your stomach. You search your mind for the cause, and you think of something unsettling that happened in the office yesterday, a difficult conversation you need to have or a deadline you’re facing on a project. Before you know it, worries are mounting in your mind, one feeding on the next.

It’s a phenomenon called “negativity bias.” “Over and over,” Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, says, “the mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly and persistently than to equivalent good things.” Or as Roy Baumeister, a fellow psychologist, puts it, “It’s evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good.”

True enough, if there’s a lion chasing you. Not so true sitting at your desk trying to work in a clear, focused way, which was precisely my goal on the recent morning that a succession of negative thoughts began to multiply in my mind.

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Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.

By Cal Newport

I’m a millennial computer scientist who also writes books and runs a blog. Demographically speaking I should be a heavy social media user, but that is not the case. I’ve never had a social media account.

At the moment, this makes me an outlier, but I think many more people should follow my lead and quit these services. There are many issues with social media, from its corrosion of civic life to its cultural shallowness, but the argument I want to make here is more pragmatic: You should quit social media because it can hurt your career.

This claim, of course, runs counter to our current understanding of social media’s role in the professional sphere. We’ve been told that it’s important to tend to your so-called social media brand, as this provides you access to opportunities you might otherwise miss and supports the diverse contact network you need to get ahead. Many people in my generation fear that without a social media presence, they would be invisible to the job market.

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This video about the scale of black holes will crush your poor, tiny brain

By Fiona MacDonald

Black holes are vast, matter-annihilating objects that seem to defy physics by their very existence. They’re so weird, that when Albert Einstein’s equations first predicted the existence of these beasts, he didn’t believe they could actually be real.

And you can’t really blame him, because the idea that we have these singularities of space-time intent on sucking up all the matter around them scattered all around our cosmic backyard is pretty hard to wrap your head around.

But as people who write about black holes a lot, we figured we were past being shocked by how strange and massive they are.

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