The theory seems to make sense. Stereotypically, the girl always seems to fall for the macho “man’s man” over the shy, passive nice guy. At least, this is what Hollywood and social media tends to depict in popular culture. However, naysayers of this common adage may be surprised by recent study results coming out of the US.

A very sad man once said, “Why do girls always complain that all guys are jerks, then date jerks when there are intelligent, sweet men like me dying for a girlfriend?” Well, a new study shows that this guy may be outta luck.

The study in question was conducted in a Tanzanian chimp reserve by Arizona State University Anthropologist Ian Gilby. The scientists hypothesized that female chimps would be more attracted to the aggressive male chimps, and therefore, reproduce with them more often than non-aggressive chimps. This study was observational, and scientists ended up observing that the “males who directed aggression towards females at higher rates were more likely to sire those females’ offspring.”

Nice men, don’t lose hope yet. There are a number of things that may show this study to be unreliable. Firstly, the study is not the most reliable sort. Being observational brings forth the issue of being less thorough than any sort of experiment or double-blind placebo trial, which wouldn’t quite be possible with this sort of hypotheses.

Additionally, the details of the study are muddy. Specifically, what did the researchers use to determine aggression in males? What was judged to be the difference between passive and violent? It’s also worth pointing out that the article did not disclose whether the aggressive males and the passive males were given the same access to females, which would obviously affect which group the females would end up mating with. The study was not conducted multiple times, and this being an observational study, this data was only drawn once over a seventeen-year period.

Overall, despite the fact that this single study found that the females were more likely to mate with males who repeatedly abused them over several years, the conclusions we draw from this study don’t quite match up to what we’d expect from humans, and more importantly, the correlation between aggression and attractiveness is not established based on this single observational study alone. Nice guys, just stay nice.

REFERENCE

A common recommendation to people trying to lose weight is to cut out soft drinks in favor of diet soda. However, as more and more research come out, these zero-calorie, artificially sweetened beverages are shown to be as bad or even worse for a person than the soda they originally gave up.

As someone who grew up drinking diet soda, as it was the only thing that my mom would buy thinking it was healthier because of the zero calorie label, I was curious to see if my continuation of this habit is dangerous to my health. As I looked into research, I began to see that more and more studies show that these types of sodas are negatively impacting the health of calorie-conscious consumers in ways more significant than the calories and sugar from normal soft drinks.

This article from Today.com cites research that confirms that negative effect of diet sodas. One piece of research is from the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, which compiled evidence from recent literature on this topic and actually found that artificial sweeteners have “a variety of negative health outcomes, especially in adults.”

The Today article itself ponders whether or not the unhealthy nature of diet soda is due to psychological reasons, such as people thinking they’re healthy, therefore eating more sugary food to compensate. Additionally, they mention that people drinking diet soda tend to be heavier and actually are more at risk regardless.

Susan Swithers, professor or behavioral sciences at Purdue says that the research is hard to explain by these ideas. She instead suggests that it could possibly be due to your body expecting a lot of sugar when you drink that sweet sip of diet soda, and then your stomach expects a high level of energy to arrive following the sweet flavor, and when it never comes, your body is inefficient at handling the utilization of food.

My own personal analysis on this is that diet soda is not “healthy”, but I don’t think it is necessarily harmful. I think that the evidence provided by Dr. Swithers explains a reason why it would be unhealthy to drink diet soda in excess, but if you have it in moderation, it couldn’t be that bad for you.

While it would be unhealthy to drink it every day, small amounts of this would likely not ruin your body’s ability to process food effectively. However, thinking of opportunity cost versus danger and risk, I definitely will be cutting down on my diet soda consumption because I really don’t lose anything by instead simply choosing Swithers recommended diet drink, water.

Most people make their clothing choices to make a fashion statement, to impress, or to keep warm. But this clothing designer from Colombia is putting a whole new spin on stylish accessories. Specifically, taking traditional forms of clothing, and making them bulletproof.

Designer Miguel Caballero is a Colombian manufacturer of bulletproof products worn by everyone from actor Steven Segal to the Barack Obama. The self-titled “Armored Armani” (fantastic nickname) runs a company which creates secure, bullet-resistant clothes targeted at both the big-shot politician and the common man. (Caballero’s inconspicuous bulletproof polo is pictured below.)

With products ranging from bulletproof tank tops to bulletproof polo shirts, Caballero claims that you can be shot in style. As proof of his “seal of quality,” Caballero has an unspoken rule that each and every person working in his manufacturing plant has to take a very serious test to assure the product is up to standard. Each employee of Caballero’s company must be shot (wearing one of the clothing pieces they made.)

The one thing about this that supposedly proves Caballero’s product is legitimate is this VICE documentary in which a reporter wears one of Cabellero’s stylish woolen jackets and is shot at point blank range with a revolver courtesy of Mr. Cabellero himself. Though Caballero advertises his product as an acceessory for the everyman, I think it is not reasonable to expect this product to go mainstream, one, because of the price ($390 at cheapest) but also because it is likely that if these became commonplace objects somewhere like the US, people would likely shoot each other to test them out, which would inevitably lead to injury.

In other words, while Caballero’s product is astounding, it is most likely less scientifically sound than it appears in this documentary clip. I think it is entirely possible that Caballero set up this specific test with the reporter to be sure nothing would go wrong, which inaccurately demonstrates how well the product would hold up in a real life or death incident.

Why waste time stacking colorful blocks in Tetris when you can punch a pedestrian in the jaw, steal a helicopter, and blow up a cop car in Grand Theft Auto? A large group of grouchy old white dudes (politicians) in the United States believe that video games like Grand Theft Auto are causing our nation’s youth to commit massacres, and over the years, games have seemingly become scapegoats for the Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook tragedies. As both a lifelong video game player and, at the time of this writing, not a mass murderer, I became curious as to if I was in fact an anecdotal case, as somebody who has never injured any person other than the occasional pixelated baddie on a screen.

But back to my earlier claim about Tetris VS. Grand Theft Auto: according to this TIME Magazine article, 90% of kids who play video games would choose the latter. This implies that most kids who play games at all are much more likely to choose the violent ones. This is unsurprising. Nobody likes Tetris anymore. However, this does mean that there are significant implications if it turns out that video game violence translates into real-world aggression.  

The TIME article cites a study done by a group of scientists led by Craig Anderson, who sampled a group of 3,034 boys and girls in Singapore who played violent games. Anderson’s team would question the children “three times over a period of two years about their video game habits” as well as psychological tests which dealt with aggression and violence.

The study showed that kids who played more violent video games for more hours per day were more likely to react to a conflict with violence, and more likely to “respond with violence when provoked, even accidentally.”

I personally do not think this proves that game violence causes real violence. My best guess on this topic is that it is a case of reverse causation, and that means that the kids who play violent video games were quite possibly already prone to be more violent. In other words, I think it’s very possible that the children who spent an unusual amount of time playing violent video games would have already had a sort of drive to act aggressively, otherwise they wouldn’t crave virtual violence so much.

Many athletes in recent years, both professional and amateur, have been seen wearing a strange rubbery bracelet with a white spot in the center, claiming it can improve balance and athletic performance in general. I became interested in these funny looking accessories when I saw my friend, a baseball player at Moravian, wearing one last month. He, and many others, swear by the band’s ability to improve performance in athletics.

These “Power Balance Bands” feature a “hologram which is purportedly designed to interact with the body’s natural energy flow.” Now, clearly this sounds like a bunch of baloney to any rational person. Not only does the company avoid explaining what “flow of energy” even means, they do not even explain how the “hologram” on the bracelet even affects the body (or what the hologram is made of, for that matter!)

Unsurprisingly, a scientist went to work to discover if these bands truly were a helpful athletic accessory or a big hoax. Professor John Pacori, professor of exercise and sport science at University Wisconsin-La Crosse, is quoted on this news article as saying “I think it is a scam.” Porcari’s small trial came out with a small trial which involved 42 athletes- some wearing Power Balance bands and others wearing silicone “Wal-Mart bands”, and concluded that there was no difference in performance.

What this says to me is that there could possibly be a placebo effect taking place which makes people think they do better while wearing the bracelet. Believers of this accessory must perform better and think that the band is the reason it’s happening, not because of any “biological benefit” as the company claimed.

An interesting side note is that the company that produces these bands even said that “We admit that there is no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims,” and even agreed to refund customers’ money who felt tricked by the company’s optimistic ad campaign.

This is a real-world case which makes me see why classes like this are important- if people were able to look into these facts and studies seeing that there’s no scientific reasoning behind these bracelets being beneficial, then scummy businessmen with rubber wristbands wouldn’t be getting away with this kind of ridiculous scheme.

Like most people my age, I am constantly on my smartphone for one reason or another. They have become so engrained into our lives that I find myself and others frequently checking our phones even when we have no real reason to, or browsing Twitter, or reading news. In fact, I became interested in this topic after seeing a headline about it on my phone.

So can smartphones cause brain cancer? This article from CNN certainly thinks so. In the headline of the article, CNN quotes WHO (World Health Organization, not the band) in saying that cell phones can increase the risk of cancer. However, just below this headline, it states that “no adverse health effects had been established.”

The article claims that the radiation emanating from our iPhones is similar to “low-powered microwave oven,” and goes on to say that it “cooks the brain” which can lead to other issues like memory function.

The article does mention that the biggest issue with this sort of claim is that smartphones haven’t been around long enough to properly establish whether or not there is a threat, which I linked to the topic in class about smoking. I don’t think we can say just yet that smartphones cause cancer based off this study, but I’m definitely more hesitant to use mine as often because there’s not much of an opportunity cost of not checking twitter four times a day.

The study conducted explained that it followed people who had used a cellphone for 10 years or more, and these people had doubled their risk for “brain glioma, a type of tumor.”

My take on this is that it’s hard to say that cellphones alone caused this double in risk, because the type of people who have been using cellular phones for ten years at this point grew up in a generation where a ton of new technology (computers, video games, etc) came out as well and most of these people were likely exposed to these types of tech as well. I think it is hard to pinpoint cell phones as the primary cause because almost everyone at this point has a phone, and there are many other things in common with the average cell user than this.

Hey guys,

I’m Connor Baun, and I’m a freshman majoring in English Education/Communications. I’m originally from Bucks County PA, in a small town called Doylestown. While I don’t particularly dislike science, I do not think I am math savvy enough to delve into any science field itself at the moment, and I know that complex math often goes hand in hand with most types of science.

This type of course seemed perfect for me. However, I believe that the main reason I took this course was because I am an English Major and this was the first science course that I saw become available in the selection list. After reading over the description, it seemed interesting enough.

In my free time, I enjoy playing guitar, listening to music, playing video games, running, and watching videos on YouTube. One of my favorite bands is The Strokes. (Here is one of their albums.)

(If I could have any guitar in the world, it would be this one. Here is an image of it.)