The evolutionary roots of shopping?

Today's spurious hunter-gatherer reference, found in a Christian Science Monitor article about men being disproportionately represented among last-minute shoppers:

A University of Michigan study (.pdf) released earlier this month suggests evolution may be to blame.

Typically, women’s shopping habit are informed by skills once used as gatherers, theorizes Daniel Kruger, research faculty at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Men, he says, shop like hunters.

“The sexually divergent adaptations for gathering and hunting may be evident in reports of shopping experiences, as shopping could be considered a form of foraging in the modern consumer environment...,” the study says. “Men, in turn, will report shopping strategies and experiences that resemble hunting skills.”

That explains why women often spend more time shopping – looking for just the right item – while men are more hurried, Mr. Kruger says.

Tripping with cancer

The Guardian has an article on recent experiments with hallucinogenic drugs being conducted by scientists, basically the first since the 1970s. LSD for some reason had a very negative reception when it first because popularized, as did MDMA (ecstasy) later on. But what's striking about the trials is not what they're studying, but that they're studying the exact same things that were being studied over three decades ago. That is, because of the restrictions placed on researchers and the government's quasi-monopsony power over scientists through research grants, this promising area was left untouched for a very long time. The ailments that hallucinogens might help are mainly in the psychological field – the article focuses on the post-trip clearness that terminal patients feel after being given a dose of either LSD (acid) or psilocybin (magic mushrooms). It's pathetic that the drug scare has taken this long to get over among the medical establishment, let alone among politicians and voters.

Humans go to work, come home, stay home

Over at the Antiplanner's blog (I find his blog's name incredibly ironic given the author's views, but that's for another time), where I often find myself sucked into repetitive arguments about the merits of contemporary American land use and transportation policy, one commenter made the assertion that individualized transport is inherently superior to mass transit because:

By definition and, communal transport meets only the most common needs. One might lower their aspirations, but it would be like telecom reverting to the party-line phone at the general store.

I take issue with this comment on a number of levels, but today I read an article in the NYT that suggests that "common needs" might be just about all we need. The article is about a study published in Nature that analyzed the movement pattern of 100,000 people in an unnamed European country via cell phone records. The Times write-up didn't have any quantitative specifics, and the study itself is gated, but the researchers concluded that "[i]ndividuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work." It makes you wonder how necessary the on-demand flexibility of the road/car system really is.

Edit: Reader DS points to this link for an ungated version of the article.

Teenager solves never-decomposing plastic dilemma

From Wired, "Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months":

The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.

Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that's needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.

Nature's best friend: the city

From Wired, here's a very informative map of per-capita carbon emissions in the United States. If you want total carbon emissions (not per capita), they have another. The maps are essentially inverted – the places that use the most amount of total energy are the most densely populated, yet they emit much less carbon per person. Even cities that we don't think of as very urban – like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and all cities in Texas – do very well in per-capita carbon emissions. In the original article, they show a close-up of the LA metro area, and it actually says that some parts have negative carbon emissions. I don't really understand how that's possible, but the point – that they have a carbon footprint about an order of magnitude smaller – is well taken.

There are a few reasons why cities are so much more efficient than other types of living. For one, people occupy smaller houses, and those houses are often stacked on top of each other, allowing more insulation, which reduces heating and cooling costs. Their transportation carbon footprint is much lower, since car ownership is less prevalent, and ground-based mass transit is remarkably energy efficient. This applies to all goods consumed in cities: since many distribution systems are based at least somewhat on a hub-and-spoke model, being in the "hub" allows goods to get to you much faster, using less energy. Furthermore (and this may account for the negative carbon emissions of the most densely-populated centers), the amount of nature that has to be destroyed is much lower, and many natural landscapes (forests, plains, etc.) act as carbon sinks, removing carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into oxygen.

Most of the time, efficiency in energy equates with efficiency in economics, as the system will use fewer inputs to achieve the same output. However, we'll never know, since the most polluting industries (transportation and energy production) have had their market signals removed by government policies and regulation, ensuring the perpetuation of the very anti-market status quo.

Why politicians wouldn't want to talk about science

The headline on wired.com today is an article about Clinton, Obama, and McCain spurning a debate that was supposed to be about science. You'd think that would be a warm place for Democrats: there is no fundamentalist Christian base out there asking them to refute basic tenants of modern science, and yet neither of them wanted to show up at the event. It's pretty telling, though, of electoral strategies: debating science is a very technical topic, and actually requires expertise. Which isn't a bad thing – if a president is going to be making decisions that are ultimately rooted in science, they ought to know something about it. But people don't campaign on facts, they campaign generalities. What's Obama going to say when someone confronts him about the environmental and humanitarian costs of ethanol subsidies? Or when McCain is questioned about his statement that marijuana has no unique medicinal value? Or when any of the candidates are pressed on how likely any of their plans are to actually address America's contribution to general environmental degradation? So much of electioneering is based on trying to get people to not pay attention to numbers and facts, so it doesn't seem to be in anyone's advantage to embarrass themselves when they have to concede that they really don't know much about science at all.