1. Ancient Female Ancestors Roamed Far and Wide for Mates. Analysis of the 2 million year old bones of human ancestors indicates that males stayed close to their birth place for their entire lives, whereas females who reached maturity would leave their birth area and join a new group to find a mate.

2. Nerds and the supernatural. Radio preacher Harold Camping recently incorrectly predicted that the rapture and the end of the world would happen on May 21, 2011. How could he have believed the Bible could be used to make such predictions? I like Razib Khan’s exaplanation:

“Harold Camping is a nerd. He has a degree in civil engineering from Berkeley. . . . I have tried to imagine myself, a nerd with a quantitative and analytic bent, existing in a world where the Bible was the Word of God. I can immediately intuit how someone like Harold Camping could arrive at his absurd conclusions! To the nerdy crazy fundamentalism seems eminently reasonable once one accedes to the peculiar propositions of faith. Give a nerd an absurd axiom, and he will infer absurd entailments! Camping did as a nerd is wont to do. Most normal humans don’t have this nerdish momania to create integrated rational wholes, and then project inferences from the system which they’ve constructed. It seems silly and a waste of time. This is why so many conservative Christians easily spouted sage skepticism worthy of James Randi all this week.”

I think he hit it right on. It took me many years of my life to figure out that I shouldn’t expect that “integrated rational wholes” can be derived from metaphysical and religious texts.

3. What happens when you let your children have it all their own way? A mother tries an experiment of saying yes to everything her children want for a week. She learns some interesting lessons: that saying “yes” a little more often created some great family moments of fun and bonding, but that it was still necessary to impose some boundaries.

4. Are Associations Between Parental Divorce and Children’s Adjustment Genetically Mediated? An Adoption Study. This is an old study (from 2000), but I thought it was interesting. It is well-known that children with parents who are divorced fare worse in many measures of life outcome than children of intact families. It is a matter of debate, however, whether those poor outcomes are because of genetic or environmental factors. Twin adoption studies have shown that a significant determinant of a person’s probability of getting divorced is genetic (possibly, for example, because of factors such as genes that influence behavior in a negative way), so it is possible that the same genetic factors leading to an increased probability of divorce would be inherited by the couple’s children and lead to other negative life outcomes for the children. It is thus possible that there is no causation between correlation of having parents who divorce and poor life outcomes.

This study compares almost 400 adopted and biological families to try and figure out whether the children in divorced families are negatively impacted by the divorce itself, or by the genes. The authors conclude that “[i]n biological families, children who experienced their parents’ separation by the age of 12 years exhibited higher rates of behavioral problems and substance use, and lower levels of achievement and social adjustment, compared with children whose parents’ marriages remained intact. Similarly, adopted children who experienced their (adoptive) parents’ divorces exhibited elevated levels of behavioral problems and substance use compared with adoptees whose parents did not separate, but there were no differences on achievement and social competence.” It thus appears that the increased rates of behavioral and substance abuse problems among children of divorced parents are caused by environmental factors and not genetics. On the other hand, it looks like the decreased achievement and social competence in children of divorced parents is caused at least in part by genetics, and not only as a result of the divorce.

5. Beware Cancer Med. Increased non-drug spending on cancer treatment actually seems to increase cancer deaths. “The apparent lesson: avoid cancer docs, and especially their non-drug cancer treatments. . . . . That fits with cancer patients living longer when they go to hospice and get no cancer treatment and with randomized trials of cancer screening consistently showing no effect on total mortality.”

6. Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong. “[T]he very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly regimens that won’t help and may even harm you. . . . ‘Positive’ drug trials, which find that a treatment is effective, and ‘negative’ trials, in which a drug fails, take the same amount of time to conduct. ‘But negative trials took an extra two to four years to be published,’ he noticed. ‘Negative results sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn positive.’ With billions of dollars on the line, companies are loath to declare a new drug ineffective. As a result of the lag in publishing negative studies, patients receive a treatment that is actually ineffective.”

7. Harvard Law School exams from 1871 to 1998.

8. Mars’ Frozen Ocean of Carbon Dioxide. The northern Martian ice cap has 30 times more carbon dioxide than previously thought, enough to double the atmosphere’s density when the planet’s periodic change in tilt (every 100,000 years or so) makes it warm enough in the summer to evaporate the frozen CO2 into a gas. The extra CO2 would be enough to warm the planet up to make it possible for liquid water to exist on the surface of Mars at low elevations (enough for creeks and ponds).