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REPOST: Mobile Elements: Drivers of Genome Evolution

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) Several new readers have asked for more information on ERVs, and what exactly my blog subtitle 'joke' means. After finals next week I plan on writing more detailed posts, but until then, there are a few in the archives to tide you over :) 'Mobile Elements' was my third post…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 32

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 31 Table of Contents Chapter 33 Chapter 32 One Thing After Another, December 14, 2055 The next few days were just one damned thing after another. On Monday, when I walked into Ecology 550, a spontaneous wave of applause broke out. I held up my hands. "Okay. Okay, listen I'll make you a deal. Hold the applause until after we fix this problem and then we'll all celebrate. We still have a lot of work to do." My statement had just the sobering effect I wanted. As I looked around the room, I noticed a few faces that didn't belong. Officially the…

Sports Break: Duke-Carolina

I don't often write about sports, but since last night was one of the high holy days for a college basketball fan, I have to. For those who don't know, I am a Duke fan. No, I'm not a bandwagon fan who jumped on when they became the New York Yankees of collge basketball, I've been a Duke fan since my sophomore year in high school in the early 80s. I'm also just in general a huge college basketball fan. I think it really is the greatest sport there is. I don't think any sport can match the drama of the NCAA tournament, and no other rivalry in the sport, or any other, can come close to matching…

Reply to John West on ID and Metaphysics

John West, associate director of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, has replied to my "fulminating" essay, posted to Dispatches, In the Agora and the Panda's Thumb, on ID and "divine design". You'll recall that Mr. West had claimed that he and his fellow ID advocates get "very upset" when people "confuse" intelligent design with divine design, as a Utah legislator has in a bill designed to give equal time, and I replied by offering numerous quotes from ID advocates themselves ostensibly "confusing" the two. Mr. West's reply to me, unfortunately,…

Scalia on Loving v Virginia

I decided to take a look and see if Justice Scalia had ever addressed the ruling of Loving v Virginia. It turns out, apparently, that he thinks the case was decided correctly, even while embracing the exact same argument made in that case by the state of Virginia. In his dissent in Lawrence, he accepted the defense's argument that the Texas anti-sodomy law was "facially neutral" because it applied to both men and women equally - that is, men and women were equally forbidden from marrying someone of the same sex. This is precisely the argument that was made by the state of Virginia with…

Long for the Stars

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery The Universe has been around for a long time: 13.8 billion years, to be precise. As humans, we're relatively young, and our species has only been around for the last couple of hundred thousand years of it. For nearly all of human history, this is what the night skies have looked like. Image credit: The Milky Way, by Stephane Guisard. When the Moon isn't out and you're in a place that's…

Twisty Little Universes, All Alike

When we left our story, we were stuck in the unfortunate position of living somewhere in a multiverse without any a priori way to figure out where we live. What might we do? One thing we can do is let the dreaded anthropic principle rears its head. At its most basic essence, the anthropic principle is the statement that we exist. This is data, and we can draw conclusions from this data. The most famous examples of this are Hoyle's prediction of a particular nuclear resonance based on the need for enough carbon in the universe for us to exist and Weinberg's bound on the cosmological constant…

How to Do a Good PowerPoint Lecture

Having strongly stated my opinion that PowerPoint is not actively evil, but can be used to give good scientific presentations as well as soul-crushingly dull bullet-point talks, I feel like I ought to say something to back it up. Here, then, are some of the rules of thumb I use when putting together a good PowerPoint talk. 1) Know Your Audience. This is probably the most important rule in giving a talk, no matter what medium you plan to use. A talk aimed at an audience of undergraduate science majors is a very different thing than a research talk given at an international conference, or a…

Leaving Early

One of the top players in college basketball this year was Texas freshman Kevin Durant, whose team lost over the weekend. Durant is 6'10", and averaged something like 30 points a game from January on, so the automatic assumption is that he's going to enter the NBA draft, where he would be one of the top couple of picks. Durant has made some comments that suggest he's thinking about coming back next year for another run at the NCAA's. This has prompted the usual discussion about whether he should stay or go, with the usual suspects taking the usual sides. Some people speak of the wonders of…

Creation of an Ultracold Neutral Plasma

This is the last of the papers I was an author on while I was in grad school, and in some ways, it's the coolest. It's rare that you get to be one of the first people to do an entirely new class of experiment, but that's what this was. It kicked off a new sub-field (or sub-sub-field...), the history and status of which was written up in Physics a little while back. The ultracold plasma experiment may be the ultimate version of what we jokingly called the "NIST Paradigm" of cold-atoms physics research, which could be summarized as "I wonder what will happen if we stick this other laser in?" It…

Algebra and Circuit Breakers

A couple of "kids these days are bad at math" stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory "Who cares if kids know how to factor polynomials, anyway?" tack, which was obvious bait for me, given that I have in the past held forth on the importance of algebra for science students (both of these are, at some level, about algebra). Of course, these articles aren't about science students, so…

Lots of smoke, no fire

One thing the blogosphere is good for is spirited discussion and fast dissemination of news stories. One thing it is not good for is the old addage "where there's smoke, there's fire". The recent "swifthacking" of CRU email (aka "climategate") is a great example of tremendous amounts of smoke being created out of something statistically indistinguishable from bupkus. The UK's House of Commons has released a report after weeks of careful investigation into the details and implications of the illegally obtained and distributed emails to and from a handful of East Anglia University climate…

Don't be a Jew

Joseph and Mary, and Little Joe and Mary, and Grinker and I, sat around the table where most of the dinner had been laid out. Additional bits and pieces of the dinner would be brought out as needed shortly, but now it was time to pray. So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air. "We have a new tradition we'd like you to participate in," she said. Her husband…

Bugs (Darwin)

When reading the Voyage, it is impossible to miss the observation that much of the time Darwin was engaged in adolescent boy behavior: Pulling the heads off insects, noting how long they would wiggle after cut in half, closely examining the ooze and guts, occupied much of his time. Obviously, careful observation and a strong stomach were not all that was required to think up Natural Selection and his other theories, or the Origin of Species would have been written dozens of times by dozens of grown up kids. Reposted with minor revisions ... In the following passages, Darwin is still along…

Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 04 ~ Forcing

This is the fourth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming. "Climate Studies" is a "causal" science. Most sciences are "causal" in nature, which is why the sciences and scientists are often loathed and distrusted by people in the humanities and some of the soft sciences. There is not the time or space right now to address this issue, but I'll just say this: People who criticize science for its interest in causality usually do not understand what scientists are talking about. I think this is partly because people in the humanities and social sciences have gone gaga…

The shit is hitting the fan in Nigeria

Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) commandos Nigeria is where Western graduate students in political science who study corruption go to do their fieldwork. There appears to be an ensconced elite and externally connected ruling body and a down trodden underclass organized into various resistance groups. The discovery of abundant petroleum reserves in the Niger Delta and vicinity meant that the elite ruling group and external forces (including but not limited to Big Oil) have conspired to extract this resource at maximum profit largely setting aside the possibility of…

XMRV and Occams Razor

Long time readers of ERV know that I do not believe a 'new' retrovirus, XMRV, is the causative agent of any human disease. It does not make sense as a real human pathogen, unless you disregard field basics (or make up new 'rules'). New cell transformation/cancer rules. New transmission/epidemiology rules. New immunology rules. New virology rules. New genetics/population biology/evolution rules. Over and over and over with XMRV, Ive typed in frustration "THIS DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!!!!!" Occams Razor, though not always useful in science, does provide us with a basic logical guide: Either XMRV is…

Mt. Improbable?

There's an interesting discussion going on between Larry Moran and Richard Dawkins. The subject is the title of Dawkins' 1996 book Climbing Mt. Improbable. It started with this post over at Larry's blog. He included Dawkins in his list of good science writers who were nonetheless excluded from Dawkins' recent anthology of science writing. Along the way, Moran offered this thought: Dawkins is also a master of metaphor but, sometimes the metaphors are misleading and can give an incorrect view of evolution (e.g. Climbing Mt. Improbable). Personally, I loved the metaphor of Mt. Improbable…

Neurontic on Battling God

Since I'm criticizing my SciBlings today, permit me a few words about this post from Orli over at Neurontic. Orli is unimpressed with the recent glut of atheist books. She begins by reproducing a segment from a previous post: Dawkins and Dennett simply cannot understand the impulse to cling to an antiquated belief system not grounded in fact. (They seem incapable of recognizing that religion, despite its myriad flaws, provides a type of moral succor in times of strife that science can't.) To convince the masses of the errors of their ways, they're using the only weapon at their disposal:…

Basic Concepts: Infinity and Infinite Sums

On the subject of basic concepts, here's an essay I orginally posted back in June. In it I try to explain what infinity is all about. It seems appropriate for this series, so I thought I would bring it back. Enjoy! ________________________________ Think for a minute about basic arithmetic. Addition is something that is done to two numbers. You take two real numbers and add them together to produce another real number. But suppose you had three numbers, x, y, and z? What does it mean to add three numbers together? Very simple. You would begin by adding x to y. Then, you would take the…

What Scientists Should Learn From Economists

Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week in the physics blogosphere, a pair of interviews with a BICEP2 researcher and a prominent skeptic. This, in turn, led to a lot of very predictable criticism of the BICEP2 team for over-hyping their results, and a bunch of social-media handwringing about how the…

Hugo Nominated Short Fiction: A Great Year for "No Award"

As previously noted, I'm going to the Wordlcon in London this August, and as such will be voting on this year's Hugo Awards. The publishers provided a packet with at least bits of all the fiction nominees, so I've been reading through them at bedtime, and over the weekend finished all the regular nominees-- I still have stuff that I may or may not read for the Campbell-that-is-not-a-Hugo-but-is-handed-out-at-the-same-time. I wouldn't really bother to say anything about them beyond the couple of comments I've already dropped on Twitter, but Kate quoted me in her recap of the Short Story…

On Black Magic in Physics

The latest in a long series of articles making me glad I don't work in psychology was this piece about replication in the Guardian. This spins off some harsh criticism of replication studies and a call for an official policy requiring consultation with the original authors of a study that you're attempting to replicate. The reason given is that psychology is so complicated that there's no way to capture all the relevant details in a published methods section, so failed replications are likely to happen because some crucial detail was omitted in the follow-up study. Predictably enough, this…

How Fast Should I Drive?

We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate's mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out of driving around in a rental car-- The Pip chattered happily about "My new car" for a while-- which we did a lot of, going to a beach and the Mote Aquarium in Sarasota. Doing all that driving in a rented SUV and a state with a 70mph speed limit got me thinking about optimum driving speed. Particularly on the…

Old Thesis Club: Experiments on Gravitation by Earle Milton Bigsbee, 1932

One of the interesting things about the pile of old theses we found in the basement is the opportunity to look at things that nobody believes any more. Past installments of the Old Thesis Club have shown people fumbling toward an understanding of quantum physics via electron scattering and spectroscopy, but in both of those cases, they were working toward a correct theory. In this edition, we look at an investigation of a theory that's been wholly discredited. The general category of the experiment isn't problematic-- it's basically a test of the equivalence principle, the idea that the…

Ruse News

In 2002 I attended an ID conference near Kansas City. Among the speakers was philosopher J. P. Moreland. During his talk he unleashed a broadside against Michael Ruse, accusing him not only of perjuring himself during the famous 1981 Arkansas creationism trial but also of having publicly admitted to his misdeeds. I had an audio recording of the talk and wrote to Ruse to ask him about it. I transcribed Moreland's exact statement and asked Ruse if he had admitted any such thing as was being alleged. Ruse flatly denied Moreland's assertion and was kind enough to give me a quote to use in…

Is the Multiverse Real?

Discover Magazine has an interesting article up discussing a perennial favorite: the fine-tuning of the universe for life. I got a bit nervous when I saw the title: Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory That makes it sound like scientists devised the multiverse idea strictly as a desperation move to counter all that annoying God-talk. In reality physicists have been seriously discussing the idea of a multiverse for decades, and quite a lot of work in physics is pointing in that direction. The multiverse does seem to follow naturally both from recent work…

How Does Light Travel Through Glass?

I've mentioned before that I'm answering the occasional question over at the Physics Stack Exchange site, a crowd-sourced physics Q&A. When I'm particularly pleased with a question and answer, I'll be promoting them over here like, well, now. Yesterday, somebody posted this question: Consider a single photon (λ=532 nm) traveling through a plate of perfect glass with a refractive index n=1.5. We know that it does not change its direction or other characteristics in any particular way and propagating 1 cm through such glass is equivalent to 1.5 cm of vacuum. Apparently, the photon…

Entanglement Happens

There have been a bunch of stories recently talking about quantum effects at room temperature-- one, about coherent transport in photosynthesis , even escaped the science blogosphere. They've mostly said similar things, but Thursday's ArxivBlog entry had a particular description of a paper about entanglement effects that is worth unpacking: Entanglement is a strange and fragile thing. Sneeze and it vanishes. The problem is that entanglement is destroyed by any interaction with the environment and these interactions are hard to prevent. So physicists have only ever been able to study and…

The Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x Macro Lens

Only one lens can take this shot If you've paid attention to insect photography over the past decade, you'll likely have noticed that a single lens, Canon's MP-E 1-5x macro, has come to dominate the market.  Every professional insect photographer I know owns one, and many of the dedicated amateurs do as well.  Indeed, some photographers have even switched from Nikon to Canon just to be able to use it. Yet the lens is also a throwback, possessing few of the electronic features of modern camera technology.  It is largely manual, with no auto-focus or image stabilization, and is…

Trailblazing teacher and role-model: an interview with a woman scientist who went before

It's Women's History Month, and the Diversity in Science Carnival has asked us to profile women scientists. I spend a lot of time thing about the things that affect the lives of today's young women scientists, but I also know that we are preceded by some incredibly strong and brave women who faced much tougher working conditions than we. And some of those trail-blazing women in science were young not that long ago. So I'm taking this post to talk with one of those amazing women and see what has changed and what hasn't. Over the course of two hours, I had a wonderful conversation with this…

Remembering Steve Blackwell

Today is the second anniversary of the passing of Steve Blackwell, a Midwestern transplant who came to the Sunshine State as a high school English teacher and became a fixture in the Florida folk music scene. My path crossed with Mr Blackwell in the months before his untimely departure from melanoma at age 58. I detailed my connection with Mr Blackwell in this repost of my thoughts from the day of his memorial service. Mr Blackwell's daughter and other former bandmates continue performing as Still Friends. Steve's memory was also honored musically this past March with SteveFest '08 in Port…

Children learn to share by age 7-8

Yesterday, I wrote about selfless capuchin monkeys, who find personal reward in the act of giving other monkeys. The results seemed to demonstrate that monkeys are sensitive to the welfare of their peers, and will make choices that benefit others without any material gain for themselves. Today, another study looks at the same processes in a very different sort of cheeky monkey - human children. Humans are notable among other animals for our vast capacity for cooperation and empathy. Our concern about the experiences of other people, and our natural aversion to unfair play are the bedrocks…

Winners don't punish: "Punishing slackers Part 2"

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a Science paper which looked at the effects of punishment in different societies across the world. Through a series of fascinating psychological experiments, the paper showed that the ability to punish freeloaders stabilises cooperative behaviour, bringing out the selfless side in people by making things more difficult for cheaters. The paper also showed that 'antisocial punishment', where the punished seek revenge on the punishers, derails the high levels of cooperation that other fairer forms of punishment help to entrench. Now a new study published in that…

The value of "this is cool" science stories

A couple of nights ago, I discovered a blog by Canadian science journalist Colin Schultz, who is doing a series of interviews with eminent science journalists including Carl Zimmer, Nicola Jones, David Dobbs and Jay Ingram. They're great reads and I especially liked the stark differences in the answers from Nicola Jones and Carl Zimmer, particularly about the sorts of stories they like to tell. Jones says, "The really fulfilling stories are the ones that come, I think, spinning out of real world events." She is interested in how science "relates to policy developments" or "to things that are…

Becoming better mind-readers - to work out how other people see you, use the right lens

We spend a lot of time wondering about what other people think of us. Do they find us attractive, intelligent, capable or trustworthy? Considering how often we mull over such questions and how confidently we arrive at conclusions, we are remarkably bad at answering them. We have a nasty tendency to use our own minds as a starting point when reasoning about other people's and we rely too heavily on stereotypes and other expectations. In short, we are rubbish telepaths.  Mind-reading is still the stuff of science-fiction (or quackery) but Nicholas Epley is more interested in the everyday…

Creating God in one's own image

For many religious people, the popular question "What would Jesus do?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs. Psychological studies have found that people are always a tad egocentric when considering other people's mindsets. They use their own beliefs as a starting point…

Does science journalism falter or flourish under embargo?

One of the highlights of the World Conference of Science Journalists was the final day's heated debate about embargoes. For newcomers to the issue, journalists are often given press alerts about new papers before they are made publicly available, on the understanding that they aren't reported before a certain deadline - the infamous embargo. This is why so much science news magically appears at simultaneously across news outlets. All the major journals (and many minor ones) do this with their papers, as increasingly do universities and other research institutions. Vincent Kiernan (who has…

Alex the parrot and Snowball the cockatoo show that birds can dance

Snowball, the sulphur-crested cockatoo, is an internet superstar. He's known for his penchant for grooving to music, notably Everybody by the Backstreet Boys. As the music plays, Snowball bobs his head and taps his feet in perfect time with it. If it speeds up or slows down, his rhythm does too. He is one of two parrots that are leading a dance dance revolution, by showing that the human behaviour of moving in time to music (even really, really bad music) is one that's shared by other animals. People who've attended parties at scientific events may question the ability of humans to move to a…

Fishing expedition reveals unexpected link between Alzheimer's and prion diseases

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia in the world, affecting more than 26 million people. Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (CJD), another affliction is far less common, but both conditions share many of the same qualities. They are fatal within a few years of diagnosis, they are incurable and they involved the crippling degeneration of the brain's neurons. Now, a group of Yale researchers have discovered that the two diseases are also linked by a pair of critical proteins. Look into the brain of someone with Alzheimer's disease and you will see large, insoluble "plaques" sitting…

Mad Cow Memories

I can already see the grim look many Americans will have as they chew on their Christmas roast tomorrow. They'll be thinking about yesterday's report that a cow in Washington state tested positive for mad cow disease. There's some comfort in knowing that so far it's just a single cow, and that American cattle are regularly screened for bovine spongiform encephalitis. The grimmest look this Christmas may be on the faces of McDonald's shareholders and cattle ranchers. A single Canadian cow that test positive wreaked havoc on the entire beef industry up north. But this Christmas also brings a…

DC Briefing on Climate Perceptions, Science, & Policy

Readers in Washington, DC will find this event, open to the public, of strong interest: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and the American Statistical Association (ASA), present: Climate Policy: Public Perception, Science, and the Political Landscape Friday, March 12, 2010 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Hart Senate Office Building, Room 902 United States Senate Washington, DC *To learn more about this event, please visit www.ametsoc.org/cb* **This event is part of the AMS Climate Briefing Series, which is made possible, in part,…

Damn the NCCAM

Since I was just griping about the false claim that the political left is as anti-scientific as the right, I will mention one exception where I think the argument has some merit: alternative medicine. I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which had a 2005 budget of 123 million dollars—123 million dollars that was sucked away from legitimate science and placed in the hands of quacks. The latest issue of Science has two articles, pro and con, on NCCAM, and you might be able to guess where my sympathies lay. A major goal of NCCAM has been to…

Agro-environmental Films

The genre of "environmental documentary" or "environmental film" is large enough now that it can suitably hold sub-sets. Here is a start to a filmography of agro-environmental documentaries and films. Since it is by no means exhaustive, I welcome all additions. I should say too that although many of these almost necessarily touch on GMOs and biotechnology in general, I am looking more for ones that put the lens on alternative and sustainable agriculture as their centerpiece. Princeton's Environmental Film Festival (currently underway), is hosting some of these agro-food films, along with…

A Genetic Variation May Hide Steroid Abuse

After the whole Floyd Landis thing, I wrote a long post about the science of detecting steroid abuse. The primary test uses something called the T/E ratio to determine whether the athlete has injected steroids. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has a maximum T/E ratio of 4. If an athlete gets greater than four on any test, an investigation gets started. However, researchers in Sweden have just published a paper suggesting that this test has a possibly fatal flaw. Schulze et al. show that a gene variant present with alarming frequency in the population allows individuals to inject…

Acute Tryptophan Depletion increases offer rejection in the Ultimatum Game

Here is an interesting article showing the cross-over between neuropharmacology and decision making. Crockett et al. show that if you use acute tryptophan depletion to lower the levels of serotonin in subjects, they are more likely to reject unfair offers in the ultimatum game. Background The ultimatum game is an experimental economics paradigm. It works something like this. The proposer in the game gets to divide a certain pre-specified quantity of money between themselves and another player. The other player sees that division, and then gets to decide whether to accept it or reject it…

The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia

SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis Galton in the 1880s, little was known about this condition until recently. A rennaissance in synaesthesia research began about a decade ago; since then, three previously unrecognized forms of the condition have been described, and hypotheses for how it arises have been put forward. Two new studies now provide some insight into time-space synaesthesia, the least researched of all the forms of this…

Experience induces global reorganization of brain circuitry

One of the central dogmas of neuroscience, which persisted for much of the history of the discipline, was that the adult human brain is immalleable, and could not change itself once fully developed. However, we now know that this is not the case: rather than setting like clay placed into a mould, the brain remains pliable, like a piece of putty, so that each new experience makes a lasting impression upon it.     This phenomenon, referred to as synaptic (or neural) plasticity, involves reorganization of the connections between nerve cells, and is arguably the most important discovery in…

Swimming in the Cambrian

If you ever get a chance, spend some time looking at fish muscles in a microscope. Larval zebrafish are perfect; they're transparent and you can trace all the fibers, so you can see everything. The body musculature of fish is most elegantly organized into repeating blocks of muscle along the length of the animal, each segment having a chevron ("V") or "W" shape. Here's a pretty stained photo of a 30 hour old zebrafish to show what I mean; it's a little weird because this one is from an animal with experimentally messed up gene expression, all that red and green stuff, but look at the lovely…

Understanding the political timing of stem cell studies

Consider the following events, their political timing, and their impact on the framing of the stem cell debate: 1) Last week, as the House was preparing to vote on legislation that would overturn Bush's limits on funding for embryonic stem cell research, studies published at the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell reported that mouse skin stem cells could be turned into a pluripotent stem cell with all the characteristics of an embryonic stem cell. Coverage of the studies appeared on the front page of the Washington Post and other newspapers across the country. Though the research teams…