Plants can smell. Plants can see. Now plants are capable of evading predators and determining friend from foe.

I have always secretly hoped that someday we would discover that plants are just as sentient as animals, and as a result, the ethical vegans of the world would be forced to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to food, they are no less murderous than cow and chicken-eating people like me.

I posted that paragraph back in July upon learning that plants have a sense of smell. And this was on the heels of learning that plants can see as well. 

This week we learned that certain plants are capable of evading enemies and discerning friend from foe.

Marine scientists at the University of Rhode Island School of Oceanography recently discovered a species of phytoplankton that actively avoids being eaten.

The scientists observed that the phytoplankton, called Heterosigma akashiwo, swam away from zooplankton, its natural predator, yet remained undaunted by the presence of predators with an appetite for other things.

I realize that this is a microscopic form of plant life, but it’s a plant, damn it, and it’s running away from the bad guys and determining who is safe to hang out with based upon their appetite.

This is some advanced stuff.

I’ve said it before: It’s remarkably arrogant for us to think that we fully understand the true nature of any living thing, including plants. To simply assume that the carrot you are eating is incapable of experiencing thought or pain or existential suffering is foolish. As scientists are continuing to discover, plant life is capable of far more sentience than we could have ever imagined.

So eat up, my ethically vegan friends, while there is still time. It won’t be long before we discover that the acorn that landed on your head was purposely thrown at you by an oak tree with a not-so-great sense of humor.

Unfair assumption #2: Smokers are not as smart as nonsmokers.

Smokers are not as smart as nonsmokers. Considering the addictive nature of nicotine and the deliberate manipulation of nicotine levels by tobacco companies. this was an assumption that never seemed fair to me. Though I never tried smoking, I know how easily a person can become addicted to smoking if they decide to experiment with it at a young age.

Nevertheless, I’ve always thought that smokers weren’t as smart as nonsmokers.

It turns out my assumption might not be so unfair after all.

Researchers have found that smokers have lower IQs than those who abstain, with intelligence decreasing the more one smokes.

A study of 18 to 21-year-old men revealed that the IQs of smokers averaged 94 – seven points lower than non-smokers on 101.

The study also measured effects in twin brothers – and in the case where one twin smoked, the non-smoking twin registered a higher IQ on average.

This study was first published in 2010, and it has been repeated multiple times since then with similar findings.

This does not mean, of course, that all smokers are less intelligent than nonsmokers. This is the part of my assumption that remains unfair. There are some highly intelligent people in the world who smoke.

But it’s apparently not as unfair as I once thought to assume that in general, smokers are a less intelligent group of people as a whole.

What I would like to see next is research on the intelligence of people who have quit smoking versus those who continue to smoke. I assume, perhaps unfairly, that the smokers who eventually quit are more intelligent than the smokers who do not, but I’m not sure if a person’s ability to overcome addiction is related to IQ.

But I think it might be.

Two new clinical studies find something that everyone already knew

The New York Times (and many other media outlets) have reported on two new randomized clinical trials published in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that removing sugary drinks from children’s diets slows weight gain in teenagers and reduces the odds that normal-weight children will become obese.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Though sodas, sports drinks, blended coffees and other high-calorie beverages have long been assumed to play a leading role in the nation's obesity crisis, these studies are the first to show that consumption of sugary drinks is a direct cause of weight gain, experts said.

Perhaps these are the first studies to demonstrate these findings because up until now, researchers did not see the need to spend time and money studying something that everyone already knew.

Drinking calorie-laden sodas can make you fat? We needed a government-funded study to determine this?

I’m astounded that two separate teams of researchers found this topic compelling enough to invest time and money in order study, and I’m even more astounded that so many media outlets decided to report on this bit of obviousness.

Couldn’t the researchers simply looked at the nutrition label on a bottle of Coca-Cola and come to the same conclusion?

Wasn’t the mere existence of a product like Diet Coke proof enough that a product like Coke contributes to weight gain?  

Isn’t an standard of obviousness applied before the government agrees to fund a study that answers a question that everyone already knows the answer to?

What’s next? A study to prove that eating cheeseburgers and French fries can contribute to weight gain?

We did not need science to tell us that sleep training your child is the right thing to do.

A new study has shown that allowing your infant to “cry it out” as part of sleep training does not lead to any long term emotional or psychological harm in children.

I find the study fairly pointless since I suspect that most parents already know this. When a parent is unwilling or unable to sleep train their child, it is often less about a concern over the long-term psychological impact on their child and more about the parent’s inability to prioritize long-term health over short-term discomfort.

My wife and I sleep trained our daughter when she was four months old. It took about three nights, and they were not easy. We would sit at the kitchen table and listen to our baby cry in her crib for an hour or more each night. There were moments when each of us would begin to crack, only to be strengthened by the other. After three nights, most of the crying was over and my daughter went to bed with little protestation.

Even since then, she has been an excellent sleeper. She sleeps 10-12 hours each night and has never slept in our bed. In fact, the one night when we wanted her to sleep in our bed, after a nasty fall and fear of concussion, she refused, preferring the comfort of her own bed.

We will do the same for our three month old son soon, though he is already sleeping 7-8 hours a night in a cradle beside our bed. It will not be easy. We will experience great a deal of parental discomfort, and Charlie will not enjoy it either. But we will choose long term health over short term discomfort, and Charlie will be the better for it.

I realize that there are babies for whom sleep does not come as easily, but I also believe that these babies are few and far between. When a child is not sleeping through the night or spending parts of the night sleeping in the parents’ bedroom, it is far more common, at least in my experience, for the parents to be the cause. These are the parents who respond to their child’s every cry, choose to keep their child in their bedroom with them for extended periods of time, allow their child to climb into bed with them on a routine basis, and lose hundreds, if not thousands of hours of sleep because they are unwilling to let their babies cry it out.

Though I am sure they exist, I have never met a parent who attempted to sleep train their child by allowing that child to cry it out who failed to produce a child who sleeps through the night in his or her own bed.

And as a teacher with fifteen years in the classroom and the husband of a woman who seems to know everyone on the planet, I know a lot of parents. 

A friend of mine recently complained about how her nine month old daughter was still not sleeping through the night. I explained to her how to sleep train her child, including white noise and blackout curtains in addition to allowing her daughter to cry it out, but I also warned her that it would not be easy.

But I also told her that by sleep training her child, as difficult as it may be, she would be helping her daughter beyond measure. In return for short term suffering, her daughter would be a well rested child, and all of the crucial development that takes place when a child is asleep could proceed without interruption. Her child would also be less moody and far better prepared to handle the challenges of the day.

In addition, she and her husband would be more well rested. This would result in a more productive day for both of them and would likely have a positive impact on their marriage.

Two months later I asked her how her baby was sleeping. She said that she took my advice, and after five nights of crying it out, her baby was sleeping through the night, 8-10 hours at a time.

I have a friend who is fond of the expression “You pay now or you pay later,” and I think it is perfect when it comes to sleep training. I cannot tell you the number of parents who I have known who have their children sleeping in their beds or in beds set up in their parents bedroom for years.

I’ve also known fathers who sleep in their child’s bed so the child can sleep with mom and parents who routinely sleep on the floor in their child’s bedroom.   

For many, it is a tragic source of shame or embarrassment.

Others they devise complex and illogical rationales to defend the addition of a second bed in their bedroom (this happens more often than you might think) or the the presence of their child in their bed for the majority of the night.

Either way, these are “pay it later” parents.

I am convinced, not by this recent study but by simply common sense, that the only long-term psychological impact of sleep training your child is contentment, for both the child and the parents.

A true-life space adventure that includes bears and wolves!

Mental Floss posted a piece this week entitled 4 Ridiculous Space Accidents (Where Everyone Survived). The whole thing is excellent and well worth reading, but the first story was so good that I couldn’t risk you not clicking over and missing it.

Heads up, screen writers and producers: There is a movie here.

In the 1960s the Soviets took a great leap forward in the space race when they sent Voskhod 2 into orbit with two cosmonauts aboard. One of them, pilot Alexey Leonov, became the first human to leave a spacecraft and perform a spacewalk. While an impressive feat, it came very close to disaster: the Soviets had failed to account for the effect of the vacuum of space on Leonov’s spacesuit.

After 12 minutes outside the craft, the cosmonaut found that he could not bend his suit sufficiently to return through the hatch. Soviet television had to cut away because they feared the worst. By opening a valve in the suit, he was able to reduce the pressure enough to get back in. Once inside, Leonov and his co-pilot could barely get the hatch closed. At the time, reports never indicated that Leonov had any trouble during his spacewalk, but the cosmonaut later revealed that his 12-minute ordeal left him up to his knees in sweat—it filled the legs of his spacesuit. And had the spacewalk gone any more awry, Leonov had a suicide pill handy.

After Leonov and Belyayev were safely inside, they found that there was so little room in the capsule that they couldn’t actually get back in their seats, throwing off Voskhod’s center of gravity. On reentry, they ended up hundreds of miles off-course. The men were forced to spend a night in the woods of Siberia, and while the door had been blown off on impact, they were at least heavily armed to protect themselves from wolves and bears. Although helicopters located the cosmonauts, the woods were too thick to land and the two were not rescued until the next day.

Einstein was dumb

Not about many things, but about this:

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

I’ve always hated this definition.

I wouldn’t call it insanity. I’d call it persistence. Grit. Determination. Practice.

There are many examples in life in which one does the same thing over and over again with the reasonable expectation of improvement (and thus differing results).

In fact, I can think of more instances in which this is true than it is not.    

I’m sure that when Einstein said this, he was referring to a specific instance where this definition aptly applied (probably related to scientific experimentation), but too often quoted as a universal truth when this is simply not the case.  

Prepare to cry

I will show this video to my students in hopes that it will have the same effect on them that it had on me:

It will remind them how fortunate they are and how much of a difference they can make in this world if they work hard. 

My mother soaked me in neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors as a child

When I was a boy, my mother would literally lock me and my brothers an sisters and me out of the house during the summer, only permitting entrance for lunch, which consisted of a slice of bologna and a dollop of catsup between two slices of Wonder Bread and a cup of Kool-Aid. Apples. Pears and peaches could be picked from the trees of my grandfather’s orchard next door if desired and if ripe enough.

If we got thirsty while locked outside, our parents instructed us to drink from the hose, so we did, in vast quantities for years. Eventually my parents bought an attachment to the outdoor spigot that converted it into a bubbler (a drinking fountain for all of you not from Massachusetts), but that came much later. I actually grew to love the taste of water from a garden hose, and I have been known to take a drink from it even today if given the chance.

All this explains why my day was ruined when I read a story about the dangers of drinking from a garden hose in TIME:  

Research released by the Ecology Center, which tested water coming from standard garden hoses and found that it can contain lead, endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins, especially in older hoses.

If my mother was alive today, I would be on the phone with her right now, complaining that I could have been an astrophysicist or a cardiac surgeon if not for all the lead, endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins that she forced me to consume as a child.  

I’d also point out to her that this would technically be the second time in my life that she attempted to poison me. When I was two years old, she tried to kill me with a bottle of paregoric as well.

Thankfully I cannot be killed. It’s my super power.

Utterly terrifying super power

If my wife had to choose one super power, it would be teleportation. I think this is a brilliant but selfish choice.

If you get to choose a super power of any kind, the only morally acceptable choice in terms of the fate of the world is the ability to see the future. The ability to warn about natural disaster and prevent manmade ones trumps the ability to pop into Manhattan for dinner in the blink of an eye.

Not by much. But it does.

Besides, teleportation is hardly a super power. Physicists have already achieved this teleportation years ago, as the video below demonstrates.

But be warned. If you are anything like me, this video may terrify you.

I have a great deal of respect for physicists, but the fact that particles are aware that they are being measured should scare the hell of everyone, physicists included, but they seem to accept this fact as if it were no big deal.

I’ll never understand this.

Plants can see! See you eat them!

I have always secretly hoped that someday we would discover that plants are just as sentient as animals, and as a result, the ethical vegans of the world would be forced to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to food, they are no less murderous than cow and chicken-eating people like me.

I wrote that paragraph back in May of this year in regards to recent findings that plants possess a sense of smell and are therefore one step closer to sentience. 

Scientists have taken another enormous step in that direction with the recent discovery that plants can see.

That’s right. There is evidence suggesting that the innocent carrot that you munched on last night was able to see before you decided to kill it.

They don’t see pictures. But they see colors, they see directions, they see intensities. But on a certain level, plants might think that we’re visually limited because plants see things that we can’t see. They see UV light and they see far red light, and we can’t see that at all. So I think we can say that plants see. It knows quite a bit, much more than we give them credit for.”

Plants can see. They can smell. We know from plants like the Venus fly trap that at least some plants possess the power of touch.

What will we discover next?

I also wrote this back in May, but it still seems especially fitting:

Brace yourself, my vegan friends, We may soon discover that plants are capable of playing chess and debating the merits of a Parliamentary government.

Pop head off before eating.

About 200 years ago, the lobster was regarded by most Americans as a filthy, bottom-feeding scavenger unfit for consumption by civilized people. Frequently ground up and used as fertilizer, the crustacean was, at best, poor people’s food. In fact, in some colonies, the lobster was the subject of laws—laws that forbade feeding it to prisoners more than once a week because that was “cruel and unusual” treatment.

This is the opening paragraph of Josh Schonwald’s Slate piece that discusses insects as a viable source of nutrition for human beings. As someone who does not like lobster, I love this paragraph. The food that people are willing to pay six dollars a pound to eat, basically as a result of its scarcity, was once considered unfit for human consumption because of the ease by which it could be acquired.

Despite how much you might profess your love for the taste of lobster, taste is not the only factor at work here. If lobster were as plentiful as it was 200 years ago, it would cost a penny a pound and you would be feeding it to your least favorite dog.

Should we be surprised? Name another food that is almost always dipped in butter? If lobster were really so tasty, why would you mask its taste with melted butter?

I love mentioning this fact to lobster lovers and watching their reaction. Some simply ignore my statement entirely, while others attempt to rationalize this unfortunate fact by explaining that the way we prepare lobster today (dropping a living creature into a boiling pot of water)  is different than how it was prepared two centuries ago, therefore changing the taste entirely.

Schonwald brings up this fact about lobster (one I first learned year ago in a Bill Bryson book) to point out that attitudes about food can change over time, which is something many people are hoping for when it comes to eating insects.

Schonwald believes that two food sources that strike many as unpalatable—insects and seaweed—could play a critical role in not only feeding the 2.5 billion extra humans expected by 2050, but doing so in a green, climate-friendly way.

Many insects are what you might call superfood—rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol, high in essential vitamins and minerals like calcium and iron. More important, insects are green super-foods. Bugs are cold-blooded (they don’t waste energy to stay warm), so they’re far more efficient at converting feed to meat than cattle or pigs.

I was once a consumer of insects. As a Boy Scout, I learned wilderness survival training while at camp one summer. Included in my training was the identification and consumption of insects that are nutritionally viable to human beings.

I ate a grasshopper, a cricket, and a large, black ant, which did not taste like a blueberry as promised but was not too bad.

Not only was I required to eat these insects, but I was also required to locate them in the forest and prepare them for consumption.

In the case of crickets and grasshoppers, this meant removing the rear legs lest they trigger your gag reflex on the way down.

In the case of the ants, we were taught to pop their heads off to prevent them from biting on the way down.

It sounds disgusting, but I was a fourteen year old boy at the time, so I loved gross things and was basically an idiot.

Most important, insect consumption was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of my wilderness survival training. In the event of an apocalypse, I am going to kick ass.

And probably eat a lot of bugs.

Hybrid snobbery

The grocery store that will sell me damn good pizza but cannot deign to provide a soda that wasn’t squeezed from the bark of a tree has decided to offer preferred parking to the owner of hybrid automobiles, presumably to reward them for their contributions to the environment.

image

This, of course, is incredibly stupid, not only because it alienates a large percentage of the customer base, but because the idea that a hybrid is the best and only ecofriendly vehicle that a person can drive is a myth.

While a hybrid vehicle may reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, the CO2 costs involved in the manufacture and transportation of a new vehicle can account for as much as 28 percent of the CO2 emissions that will be generated during the life of the vehicle, making the purchase of a used car or the choice to continue driving an older car an equally (if not more) eco-friendly decision.

And don't forget that the new hybrids‚ despite lower emissions and better gas mileage‚ actually have a much larger environmental impact in their manufacture, compared to non-hybrids. The batteries that store energy for the drive train are no friend to the environment‚ and having two engines under one hood increases manufacturing emissions. And all-electric vehicles are only emission-free if the outlet providing the juice is connected to a renewable energy source, not a coal-burning power plant, as is more likely.

I currently drive a 2003 Subaru Baja. I could have purchased a new car long ago but have opted to continue driving my nine year old vehicle because it’s still doing its job. It’s reliable, fuel efficient and in decent shape. To purchase a hybrid at this point would make no sense in terms of the environment.

Yet Whole Foods and other businesses catering to hybrid drivers ignore this scientific reality.

Why?

I’m guessing that rows of shiny new hybrids abutting their businesses do more to enhance the store’s image than a row of ten year old vehicles. 

Plants have a sense of smell. A SENSE OF SMELL, PEOPLE! This brings them one step closer to chickens and cows and pigs.

I have always secretly hoped that someday we would discover that plants are just as sentient as animals, and as a result, all the ethical vegans of the world would be forced to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to food, they are no less murderous than cow and chicken eating people like me. With the remarkable discovery that plants have a sense of smell, we have taken an enormous step in that sentient direction.

Brace yourself, my vegan friends, We may soon discover that plants are capable of playing chess and debating the merits of a Parliamentary government.

A rare glimpse at a master teacher at work

Hans Rosling is an incredible teacher. One of the best I have ever seen. I was completely mesmerized by his TED Talk despite my initial lack of interest in the subject.

This is the sign of a master teacher at work.

Background television makes you stupid. Or perhaps you're an idiot for failing to turn off the television in the first place. Either way, turn the damn thing off when you're not watching.

My wife and I think that background television (the continued use of the television even though its audience is engaged in other activities) is the opiate of the masses. The basest and most vile form of audio input.

A distracting annoyance of the highest regard.

As unfortunate and unfair as it may be, we are likely to think less of a person who has a television blaring in the background of their home when it is not actually being watched.

Our feelings on this subject are strong.

We have also long suspected that you have to be an idiot to leave your television on all day long, and low and behold, it turns out that we were right. Either you were an idiot to start, or the persistent use of background television has turned you into an idiot, so says a recent study cited in TIME:

The researchers found that the average American kid was exposed to 232.2 minutes of background television per day — when the TV was on, but the child was engaged in another activity. Younger children and African-America children were exposed to the most background television on average.

“We were ready and willing to accept that the exposure would be high, but we were kind of shocked at how high it really was,” says study author Matthew Lapierre, a doctoral candidate and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “The fact that kids are exposed to about four hours on average per day definitely knocked us back on our heels a bit.”

Previous research has found that exposure to background television is linked to lower attention spans, fewer and lower-quality parent-child interactions, and reduced performance in cognitive tasks, the authors said in the study.

What is most interesting about the study is that it only looks at the effects of background television on children.

Here’s the thing:

Kids are resilient. They can overcome overwhelming odds. They are highly adaptable and possess enormous reserves of unlocked potential. Most important, despite the amount of television they are being exposed to, they are also reading and writing on an almost daily basis thanks to school.

Adults are decidedly less resilient. Their ability to overcome obstacles is oftentimes limited. Their adaptability diminishes with age. Many do not read or write on a weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis.

If background television is reducing children’s performance in cognitive tasks, just imagine what might be happening to the less resilient, less literate adult population.

I’m willing to bet that background television is making them complete and total morons. And I can’t wait for the research that backs me up.

Say it ain't so.

As a kid who grew up as a dinosaur nerd (and who remains one to a degree even today), I find this news incredibly depressing.

You are probably stupid in comparison to your children, and you only have your parents to blame

A study was released this week reiterating the dangers of drinking alcohol while pregnant and identifying the end of the first trimester as the most dangerous time for a pregnant woman to consume alcohol.

The end of the first trimester appears to be the period when alcohol can wreak the most havoc on fetal development, causing physical deformities as well as behavioral and cognitive symptoms, according to research in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Despite the clear evidence that consuming alcohol can cause great harm to a developing fetus, alcohol still poses a serious danger, particularly when a woman does not know that she is pregnant:

While the data reinforce current guidelines that expectant moms avoid alcohol, it’s particularly difficult for those in the first days of pregnancy, especially since 50% of pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned. That means most women may not even become aware they are pregnant until the middle or end of the first trimester.

Despite these dangers, expectant mothers drink and smoke far less frequently than they did twenty or thirty years ago, which causes me to wonder:

Has the extreme reduction of alcohol and nicotine consumption during pregnancy caused children born today to be more intelligent than the children born thirty or more years ago?

Wouldn’t it stand to reason that a generation of human beings whose mothers routinely smoked and drank during pregnancy would be less intelligent in comparison to a generation of children whose mothers reduced and/or refrained from these cognitively debilitating behaviors altogether?

All other things being equal, is it reasonable to assume that my daughter’s IQ is likely higher than that of her parents, grandparents and great grandparents?

I think so.

I realize that if this is true, there is not much use for this information other than to gloat, but in my experience, gloating can be quite fun.

It can also lend credence to the desire to ignore the wisdom of your elders. If you parents or grandparents were bathed in an amniotic slosh of whiskey and  beer and nicotine during their most critical periods of their development, who are they to tell us that we need long term care insurance or should consider purchasing a more practical automobile?

Compared to the children born in the last twenty years, they aren’t even functioning on the same cognitive cognitive level.

At least that would be the argument I would make.

Unexpected sympathy

As a person who was once killed by bees, it was difficult to imagine any scenario in which I might feel sympathy for them.

I think of them as tiny bullets, just waiting to murder me. 

But this stunning and masterfully shot video left me heartsick for these bees.  I did not think this possible. 

If bacteria can solve Sodoku, how challenging or worthwhile can it be?

I have always thought that Sudoku was stupid. In terms of productivity, it is time spent and mental energy expended with nothing to show for it.

Yes, the solving of the puzzle probably exercises your brain in some way, but I believe that there are more productive, more meaningful ways to exercise your brain that ultimately result is something more significant than a square filled with numbers.

Exercise your brain in a way that produces something.

Plus Sudoku is just a dumb game.

And now I’ve learned that a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria has been engineered to solve Sudoku puzzles.

Kind of makes the puzzle seem even stupider now. Huh?

Don’t swing hard!

Any golfer will tell you that the harder you swing the club, the worse the result. Not always, but often enough.

And yet we continue to swing hard, because it just seems to make sense.  We want the ball to go farther, so we try to hit it harder.

It seems to work out just often enough to keep us trying.

Then I watched this TED Talk, which has nothing to do with golf, and yet it explains perfectly why golfers should not swing hard.

Today I took this advice and shot a 46.

My best round ever.

A coincidence?

Probably. And it’s November.  I’m sure I’ll forget this lesson by spring.