It's generally accepted It has been demonstrated that as a nation's mean IQ increases their irreligiousity increases too (Lynn, Harvey & Nyborg, 2009). That is, there's a negative correlation between Intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) and religious beliefs (be that belief in (a) God(s), an after-life, or super-beings). The Lynn, Harvey and Nyborg (2009) paper claims the relationship between g and 'Disbelief in God' is .60. America, for whatever reason, is an outlier in this data.

Now there's likely to be 101 explanations as to why this is the case, and arguments and counter-arguments can be put forth to explain it. That particular debate is not what I'm interested in (at this very moment). What I am interested in is if the above statement is true, what else might be true? It's a controversial area of research, and so the information I could find was limited, but interesting.

Could there be some cognitive difference between non-believers and believers? Specifically, could religion influence cognitive style between the two groups. Alternatively, people could be born with a particular cognitive style which influences their religiousity, and this, I think, is an e . . . More

This bit of genius is brought to you by Matushiq Sotak.



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Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to speak with Chiren Boumaaza, aka Athene, who you may know as the extravagant internet celebrity, and professional gamer.

If you haven't heard of him, he's a record holder in World of Warcraft and online poker, and plays the main character in a series of videos on a popular youtube channel with well over 340,000 subscribers.

'Athene' is known for crashing gaming servers, with the aid of his massive army of followers, who just love to be part of the controversy and trouble Athene is so well known for.

Over the past year, we haven't heard much from him, and it seemed as though he had fallen off the grid. Recently Chiren broke his silence, and announced that his disappearance was due to being very busy, conducting new research in the fields of quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, and neuroscience. He continued to say that this research is culminating in significant new discoveries that will be presented in a documentary named 'Athene's Theory of Everything'. This was definitely an unexpected turn, and caused quite a stir, and some confusion within his fan . . . More

It’s a new year and a fine new time for me to resume blogging here at LabSpaces. 2010 was a good year for me in more ways than one. I finished my Ph.D. and graduated (I plan on blogging here about my defense). But 2011 promises to be even better.  I started my brand new postdoc yesterday in an entirely different field than my graduate work and that promises to be very cool. 

However, for some reason, it struck me and my PI as a fantastic idea for me to write a fellowship application right as I’m starting the postdoc. As I’m settling in to start writing, I realize how silly of an idea this was.  I’m not kidding when I say that my postdoc is in an entirely different area of research.  The only connection between my graduate work and this is that they both can be defined as in the biochemistry and molecular biology field.

I think switching fields like this is good for me for a couple of reasons.  There’s the not inconsequential reason that I find this area more interesting than my graduate work.  It’s also wide open area to study as there has been very little done to study the molecular biology of this area. So there are a ton of interesting questions that can be asked and investigated.  Also, from what I understand, learning new skills is a . . . More

Happy Valentine's Day!

In celebration for this day where people give candy and Hallmark cards to the ones they love, I decided to share a few of the weirdest and wildest animal mating strategies I have ever come across. It almost make you feel lucky to be a Homonid!

Animals have been around much, much longer than us, and will most likely persist long after we are gone. So, animals are the true senseis of sex. They’ve been doing it longer, and are far better at it than we could ever be (yes, even better than the fabled Wilt Chamberlain).

And now, on to the main event!

I have combed through everything I have ever learnt about animals, and I have come up with a list of the five most bizarre, yet still interesting, animal mating strategies. Now, this is by no means a complete list, just the weirdest and most interesting. Believe me, there is a LOT more. If you like it, I’m sure I could be persuaded to write more.










5) Well, it IS stuck

Banana slugs look exactly as their name suggests, are about eight inch slugs the colour of a banana. The interesting thing about these animals is that since they are hermaphrodites, when mating time arises, they both possess female and male sex organs.

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So a friend, and Psychobabble regular, Matt, has recently co-authored a serendipitous little finding.

When two faces are presented side-by-side and flipped through in a series at high-speed they suddenly appear grotesque and disfigured.

Check it:



The tagline so frequently associated with this is 'pretty girls turn ugly'; it dominates the first page of google and has nearly 1.2 millions hits on youtube (an increase of 400,000 in 12 hours. That's fracking insane. [12/7/11]). See Matt's UQPsychblog post here, where he discusses the finding first-hand.

The effect was discovered when a member of their lab programming faces into a series and aligning the eyes. In spot-checking they flipped through the series at high speed to check that the faces were aligned as intended. Viola - ugliness.

Given the way the effect was discovered it's no surprise they have no sure clue as to the mechanism. They suggest, however:

"Relative encoding seem . . . More

The NYTimes has recently implemented a paywall system where users will be charged for access after a certain number of page views. Whatever your opinions of this system are, there is an easy way around it. I heard rumors on twitter that following a link from twitter or facebook to an article would not count against your "free" pageview limit. Someone has started a twitter feed that links to every new NYTimes article. This seemed a little excessive to me so I tried changing the web referrer in firefox instead. Essentially, whenever you visit a website, your web browser tells the webserver where you last visited. It's really easy to lie about where you've been using the FireFox plugin RefControl. All you need to do is:

1. Install the plugin.

2. Go to -> Tools -> Add-ons

3. Scroll down to RefControl and click on it

4. An Options button will appear. Click it.

5. In the new window click Add Site.

Fill out . . . More

It would seem as though the end of an era is upon us. Tomorrow, will be the last scheduled launch of the NASA Space Shuttle. Or at least, that's what the current plan says. Never know with that Florida weather. Regardless of the date, there is only one mission left in the old bird. After which, NASA will recall it's vehicles, and the shuttle will be retired. For good.



I'm not typically one who cares much about so called historical events. However, I do find myself thinking: 'Awww.. no more shuttle.. Awwww'. Yes, there are 2 'Aww's in there. I'm as surprised as you are.



Being the space nut that I am, I spent much of my childhood day dreaming about what it would be like to take a ride up to space in that thing. So much so, that I in fact became the first person to land on the newly repaved landing strip runway at Cape Canaveral.



It was back in the early 80's. My family and I flew to FL to spend the summer with my grandma. During our stay, we took a road trip up to the Cape, and the eager little toddler that I was got on a facility tour bus with the big kids. My parents came along too. The bus took us all around the complex. No I don't remember any of this, but I do h . . . More

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Here's where I heard about this paper first... and a pretty weak treatment at that.

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In a previous post I dared suggest* that women watched porn. Several people warned me of the imminent troll-storm, and true to their predictions, I was inundated with claims that I was a misogynist, supporting 'shoddy' science, and endorsing the male status-quo. All of which was rubbish, and based on the fact that 'women' and 'porn' appeared in the same sentence. Oh no, women are sexual beings? Think of the children!**. The lead author of the paper I cited showed up and made a few comments. The trolls fled. ...Then I won an award for the post.

And so here I am to make another inflammatory statement. Well, two, in fact. First, I think Evolutionary Psychology offers a valid paradigm to explore human behaviour and cognition. And so I am steeled for the exclamations of 'just so stories' and the accusations of 'quackery'. Second, apparently women have sex, some even enjoy it, so much so that they . . . More

Angela Monaghan is a geophysicist living in southwest Montana. In her spare time she trains and field trials her Hellfire Springer Spaniels, sporadically blogs as GeoFizz and tweets as MTHellfire.

*This entry contains a YouTube video*

"Tide goes in and tide goes out...you can't explain that." Bill O'Reilly recently told Dave Silverman of American Atheists, during a recent airing on Fox News as they debated the integrity of religion.

Although I was disappointed Dave couldn't just blurt out "It's the MOON, moron" and melt Bill into a gooey puddle of religious ignorance, I did sympathize with him. (Just look at his stunned facial expression!) He was probably thinking the same thing I was, it's impossible to rationally argue with a person who thinks facts don't matter anyway.



The frightening aspect to a highly paid TV personality being so ignorant should be obvious. There are thousands, if not millions, of people watching who might be even more ignorant than "Bill-O The Clown", and who might believe every ignorant thing he says is true.

Recently, I was told through a Facebook i . . . More

I'm a young researcher. I haven't yet been around the block. I've had one research job for the past 5+ years and that has mostly been spent coordinating influenza epidemiology studies. Only recently have I jumped into the deep end of the laboratory world to tackle the second part of my dissertation.

I know IRBs really well. I've lost count how many I've have to declare war against. I know IACUCs well enough to keep our lab kosher. I know funding agencies and the stress they love to evoke. I know how to convince random people that they should participate in my study - "Help a girl graduate, please!" I know phlebotomy well enough to actually get blood. I know how to coordinate an epi study like nobody's business. I know a random set of laboratory skills, even how to harvest influenza viruses from embryonated chicken eggs.

But why did I choose to do science and public health? Honestly, I chose science because of its cool factor. I thought microbes were fascinating and I wanted to learn as much as I could about them. I can pin point my love for infectious diseases to a specific life event - choosing to do an 8th grade book report on The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. To me, the Ebola virus was fascinating and throughout high . . . More

This week's guest blogger is Waddell Robey. He has eighteen years of aerospace engineering and management experience and thirty plus years in health and human services research. He is a strong space exploration activist and maintains a steady commentary on Twitter as XiNeutrino and through direct mailings to NASA leadership. He has several blogs devoted to space exploration. His philosophy is that we are here to explore, and in exploring we discover, and in discovering we seek to explain, and in explaining we enrich that which we call science.

Introduce a topic about space elevators within a group of space travel enthusiasts and you will usually get a variety of reactions from eye-rolls, to snickers, to nods of acceptance and interest. Although there is continuing encouragement, especially from NASA, for design research into the total space elevator concept, there remains several critical areas that pose serious barriers. One of the most important and the most challenging to address is the exposure of the space elevator to intense radiation.

Anchored to an ocean platform on the equator and to a geo-synchronous space terminal 100,000 k . . . More

What is this all about?

See Part 1

See Kate's response, Part 2

See Denise's response, Part 3

See Psycasm's response, Part 4

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Kate's response, Part 5.

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If Free Will is an Illusion, What Sort of Free Will is it That We Think We Have?

Before I launch into another defence of free will, let’s get back to basics. Let’s check Wikipedia. According to the good sustainers of Wiki, free will is:

“The apparent ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints.” – Wikipedia

The word “apparent” is an important one. Free will, everybody agrees, is something we’re all convinced we have, although it may or may not be real. Both the popular and academic discussions of free will have lately consisted of people taking one side or the other towards the proposition “free will is an illusion.” One of the best-selling books . . . More

This week's guest blogger is Joe Hanson. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he works on things far less interesting than the work you are about to read, specifically mobile genetic elements and ancient introns. He blogs at It's Okay To Be Smart and runs an awesome Tumblr page of the same name (updated ten times as often). Joe can be found on Twitter @jtotheizzoe.

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I was on a little bit of a post-vacation downer this past week. Only, I didn’t actually go anywhere. Instead, the SXSW music (and arts and interactive and style) festival came to me, right at home in Austin, TX. It was a week of uplifting musical and artistic expression emanating from every street corner and bar in town, and much of could even be classified as good! As I look back on the last week, two things jump out at me: 1) Tall cans of cheap, hipster beer and 2) BEARDS.

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After attending a conference a couple months ago and being forced to sit through some pretty bad presentations, I had in mind to discuss the importance of grad students learning how to put together and deliver a good presentation. This skill is critical and I can't believe how many scientists struggle with presentations. I know it's tough and I know when you're nervous it is easy to forget some things you wanted to say. But there are ways of making your presentation easier for your audience to understand, and make it so it triggers reminders for you, so when the nerves come in, you don't forget what you wanted to say.

My most recent experience really highlighted this problem because as soon as the speaker was done, a man behind me raised his hand to ask a question. He said, "I COULDN'T HEAR A WORD YOU SAID AND I CAN'T READ ANY OF YOUR SLIDES!" He was pissed off. I was too, but I wasn't going to stand up in a room of 100 people and yell at the speaker. But it was true. So many things were wrong in every talk presented.

Honestly, if I pay several hundred dollars to attend a conference and I get up at 7 am to make your 8 am talk (which is waking up at 4 am for me on west coast time), and I get to the room, and now I sit through . . . More

Parents screamed, children cried and I looked on in horror at the scene unraveling around me in the Shamu tank at the San Diego Sea World in February 2010.

Death was up to his usual tricks.

The stadium was packed and the trainers were putting the whales through their paces. Birds circled above, eyeing the fish the trainers were using as rewards for Shamu and his pals performing their tricks

But then, a lone brown pelican, about the size of a poodle, landed on the far side of the tank to take advantage of the bounty.



The trainers didn’t notice. But Shamu did.

In an instant, Shamu dove under the water, swam up under the bird, opened his mouth and, with a splash, dragged it down. The trainers realized what happened when the carcass floated to the surface and the whales began fighting over the prize. They immediately stopped the show.

Instinct had trumped training, and Shamu was sent for the killer whale equivalent of a time-out.

A week later at Sea World in Florida, instinct won over conditioning yet again. Only this time, the victim was a female trainer. According to news sources, while the trainer lay down in a shallow area leading into the tank, her ponytail was floating and attracted the whale’s attenti . . . More

With the launch of this year’s “Rock Stars of Science” campaign, there’s been a lot of talk about how to best promote science. I’m no marketing guru, but I am a scientist. This latest campaign is better than last years', only because it’s more diverse, but I think it really misses the boat. Is the public really going to be inspired by a couple of pictures in GQ of scientists looking uncomfortable and over dressed in the presence of Rock Stars? The most appalling aspect of this campaign is that there is no highlight of the researchers or their science. There truly are some science all stars in this group, many of which are well spoken.

However, the Rock Stars of science pages in GQ only list the scientist’s name and title, while the “Rock stars” get a one or two sentence summary of how awesome they are for standing in on these pictures. What’s the real focus of this campaign? To promote Bret Michaels’ latest reality TV dreck? If a reader wants to actually understand why these scientists were chosen and what they’re doing to cure disease, they have to visit the website. I find it hard to believ . . . More

Last night, I retweeted Genomic Repairman’s request for the twitterverse to sign up for an account at LabSpaces. He wanted users to join in on the discussions he was having in the group he created. We were greeted moments later by a tweet from DrugMonkey saying that THE Facebook for science is dead. Considering I just wrote a blog post on that exact topic, I found his tweet Ironic. The emphasis in that previous post being that there probably will never be ONE single social hub for scientists, but that doesn’t preclude the formation of multiple niche venues. Please excuse me while I get this out of my system:

(rant)What exactly is a FaceBook for science anyway? Is any site with a science spin, groups, a forum, and/or user profiles a “FaceBook.” If that’s the case, then there are hundreds of FaceBooks for science out there. I’d argue that the term is deprecated. Many sites employ social tool . . . More

What is this all about?

See Part 1

See Kate's response, Part 2

See Denise's response, Part 3

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In addressing the question ‘Do we have Freewill?’ we all took a fairly softly-softly approach. I will certainly admit to this; being the first to post I just wanted to test the waters, see what would fly.

While my position of ‘I’m not really sure’ still holds I am going to take a more concrete position, if only to play the devil’s advocate, and if only for my own entertainment.

Here it is – We don’t have freewill. It’s an illusion, and not even a very good one.

Kate used Dennett’s example that xn domino fell because xn-1 domino fell, because xn-1-1 fell... This was due to some input that hinged on a prime number. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood, but it’s not the input that matters, it’s the consequences. The input should be almost be arbitrary, and necessarily variable.
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