Tag: 3quarksdaily

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:

From Nature:

A team of scientists has produced a truly concise anthology of verse by encoding all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets in DNA. The researchers say that their technique could easily be scaled up to store all of the data in the world. Along with the sonnets, the team encoded a 26-second audio clip from Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, a copy of James Watson and Francis Crick’s classic paper on the structure of DNA, a photo of the researchers’ institute and a file that describes how the data were converted. The researchers report their results today on Nature’s website¹. The project, led by Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, UK, marks another step towards using nucleic acids as a practical way of storing information — one that is more compact and durable than current media such as hard disks or magnetic tape.  “I think it’s a really important milestone,” says George Church a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who encoded a draft of his latest book in DNA last year². “We have a real field now.”

DNA packs information into much less space than other media. For example, CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva, currently stores around 90 petabytes of data on some 100 tape drives. Goldman’s method could fit all of those data into 41 grams of DNA.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Beautiful people are indeed happier, a new study says, but not always for the same reasons. For handsome men, the extra kicks are more likely to come from economic benefits, like increased wages, while women are more apt to find joy just looking in the mirror. “Women feel that beauty is inherently important,” says Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas at Austin labor economist and the study’s lead author. “They just feel bad if they’re ugly.”

Hamermesh is the acknowledged father of pulchronomics, or the economic study of beauty. It can be a perilous undertaking. He once enraged an audience of young Mormon women, many of whom aspired to stay home with future children, by explaining that homemakers tend to be homelier than their working-girl peers. (Since beautiful women tend to be paid more, they have more incentive to stay in the work force, he says.) “I see no reason to mince words,” says the 69-year-old, who rates himself a solid 3 on the 1-to-5 looks scale that he most often uses in his research. The pursuit of good looks drives several mammoth industries—in 2010, Americans spent $845 million on face-lifts alone—but few economists focused on beauty’s financial power until the mid-1990s, when Hamermesh and his colleague, Jeff Biddle of Michigan State University, became the first scholars to track the effect of appearance on earnings potential for a large sample of adults. Like many other desirable commodities, “beauty is scarce,” Hamermesh says, “and that scarcity commands a price.”

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From Science:

If you could confront the pickpocket who ripped you off in the subway, would you simply demand your wallet back, or would you seek vengeance? Your decision to punish the thief might hinge on whether the thief ended up richer than you, a new study suggests. According to most economic theories, self-interest is the prime motivator in human behavior. However, studies show that people consistently sacrifice their own welfare to punish cheats. For example, in a classic economic experiment called the “ultimatum game,” one person holds a certain number of dollars and can offer as many as she likes to a second player. If the second player rejects the offer, the first player loses everything. Rather than accepting any offer, the second player will consistently reject low offers, preferring to receive nothing than to allow her rival to retain the larger sum. In 1999, Swiss economists Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt defined this spiteful reaction toward cheats and freeloaders as “inequity aversion.” They hypothesized that such behavior is essential for cooperation and bargaining, and that it is separate from the desire for revenge, or “reciprocity,” as social scientists call it. However, says Fehr, it isn’t easy to tease apart the two motivations in experiments, much less real life. “This is a long-standing question that has not been answered to our full satisfaction.”

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From Harvard Magazine:

This past winter, a class of ’73 graduate asked me whether students still spend hours lingering over meals. He recalled his Harvard as heady and carefree, a place for reading great books and whiling away days in conversation. He had been saddened by an article in this magazine that chronicled the over-programmed lives of Harvard undergraduates today; among other alarums, it had mourned the death of the two-hour lunch. I looked up the piece (“Nonstop” ) and likewise found it upsetting. It painted Harvard undergraduates as so over-scheduled, they barely shower or sleep, let alone linger over lunch. But I knew it was not entirely accurate. At the very least, the article did not accurately reflect my Harvard experience. One of the greatest delights of my two years here has been dawdling in dining halls, listening, talking, and laughing with friends. I now realize the article bothered me in the same way I’m bothered by people who talk too much. I see in their annoying behavior a shade of something I fear I also do. Likewise, reading about Harvard’s “superstars” who “do it all” reminded me of a role I’d once tried to fill, now consciously refused, feared falling back into, and also was terrified of abandoning. I arrived at Harvard as a successful student who never slacked off. I liked to think my life well-balanced—I played sports, kept close friends, spent time with my family, and even slept. But as I outwardly checked off markers of a good, happy life, inside, I was all turmoil. That “carefree” lifestyle was a daily struggle, a purposeful act. I was terrified of “not doing everything right.” Schedule, schoolwork, social life, family, fitness, eating, clothes, even demeanor: everything had to be just so. Everyone believed I was happy-go-lucky (except maybe my parents, lone witnesses of biweekly meltdowns), and I was largely happy. But the harder I tried to be perfect, the more my perfectionism became torture.

Of course, in a sense it worked out. Affectation of effortless perfection got me into Harvard.

More here.