Weird Science tries to control its anger, gets even angrier

Self control causes pervasive anger: That’s actually not a joke headline; it really does. Earlier research had indicated people who are exercising self control—say smokers attempting to quit—are more prone to aggression. But a new study indicates that the anger appears in most aspects of a person’s life (that link may not be working yet). “We find that after exerting self-control,” the authors report, “people exhibit increased preference for anger-themed content, greater interest in faces exhibiting anger, greater endorsement of anger-framed appeals, and greater irritation to others’ attempts to control their behavior.” Exercising self-control in these cases involved things like picking a healthy snack or spending less money, so we’re not talking about major life events.

Plants are particular about their carrion eaters: A classic example of evolution are flowers that are so uniquely shaped that only a single insect species, with appropriately shaped mouth parts, can fertilize them. Researchers have now provided another example of this plant-insect specificity, one not based on shape, but rather the reeking stench of death. A few flowers attract pollinators by smelling like a corpse, which attracts bugs that are into laying their eggs on dead animals. There is an orchid species that releases such a finely tuned stench that only one species of fly lands on it. The plant is so convincing that females actually lay their eggs on it.

Weird non-cosmology: This one’s quite a tale. Some of you may remember that a few years back, researchers announced they had found what appeared to be cell-like organic structures inside a meteor that originated on Mars. The interpretation ended up being controversial—various non-biological processes can produce similar deposits—and the evidence has since been considered inconclusive. History seems to have repeated itself with a paper written by a NASA scientist but published in the rather unorthodox looking Journal of Cosmology. The paper claims to have found evidence of bacteria in a variety of meteors, suggesting life might be all over the solar system. Scientists quickly made some of the same critiques of this paper, noting that we don’t know whether these are real cells and, if so, whether they’re contamination.

There it might have ended, except the people behind the Journal of Cosmology have not responded to criticism well, pretending that no credible sources had voiced any objections, and lashing out at NASA for pursuing a religious persecution of its own staff. This e-mail from the editor, hosted by David Dobbs, is positively hallucinogenic, containing statements like “The choice is simple: Science as advocated by the Journal of Cosmology, or religion masquerading as science as advocated by our critics.” The whole thing’s worth a read.

You win some, you lose some: Clean drinking water is generally a very good thing for human health, but leaving the disinfectants, like chlorine, in can actually have an adverse effect on health. A study of disinfectant exposure in Spain found that the wealthy manage to avoid ingesting disinfectants in tap water by having more bottled water, but they compensate for that lower risk by spending more time in pools, where they get exposed to chlorine anyway.

Hopping continents as bird poop: Lots of species that produce berries have their seeds spread far and wide by birds, which eat the berries and then drop the seeds in their droppings. In the case of the crowberry, this method seems to have helped it hop continents. The North American species show the normal branching pattern of speciation based on molecular clock experiments, but every single South American species traces back to a common ancestor, one that the authors conclude was brought to South America inside a bird.

Banana peels get the lead out: Provided you mince them up and use them as a water filter. They also remove copper, and could be used for at over 10 purification cycles without losing capacity.