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At some point in their existence, I would bet every single person in this class bar none has visited a fast food restaurant and, even though the food may not be of great quality, enjoyed the scent of the restaurant. I know I certainly have. But while scouring through the news a couple of months ago, I found out that this is often nothing more than artificial scents pumped into the air. I remember reading the about how the fast food franchises used those scents to increase the amount of food customers would buy at their locations. That may be their goal, but do fake smells actually entice people? I predict that people can indeed be enticed by false odors.

All sign point to this true. Scent machines were installed at a café at Legoland in what turned out to be an experiment without ever intended to be one. At the end of the first day, an employee is mentioned to feel that “they couldn’t believe how much they sold.” The logical answer in this case is to say that the scent machines caused this uptick in sales, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Third variables are everywhere here. The theme pack could have had extra visitors that day, or a favorite item could have been a daily special. There is no way to say for sure whether the artificial scent was the cause of the increase. What is known is that the same company that produced the scents for this café also produces them for such fast food brands such as McDonalds, which could be used to draw a correlation to increased fast food sales when the scent machines are installed. While correlation does not equal causation, this is no reason to rule out the importance of the connection keeping consistent with my alternative hypothesis.

All though my alternative hypothesis was holding up, I wanted to know the science behind smell enticement. This article at US News details this process. Smell goes through the nose directly into the brain. This occurs before we even have time to think about it, meaning that the smell emotionally creates a pull on us before we even process what is happening. It is via this mechanism US News says that fake odors can take advantage of, making us crave something before we can make a logical decision about it.

While there is major scientific study to prove my theory, it appears that I can tentatively reject the null hypothesis in this case. All evidence points to the fact that smell can indeed influence people to buy a certain food, or more of it for that matter.

Everyone knows a person like this. They love all forms of adventure, speed, and height, and can’t stop coming back for more. They can never be satisfied, and always look for something bigger, higher, or faster to check off the bucket list. I am talking, of course, about the adrenaline junkie. But are they really addicted to the “rush” from their high-octane adventures? I think that this in indeed a form of addiction, similar to getting a high off of drugs or sex.

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While not officially listed as an addiction, there is an official label of “adrenaline junkie” in the scientific community. Temple University’s Frank Farley made the first official classification of these personalities in 1980’s, calling those who gravitated to danger and risk “Type T” personalities. But just because science hasn’t confirmed it as an official addiction doesn’t mean it isn’t.

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I therefore dug deeper into what could possibly be addictive about an adrenaline rush itself. What I found was that when the body senses a potentially dangerous or frightening situation, it responds in several ways that create the “rush” people associate with these extreme sports. First, the adrenal gland produce, you guessed it, adrenaline. In addition, the pituitary gland creates its own endorphins, which add increased pleasure and decreased pain to the experience. Dr. Bernard Beitman of the University of Virginia looked at the first part, the adrenal gland secreting adrenaline, and explained how this could be the addictive factor. As is stated in this Q&A, adrenaline is closely linked with dopamine, which “plays a major role in pleasure and addiction” Is this the link that could settle the matter once and for all?

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A look at a helpful guide called HelpGuide courtesy of Harvard’s medical program explained to me why dopamine causes addiction. Dopamine combines with the chemical glutamate to rewire the brain such that it begins to associate the addictive “thing” (in this case adrenaline) with pleasure and positive feelings and desire more and more. Thus begins the cycle of addiction.

A single statement from a single doctor doesn’t confirm that adrenaline rushes are addicative. No single statement is enough to conclusively overturn a null hypothesis. I turned to search engines, with page after page of search results using the term “adrenaline addiction” but without a link to a study or experiment that actually proves this to be a real addiction. For although it may seem like all signs point to this being a real affliction, science cannot simply assume something to be true. Thus, my alternative hypothesis that adrenaline rushes can be addictive is in limbo, not rejected but not a proven medical diagnosis either.

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I’ll confess: I have always enjoyed the subject of history most of all those taught in school. I took as many history classes as could allow and was particularly fascinated by the history of the United States, which brings me to an unlikely hook for a scientific blog post: our 7^th president, Andrew Jackson. Jackson, a famous military leader and popular politician, assumed the office in 1829 and served 2 terms ending in 1937. He was an enormously popular leader, and in 1928 was even given the honor of being placed on our 20$ bill. Historical rankings of the effectiveness of United States president’s always place him inside the top 20 overall. Yet in all my history classes, the teachers were unanimous in their dislike of Jackson. A closer peak at the rankings indicates a subtle slide in opinion over the last century. This got me thinking: could science possibly explain how public could change so drastically in a relatively short span of time?

It appears that may indeed be the case. An observational study conducted by the University of Connecticut in 1993 offered not one but two possible hypotheses for this. After a brief bit on why it is unlikely to occur because people change their minds, the authors provide a detailed analysis on what they believe is the most likely answer, centered around the differences between generations of humans. While not quite a meta-analysis, this is a study of each generation’s differences, and then weaving together how they change from one to the next. To prove this point, a double-blinded survey was conducted asking different generations if they would vote for a female president. As was hypothesized, the younger generations showed greater willingness than the older ones, demonstrating firsthand how the prevailing opinions change. A modern Stanford study focuses almost exclusively on politics, but offers the additional insight of how major events quickly alter opinions, such as wars and depressions, which leads me into the role of the media.

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Is there a contrasting rationale on the matter? There definitely are, but almost no other proposed reason is scientifically-based. The best argument I see here is it is simply the media swaying public opinion. This is a fair point, as the media is predominantly liberal and public opinion seems to become more liberal by the second. A scientific study actually used a sort of mathematical formula to determine how much sway mass media has on public opinion, and concluded that indeed there is a certain amount of successful “agenda setting” done by the media. Granted, third variables abound in this type of trial, and could even be down to a fluke.

I would say a combination of the two hypotheses is what happened to the legacy of Andrew Jackson. Immensely popular during and immediately after his presidency, as time went on and the world welcomed two new centuries of thought, his popularity has eroded as a result of his actions failing society’s current vein of thinking and moral values. It was not long after Jackson that a generation of Americans went to war to defend slavery, and that sentiment no longer pervades American life. With changing times and opinions, I believe it is simply the passage of years that has led to the declining popularity of Andrew Jackson, in accordance with the studies I found.

On September 13, 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) made an announcement that inspired the largest outburst over an astronomical issue since the discovery that the Sun is the center of the Solar System. Pluto, the beloved 9^th planet, with an odd orbit and diminutive size, had been demoted to the status of dwarf planet. And despite all the larger issues that plagued the world that year, the public’s outrage was unbelievable and unprecedented, and continues even until this day.

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Pluto is a classic underdog story. Discovered by a simple American without a college education, it clung to planetary status for over 85 years by even thinning margins: always the smallest, weirdest, and most mysterious of the major celestial bodies. This isn’t just a single anecdote, however. Earth’s love for Pluto perfectly explains the phenomenon of the Underdog Effect.

Think about it: when two sports teams are playing, neither of which are your favorite, which one are you most likely to root for? Most people would say the team less likely to win, according to non-blinded trial conducted in 1991. The experiment could not have been simpler: 100 random participants were told of a 7 game series between two fictitious teams, one of whom was heavily favored to win. 81% said they would root for the underdog. Similarly in this century, a psychology professor at the University of San Diego conducted an a three-fold experiment by placing an article in a newspaper about one entity as having longer odds to win than another, and a similar article specifically labeling one entity as the underdog. The experiment was run for sports teams, mayoral elections, and businesses fighting for contracts, with test subjects predicting who was going to win. In every trial, the one labeled as the underdog was deemed more likely to win than the one simply labeled as having longer odds. It doesn’t appear to be a false positive either, as the exact same scenario was run twice more with the exact same results. Some deeper psychological effect is clearly in play in creating our love for the hard-working losers.

But does the Underdog Effect have limits? While not exactly a classic Texas sharpshooter issue, it appears this may be the case.  A 2010 study showcased the inverse of this phenomenon. In a double blind placebo trial, college students were given a test, and told their scores were being compared to either an academically better or worse university, depending on which random group they were placed in. The results were startling: the group supposedly competing against the better students performed worse than those who were playing the “top dog” role. Since no retrial was mentioned, the results could be a fluke, but the possibility is there that not everyone loves the underdog role prior that prior experiments had shown.

image from gdc-outwitevil.rhcloud.com

Rounding things up, the null hypothesis (that there is no Underdog Effect) hasn’t yet been rejected, but appears more than likely to be wrong. That Pluto still has a lot of popular support to regain its planet status just proves that point further, especially since the discovery that Pluto has a heart!

So late in the evening last Thursday I found myself absent-mindedly scrolling through Twitter, as I am sure many of my peers have done. And I happened upon a message from one of the many joke accounts set up just to get a reaction out of people. Considering the language used, I cannot exactly repeat what was said here but the gist was to get a laugh out of the assumption that women complain more than men. As I got around to thinking about potential topics, this seemed like one to be explored, as I have many friends of both genders. Even though I have heard an innumerable amount of complaints over my 18 years (and uttered more than my fair share myself!) I didn’t notice any major difference between the two sexes. I therefore predicted that science would have found the same.

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But I underestimated just how broad a topic this was. From scouring various sources, it appears that men and women each have different areas where they complain more than the other. As consumers, the Journal of Consumer Research conducted a study involving over 400 people as to whether they were likely to tell someone else about a bad shopping experience. The survey stated females were much more likely to talk to someone about a poor experience, especially their close friends. A White House study, using only 2 years for data over 30 years apart, found that men are the bigger whiners in the slightly more vague area of “work-family” conflicts. Some reasons were helpfully thrown out by the author, but they were nothing more than hypotheses, as the study didn’t ask for any specifics in its reporting. The best-rounded study I found though was a 2006 study by Women and Language that found more definitively than either of the two prior examples that the sexes complain for different reasons, but one does not necessarily complain more than the other.

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That was pretty much all there was to be found on the Web on the subject. This I thought fascinating, as I thought this would be a relatively mainstream topic. It appears that not a lot of other research appears to have been done on the subject. Therefore, with no real findings in one way or the other, the null hypothesis (neither gender complaining substantially more than the other) has yet to be rejected. If I had to guess a reason for this, I would say that in a list of important issues that science is tackling at the present, this would have to be very low on the priority list. But the file drawer problem could also come into play in this situation. Low priority by publishers could have led to crucial data being stored away from public viewing, leaving the question unresolved. But with the limited resources available to me, my own personal hypothesis appears to tentatively hold up to the research that has been gathered so far.

image from of The Guardian

Every once in a while, news stations will break away from whatever tragedy they are covering that day to do a segment on the decline of handwriting in the United States. The downturn in two-fold: schools decrease the amount of time they spend on teaching it, especially cursive script. Adults abandon it in favor of leaving voice memos or jotting things down on their smart phones. So I wondered: between handwriting and electronic writing, is one better than the other? I assumed that as most people turn to electronic ways to “write” everything down, science would back up that this is a reasonable substitution, a progressive, 21^st-century way to do things better than had been done before. But does my own hypothesis concur with that off the scientific community?

image courtesy wikihow.com

Even though that was my hypothesis, my own preference has always been to handwrite things. In all but one class here at Penn State I use old fashioned pen and paper to take notes, and I began to observe similar things as stated in this Atlantic article. I found I took away the key points better in those classes I manually wrote things down than when I used a keyboard. Further research shows that this finding could affect children from a young age. The University of Washington went into great detail in a randomized, controlled experiment that saw children in 3 different grade levels (2^nd, 4^th, and 6^th) write essays with either a computer or a pen. Those writing manually consistently wrote longer essays in a more expeditious manner. To me, these are crucial stepping stones in the learning process that would seem to increase chance for success in later life, but length of the writing does not necessarily equate to quality. To me, this study can’t be held in the highest regard when trying to figure out my hypothesis as I am looking to find differences in quality of notes, not quantity of essays.  A report that was published in SAGE Journals contained the results of three separate experiments that all agreed with their alternative hypothesis that written notes are preferable to those typed.

But is this conclusive? I feared it wasn’t, because the Texas sharpshooter problem could be in full effect here. But while millennial’s for the most part favor technology, the real issue isn’t what they prefer, but what is a better and more efficient way to take and remember notes. And a google search on the subject begins with 5 straight pages in favor of handwriting with no evidence to the contrary.  This leads me to believe that while the null hypothesis hasn’t been rejected, it certainly looks very likely that the alternative hypothesis of handwriting being preferable is correct, which means I was wrong in at least the area of note-taking!

A couple of years ago I remember there being this big fuss because apparently, despite extravagant marketing to the contrary, that Vitamin Water was not actually healthier than soda. Since both are bottled and marketed by the Coca Cola Company, this wasn’t all together surprising. The consensus, once the facts came out, was that the Coca Cola Company tried to boost its sagging soda sales by introducing a similar product cleverly labeled as a healthier alternative. The public outcry following the debunking of the Vitamin Water myth was somewhat significant, and it makes one wonder how the public could be so misled in the first place.

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A little digging got me to a business article in The Atlantic that showed how advertisements try to leave long-lasting “impressions.” This makes sense, and explains to a degree how Vitamin Water became so huge for a short time. Americans, influenced by the new health-consciousness that has been sweeping the nation for the last half-decade or so, was willing to buy into a flavored drink with major health benefits. Something that taste
d “better” than regular old water and could boost your health seemed like a win-win, and the public bought in. In hindsight, the ad campaign run by Coke was an absolute masterstroke, one on par with or greater than their recent “Share a Coke with…” campaign that caused sales to once again increase. With such obvious benefits, the public didn’t bother to look into the “fine print”, so to speak, that is in the form of the Nutrition Facts on the side of each bottle. Ingenious advertising such as that is part of the reason why it remains a 70 billion dollar industry, according The Atlantic.

I am the first to admit I can be quite sarcastic at times. I have always enjoyed that type of humor, even when it has gotten me into trouble. As far as school goes, teachers with a well-developed wit always kept my attention in elementary and high school classes to a higher degree than others. But the other day, as I was lying around reminiscing about kindergarten for some reason, I realized that my more innocent self would never have understood a sarcastic remark and I would probably have been personally hurt by such things back when I was only 5. This got me wondering: when does a person begin to understand sarcasm?

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From what I researched, there doesn’t seem to be any one definitive answer to this question. One report stated that kids begin to perceive sarcasm between the ages of 8 and 9 by the tone of the speaker’s voice. But they then go on and say children don’t really understand it fully until around 11 or 12. But Melanie Glenwright of the University of Manitoba conducted her own research and came up with different results. She is quoted in the article as saying that, “Kids detect sarcasm at about age 6, but don’t begin to see the intended humour until around age 10.” This is fascinating, but I was inclined to believe this article more as it gave a clear indication it got the information from a college professor conducting scientific research. But to be sure, I checked another source: a British psychological study that said the age of understanding was between 9 and 10. At this point, it became clear that enough research hasn’t been conducted in this area of study to come up with a definitive answer on the subject.

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What is funny about my generation is that we grew up in an age where cell phones were still outnumbered by landlines, yet now you can’t go anywhere without seeing someone checking their device. But despite the obvious drawbacks when it comes to actual human interaction, smart phones do serve awfully helpful purposes. Apps of every sort have popped up the last couple of years, and many of them prove very useful in classroom settings. Email can be checked in an instant, classes can be found via a handy mobile map, polls can be conducted, study groups can function without being in the same place, and you can even check what’s for dinner 3 days away! This leads me to a thought: even though some adults do it, could a college student in this day and age actually function without access to a smart phone?

A recent USA Today study showed that over half of college students cannot imagine life without a smartphone. I do believe it is actually possible, as humans have lived without smartphones for thousands of years after all, but I also think it wou
ld be a lot harder to manage, and with college coursework hard enough as it, I can’t imagine what centennial would take this option willingly. Sure, apps like Snapchat and Instagram wouldn’t be able to be used, but those are used almost universally for extracurriculars, and aren’t necessary for academics. Most other uses for the smartphone are found on a laptop: word processing, slide show presentation, the gradebook, and email are all found on mobile computers. Likewise, pen and paper can be used for notes and the student would be able to avoid the urge to check their phones during working hours, something studies show is commonplace. But all these extra items to check and carry with us would mean that time would most likely be used less effectively, and could put pressure on the student to rush through assignment they normally wouldn’t have to.

As an avid golfer, I often read books or magazines to try and improve my game. Several years ago, I read a study in a book that said your spine slowly shrinks every round of golf you play. This fact stayed in the back of my mind for years and I always wondered why. I had always presumed it had to do with the shock that courses through your body when your club impacts the ground.

image courtesy kenblackgolf.com

It turns out that while that is part of the problem, research shows that something else is just as big a cause of spinal issues in golf. That, as it turns out, is how one gets around the course itself as opposed to any action in the swing sequence. The act of carrying a golf bag doesn’t seem harmful on first glance, but taking into consideration that you are carrying essentially an extra 50 pounds on your shoulders on and off for over 4 hours, and the stress on your spine increases by 15%, according to a compilation of studies publishes in the Asian Journal of Sports Medicine, whose results are based off testing between an equal number of amateur and professional golfers. The alternative taken by millions of Americans, the golf cart, isn’t much better according to doctors. The constant bouncing up and down over the golf course’s terrain jostles your back as well. The Bykowski Chiropractic practice recommended similar solutions: pulling your own bag on a wheeled cart or, for golfers of a certain income, hiring a caddie to tote their bag.

But my years-old hypothesis was at least partly right. Many studies have been conducted over the years and show the golf swing is prone to causing spinal injury almost conclusively. The issues with the golf swing mainly revolve around the technological explosion in new clubs that professionals use to tackle ever longer courses. Amateurs, who lack the same swing mechanics to hit the ball as far, use what one study called a “modern golf swing”, which involves more shoulder rotation that leads to more spine “coil” and longer shots according to a study conducted by The Spine Journal. This is also a principal cause to the spine shrinkage that I read about in my book many years ago, and the correct half of my hypothesis! For amateur golfers out there, one way to avoid swing-induced spinal injury is to go for more accuracy than power, and limit the amount of turning during your swing that puts pressure on your spine.

Hi all! My name is Erik Ridley, and I’m psyched to meet you all this year! I live in Allentown, PA, which for all you out-of-stater’s is about 1 hour north of Philadelphia. For now I am in Professional Golf Management, but I am still not sure if that is the right major for me. But golf has been a part of my life since I was 2, and I have made a ton of memories playing it.  This led to making PGM my major when I decided on Penn State. I am doing this course because, like many others, my advisor recommended it as a good class to take if we weren’t good at science. I certainly fit that category, so I signed up immediately!

I am not majoring in a science simply because I am simply not good at the subject matter. While I find a good deal of science fascinating, including almost all of the topics on the syllabus, it accounted for some of my worst high school grades. I felt it would be bad for both my GPA and my sanity to try therefore to major in something I know I am not destined to do well in!