This is Improbable Too Read online

  The only practical method involves asking beer-drinkers to dig deep into their memory and estimate or take a wild guess as to their typical intake of beer and everything else that has passed down their gullet.

  Madlen Schütze and other researchers at the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke and at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, together with a colleague at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, gave it their best shot in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

  The team analysed 19,941 men and women’s weight, waist measurements and hip circumference over four years. The researchers asked participants to fill out a survey on their beer consumption.

  The participants gave an estimate, with whatever degree of accuracy they were able or willing to supply, of how much they had been imbibing daily. Their estimates were based on the size of a typical bottle of beer in Germany.

  The researchers classified men’s consumption differently to women’s. Women were placed in four categories from ‘no beer’ to ‘moderate drinkers’. Men were put in five categories from ‘no beer’ to ‘heavy drinkers’. For women, ‘moderate’ meant consuming at least 250 millilitres of beer a day. For men, ‘moderate’ meant 500 to 1,000 millilitres a day.

  The team conclude that their study ‘does not support the common belief of a site-specific effect of beer on the abdomen, the beer belly’. ‘Beer consumption’, they write, ‘seems to be rather associated with an increase in overall body fatness’.

  A study in the Czech Republic, published several years earlier in the same medical journal, balks at the idea that drinking beer by itself causes much change in weight, let alone waistlines, in Czechs. The study aimed to investigate the ‘common notion that beer drinkers are, on average, more “obese” than either nondrinkers or drinkers of wine or spirits’. Schütze and colleagues argue that that Czech study was probably flawed, that its findings were a bit bloated.

  One can quibble about the definition of a beer belly, but the German researchers say that, for their purposes, a beer belly is a ‘site-specific effect’. A beer belly, they argue, is a belly that bulges distinctly at the waist. It contrasts, in a big way, with whatever mass and expanse may adjoin it above or below that region.

  Schütze, Madlen, Mandy Schulz, Annika Steffen, Manuela M. Bergmann, Anja Kroke, Lauren Lissner and Heiner Boeing (2009). ‘Beer Consumption and the ‘Beer Belly’: Scientific Basis or Common Belief?’. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 63 (9): 1143–9.

  Bobak, Martin, Zdenka Skodova and Michael Marmot, (2003).‘Beer and Obesity: A Cross-sectional Study’. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 57 (10): 1250–3.

  ‌Synchronized cows

  A British-American team of scientists has produced a study called ‘A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows’. They were driven partly by the intellectual challenge, and at least a little by an EU council directive (precisely, council directive 97/2/EC), which mandates ‘that cattle housed in groups should be given sufficient space so that they can all lie down simultaneously’.

  Their key insight, the team says, was to realize ‘it is biologically plausible to view [cattle] as oscillators … During the first stage (standing/feeding), they stand up to graze but they strongly prefer to lie down and “ruminate” or chew the cud for the second stage (lying/ruminating). They thus oscillate between two stages.’

  The researchers ‘modeled the eating, lying, and standing dynamics of a cow using a piecewise linear dynamical system … We chose a form of coupling based on cows having an increased desire to eat if they notice another cow eating and an increased desire to lie down if they notice another cow lying down.’ This, they say, led to at least one unexpected discovery: ‘[We] showed that it is possible for cows to synchronize less when the coupling is increased.’

  The researchers – Mason Porter and Marian Dawkins at Oxford University, and Jie Sun and Erik Bollt at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York – published their work in the physics journal Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena. In the thirty-one-year history of that journal, this was the first article specifically about cows. (Cows do have an accepted, very humble place in the history of physics: an old joke, beloved by physicists and a few others. The joke starts [usually] with a physicist offering to solve a dairy-related problem for a desperate farmer. The physicist walks to a blackboard, and draws a circle. ‘First’, he says, ‘we assume a spherical cow …’).

  Decoding a cow’s hunger versus its desire to lie down, mathematically

  The team built upon the work of earlier, fully serious bovi-mathematical scholars.

  In 1982, P.F.J. Benham of Reading University published an innovative study called ‘Synchronization of Behaviour in Grazing Cattle’. Brennan studied a herd of thirty-one Friesian cows, recording the behaviour of each every five minutes during daylight for fifteen days. His short paper – it’s only two pages long – ends with the declaration: ‘Studies of behaviour synchronization are evidently relevant to the management of grazing cattle.’

  Porter, Dawkins, Sun and Bollt also looked beyond the bounds of cow analysis, gaining insight from a 1991 monograph by A.J. Rook and P.D. Penning of the AFRC Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Hurley, Maidenhead. Rook and Penning called their report ‘Synchronisation of Eating, Ruminating and Idling Activity by Grazing Sheep’, and published it in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science. They reached four conclusions. I will mention only one, as it has wide applicability: ‘Start of meals was more synchronised than end of meals.’

  Sun, Jie, Erik M. Bollt, Mason A. Porter and Marian S. Dawkins (2011). ‘A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows’. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 240: 1497–1509.

  Benham, P.F.J. (1982). ‘Synchronization of Behaviour in Grazing Cattle’. Applied Animal Ethology 8 (4): 403–4.

  Rook, A.J., and P.D. Penning (1991). ‘Synchronisation of Eating, Ruminating and Idling Activity by Grazing Sheep’. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 32 (2/3): 157–66.

  To know a fly

  Vincent Dethier loved flies with a fervour that is rare. He distilled this love into a book called To Know a Fly.

  Page fifty-three tells what happens when Dethier severed the tiny nerve that tells a fly whether it has had enough to eat: ‘The results of this operation on a hungry fly were spectacular. Such a fly began to eat in the normal fashion, but did it stop? Never. It ate and ate and ate. It grew larger and larger. Its abdomen became so stretched that all the organs were flattened against the sides. It became so big and round and transparent that it could almost be used as a miniature hand lens. It was so round its feet no longer reached the ground and so heavy it could not launch itself into the air. Even though the back pressure from a near bursting crop was terrific, the fly continued in its attempts to eat. It reminded me of a woman who had been admitted to our hospital, a woman whose height was four feet, ten inches and whose weight approached four hundred pounds. Her major complaint was inability to move.’

  In just 119 pages Dethier describes many of the fly’s unadvertised charms and wonders. He makes no pretence of giving explanations for particular wonders that neither he nor any other scientist really understands. This in itself is wonderful and charming. Consider: ‘We know … there is a time when the female fly prefers protein, which cannot nourish her own body, to sugar, which is an adequate food for her but useless for her eggs. Here is an example of survival of the individual being subordinated to survival of the species. In some quarters it would be hailed as maternal instinct, and by so naming it we would be no nearer an understanding of what it is.’

  Dethier hungered still for information about flies, producing many detailed studies, including a 489-page book, The Hungry Fly, in 1976.

  To Know a Fly first appeared in 1962. Dethier was a biologist based at Princeton and, at various times, at other universities. There is poetry in his book, but not the lugubrious kind that makes practical people flee. Many chapters begin with brief passag
es from Don Marquis’s 1927 book Archy and Mehitabel, which is the source of much modern wisdom about cockroaches and cats (and perhaps about people, too). Had Dethier’s book appeared first, it would not have been out of place as source of chapter lead-in material for Marquis and Archy.

  I learned about To Know a Fly from Shelly Marino of Cornell University, who described it as ‘the book that turned me into a biologist in the first place’. This book can do for flies what the Harry Potter films have done for Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson. It is magically powerful stuff.

  Dethier, Vincent G. (1962). To Know a Fly. San Francisco: Holden-Day.

  — (1976). The Hungry Fly: A Physiological Study of the Behavior Associated with Feeding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

  Marquis, Don (1927). Archy and Mehitabel. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page.

  In brief

  ‘Specialist Ant-eating Spiders Selectively Feed on Different Body Parts to Balance Nutrient Intake’

  by S. Pekár, D. Mayntz, T. Ribeiro and M.E. Herberstein (published in Animal Behaviour, 2010)

  Chameleon crunch

  When parents warn children not to play with their food, there’s now reason to add a menacing ‘even if’: ‘even if the food begins playing with you’. Recently, food was given a new ability to play, a little, the moment it encounters milk.

  Researchers have patented a way to make breakfast cereal change colour as it sits in the bowl, awaiting its roller-coaster ride down somebody’s throat.

  The patent documents explain why the world needs this to occur, as well as how, chemically and mechanically, to do it.

  Hideo Tomomatsu of Crystal Lake, Illinois, filed a patent application in 1987 for what he called ‘colour-changing cereals’. Eight years later, Joseph Farinella of Chicago, Illinois, and Justin French of Cedars, Iowa, used much of the same stilted wording in filing their own application. Both patents were granted, with the rights being assigned to the Quaker Oats Company. Quaker’s colour-changing was in ‘Cap’n Crunch’ cereal – expressly, the ‘Polar Crunch’ variety, which apparently was on sale as early as 2006.

  Particular coating compositions tested. The inventors note: ‘While the invention has been described with respect to certain preferred embodiments, as will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, it is to be understood that the invention is capable of numerous changes, modifications and rearrangements’ which, they say, ‘are intended to be covered’ by the patent.

  The Quaker Oats Company, founded in 1901, makes breakfast cereal – buckets and buckets of it. Playing with food is good for its industry. Quaker even partially financed the apotheosis of that activity: the 1971 film version of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

  The patent language puts the new, shade-shifting food in context: ‘One approach to engage the interest of children, as well as other people, in eating RTE [Ready to Eat] cereal would be an RTE cereal that changes colour on contact with an aqueous edible medium such as cold milk, hot water, etc. To make the change more interesting, the colour change should be rapid and substantial.’

  ‘There is a need’ for this, the inventors write.

  ‘There is also a need’, they continue, ‘for a method for making colour-changing cereals that is efficient and cost-effective.’

  Their method is to create cereal pieces of one colour, then coat them with powder of a different hue. That leads to breakfast table magic: ‘The coating is of a second colour different from the first colour and is in a quantity sufficient to obscure the first colour … Upon mixing milk with the resulting cereal, the edible powdered surface is instantly dissolved or dispersed, revealing the specific colours of the individual pieces very quickly.’

  What are the ingredients? Glad you asked. ‘The cereal base has a coating comprising cornstarch, powdered sugar, [and] food colouring.’

  The researchers tinkered with the recipe, to see how quickly they could make the cereal disrobe. That resulted in what they believe to be a scientific discovery: ‘Surprisingly, the use of cornstarch in the correct ratio to powdered sugar increases the speed of the colour change. This creates a more startling effect that is appealing to children.’

  That ratio, with a cereal coating of mostly starch and just a smidge of sugar, got the transformation down to a presto-change-o, what-a-way-to-start-the-day seven seconds.

  Tomomatsu, Hideo (1989). ‘Color-changing Cereals and Confections’. US patent no. 4,853,235, 1 August.

  Farinella, Joseph R., and Justin A. French (2010). ‘Color-changing Cereal and Method’. US patent no. 7,648,722, 19 January.

  Drinking in the results

  America, a rich source of alcohol, of alcoholics, and of aggressive alcoholics, is also rich in scholarship on those subjects. One must drink deep of that scholarship, in many cases, if one cares about the question: what, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research? The flow of prose produced by these researchers could drown anyone who tried to ingest more than occasional, measured amounts of it.

  In a 1999 study called ‘The Effects of a Cumulative Alcohol Dosing Procedure on Laboratory Aggression in Women and Men’, Donald Dougherty and colleagues at the University of Texas-Houston medical school report making several discoveries: (1) Both men and women became more aggressive after they drank alcohol; (2) those men and women became even more aggressive ‘after consuming the second alcoholic drink’; (3) their aggressiveness ‘remained elevated for several hours’ after they finished drinking; and (4) the individuals who were most aggressive when sober were also the most aggressive when drunk.

  Three years later, Peter Giancola at the University of Kentucky wrote a study called ‘Irritability, Acute Alcohol Consumption and Aggressive Behaviour in Men and Women’. ‘The finding of greatest importance’, Giancola says, ‘was that alcohol increased aggression for persons with higher, as opposed to lower, levels of irritability.’

  The following year, Dominic J. Parrott, Amos Zeichner and Dana Stephens at the University of Georgia published a treatise called ‘Effects of Alcohol, Personality, and Provocation on the Expression of Anger in Men: A Facial Coding Analysis’. Parrott and his colleagues experimented, and made two big discoveries. First: that drunken people made ‘facial expressions of anger’ more often than sober people. Second: that when highly provoked, drunks also showed a general ‘tendency to express anger outwardly’.

  Many other alcohol mysteries are explained in these same research journals. In 1995, Siegfried Streufert and fellow researchers at Penn State boozed up some managers. Streufert published a study, called ‘Alcohol Hangover and Managerial Effectiveness’. It reports that managers who drank moderately of an evening had perfectly adequate ‘complex decision-making competence’ the next morning.

  Suzanne Thomas, Carrie Randall and Maureen Carrigan at the Medical University of South Carolina wrote a paper in 2003, called ‘Drinking to Cope in Socially Anxious Individuals: A Controlled Study’. They explain: ‘The results of this study confirm earlier observations that individuals high in social anxiety deliberately drink to cope with social fears’.

  In 2005, Soyeon Shim at the University of Arizona and Jennifer Maggs at Penn State University went looking for results. They found some. Their study called ‘A Cognitive and Behavioral Hierarchical Decision-making Model of College Students’ Alcohol Consumption’ says: ‘Results indicated that personal values can serve as significant predictors of the attitudes college students have toward alcohol use, which in turn can predict intentions to drink. Results also indicated that intentions to drink are strongly related to actual alcohol consumption’.

  Dougherty, Donald M., James M. Bjork, Robert H. Bennett and F. Gerard Moeller (1999). ‘The Effects of a Cumulative Alcohol Dosing Procedure on Laboratory Aggression in Women and Men’. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 60 (3): 322–9.

  Giancola, Peter R. (2002). ‘Irritability, Acute Alcohol Consumption and Aggressive Behavior in Men and Women’. Drug and Alcohol Dependence 68
(3): 263–74.

  Parrott, Dominic J., Amos Zeichner, and Dana Stephens (2003). ‘Effects of Alcohol, Personality, and Provocation on the Expression of Anger in Men: A Facial Coding Analysis’. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 27 (6): 937–45.

  Streufert, Siegfried, Rosanne Pogash, Daniela Braig, Dennis Gingrich, Anne Kantner, Richard Landis, Lisa Lonardi, John Roache and Walter Severs (1995). ‘Alcohol Hangover and Managerial Effectiveness’. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 19 (5): 1141–6.

  Thomas, Suzanne E., Carrie L. Randall, and Maureen H. Carrigan (2003). ‘Drinking to Cope in Socially Anxious Individuals: A Controlled Study’. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 27 (12): 1937–43.

  Shim, Soyeon, and Jennifer Maggs (2005). ‘A Cognitive and Behavioral Hierarchical Decision-making Model of College Students, Alcohol Consumption’. Psychology and Marketing 22 (8): 649–68.

  Research spotlight

  ‘An Ode to Substance Use(r) Intervention Failure(s): SUIF’

  by Shlomo Stan Einstein (published in Substance Use and Misuse, 2012)

  The vegetarian who ate a sausage with curry sauce

  A report called ‘The Vegetarian Who Ate a Sausage with Curry Sauce’ can provide cheer both for meat-eaters – because it tells how a hunk of processed meat served as a helpful warning beacon, possibly lengthening a person’s life – and for vegetarians – because that meat was the stark symbol of someone’s health going very wrong.

  Despite its children’s-bookish title, this report was published in the January 2003 issue of The Lancet Neurology, along with the less child-friendly sounding ‘Principles of Frontal Lobe Function’ and ‘Should I Medicate My Child?’.