Boys With Unpopular Names More Likely to Break Law

Boys in the United States with common names like Michael and David are less likely to commit crimes than those named Ernest or Ivan.

David E. Kalist and Daniel Y. Lee of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania compared the first names of male juvenile delinquents to the first names of male juveniles in the population. The researchers constructed a popularity-name index (PNI) for each name. For example, the PNI for Michael is 100, the most frequently given name during the period. The PNI for David is 50, a name given half as frequently as Michael. The PNI is approximately 1 for names such as Alec, Ernest, Ivan, Kareem, and Malcolm.

Results show that, regardless of race, juveniles with unpopular names are more likely to engage in criminal activity. The least popular names were associated with juvenile delinquency among both blacks and whites.

The findings, announced today, are detailed in the journal Social Science Quarterly.

While the names are likely not the cause of crime, the researchers argue that "they are connected to factors that increase the tendency to commit crime, such as a disadvantaged home environment, residence in a county with low socioeconomic status, and households run by one parent."

"Also, adolescents with unpopular names may be more prone to crime because they are treated differently by their peers, making it more difficult for them to form relationships," according to a statement released by the journal's publisher. "Juveniles with unpopular names may also act out because they consciously or unconsciously dislike their names."

The findings could help officials " identify individuals at high risk of committing or recommitting crime, leading to more effective and targeted intervention programs," the authors conclude.

Original here

Dolphins prepare food like chefs before eating

A wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin was observed going through a series of complicated steps to prepare cuttlefish for eating in the Spencer Gulf, in South Australia

A wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin was observed going through a series of complicated steps to prepare cuttlefish for eating in the Spencer Gulf, in South Australia.

Study co-author Tom Tregenza, from the University of Exeter, said the behaviour exhibited between 2003 and 2007 was unlikely to be a rarity.

"In addition to our observations, individual bottlenose dolphins feeding at these cuttlefish spawning grounds have been observed by divers in the area to perform the same behavioural sequence," they said in the study.

"The feeding behaviour reported here is specifically adapted to a single prey type and represents impressive behavioural flexibility for a non-primate animal."

The research team, writing in the science journal PLoS One, said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor.

The dolphin, then pinned the cuttlefish with its snout while standing on its head, before killing it instantly with a rapid downward thrust and "loud click" audible to divers as the hard cuttlebone broke.

The dolphin then lifted the body up and beat it with her nose to drain the toxic black ink that cuttlefish squirt into the water to defend themselves when attacked.

Next the prey was taken back to the seafloor, where the dolphin scraped it along the sand to strip out the cuttlebone, making the cuttlefish soft for eating.

"It's a sign of how well their brains are developed. It's a pretty clever way to get pure calamari without all the horrible bits," Mark Norman, the curator of molluscs at Museum Victoria.

A separate 2005 study provided the first sign dolphins may be capable of group learning and using tools, with a mother seen teaching her daughters to break off sea sponges and wear them as protection while scouring the seafloor in Western Australia.

Original here

Air Pollution Now Melting Snowpack Quicker, Study Shows

Written by Timothy B. Hurst

A new study shows that pollution from automobiles and coal-fired power plants is contributing to the melting of mountain snowpacks up to a month early, exacerbating water shortages and polluting streams in the arid West.

We’ve all seen it. That white fluffy blanket of snow that looked so nice after it fell a couple weeks back is no longer white and fluffy. It has been capped with a layer of dark sooty particulate matter, turning it from white to gray to black. Having grown up in the Boston area, this was the reality of virtually every snowstorm I can recall from my youth. But that dark, sooty particulate matter that builds up on the stale snow is not only an aesthetically unpleasing feature of urban landscapes in the winter, it happens in the North American snowscapes of the Rockies, the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades - with far more serious consequences.

A peer-reviewed study conducted by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is the first to explore changes to snowmelt caused by soot pollution at a regional level. The study, authored by Qian, Gustafson, Leung and Ghan, is scheduled to be published next month in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

The study found that particulate emissions from automobile tailpipes and industry smokestacks settles on snow-covered mountains and covers them with a dark layer that absorbs more sunlight and melts the snow faster.

>>See also: EPA Ruling Could Allow 8,000MW of New Coal-Fired Power Plants

“Soot acts like tiny toaster ovens in the snowpack, and when the sun hits them, they heat up and melt the snow,” said Charles Zender in an article at Energy & Environment (Sub$cription req’d.), an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Irvine. Zender peer-reviewed the Northwest Pacific National Laboratory study.

In a previous paper about the effects of dust layers on snowmelt, researchers found that dust affecting the San Juan Mountains snowpack originated in the Colorado Plateau, which includes parts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. The likely cause of this sudden uptick of dust particles was the expansion of grazing, agriculture, mining and increased recreational use of the land that is exposing soils to the wind, which in turn lifts the dirt into the atmosphere. One of that paper’s authors, Thomas Painter of the University of Colorado said about the phenomenon, “Whenever we have fresh, relatively clean snow at the surface of the mountain, the runoff is muted. As soon as the dust levels come back, you can see that the runoff starts back up.”

Wide-ranging implications

The implications of the study’s findings range from ecological to economic and political.

The expedited rate of snowmelt makes those dry summers of the American West that much tougher to stomach without rainfall. And because concentrations of the particulate matter are so high in the summer months the effects on water quality could have devastating ecological impacts.

So, not only is there less water in summer months, the water that is available will have higher concentrations of dirt, ash and soot from as far away as China.

“The important thing is the change in timing of available water,” explained William Gustafson, an atmospheric scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and one of the study’s primary authors. In essence, there will be plenty of water in the early spring, when water availability is never a problem. But come late summer, rivers are losing their water much earlier than before.

But faster runoff also means less water for farming and residential use, less potential for hydroelectric energy, shorter rafting and skiing seasons and less-than stellar fishing conditions. For Rocky Mountain states like Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the economic impact on the recreation industry alone, is reason alone to take this study’s findings seriously.

>>Sign up for email updates from Red, Green, and Blue

But addressing the problem with real solutions is a political nightmare. Water politics in the West is already tenuous, add to the situation drivers that begin across state and international borders, and you are left with what seems like a virtually untangleable knot. You see, it just so happens that the changes needed in our infrastructure to clean up our automobiles, our factories, and our energy supply to mitigate the effects of rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, are the very same kinds of changes we need to reduce the amount of particulate emissions in the air that turns that snow black and melts it so hastily.

Original here