Not As Smart As We Think We Are
Human beings are optimistically flawed, according to a summary of the latest psychological research on self-knowledge. The report, in essence, says that people tend to think they are better than they are. At work, they overestimate their job performance; ditto for school; and when it comes to health, they tend to think that high blood pressure, food poisoning, cancer and other illnesses are the kinds of things that affect other people. The report, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest and compiled by investigators from Cornell University, Stanford University and the University of Iowa, says there’s a downside to these errors in self-assessment. People don’t take the needed steps to prevent or treat health problems; employees often underestimate how long it will take to complete a task; and entrepreneurs can be dangerously overconfident in making business decisions.

An Eye on the Past
Odds are that a 2-year-old boy and a 23-year-old woman from Chile never knew the joy their mummified remains would some day bring to William Lloyd, an ophthalmologist at the University of California-Davis. “The opportunity to analyze two pre-Colombian era mummy eyes is exciting and fascinating,” said Lloyd, an expert in comparative ophthalmology. Both mummies had pneumonia when they were alive. The child also had an inherited cystic disease in his liver, and the woman had lice, bad teeth and osteoporosis, but Lloyd hopes to learn much more about them by looking into their eyes. Most mummies are found with well-preserved eyes, and by analyzing these, Lloyd said, “we hope to determine if their pathology suggests any so-called modern day diseases, like diabetes or high blood pressure.” The eyes, he said, also provide telltale signs of various cancers, nutritional deficiencies, fetal alcohol syndrome and early signs of HIV infection.

Get Mad, Don’t Get Even
Anger, it seems, is better for the body than fear, according to a study by scholars at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Pittsburgh. That’s not to say that getting mad is equivalent to, say, eating your vegetables, but given the choice of reacting to a stressful situation with fear or anger, go with anger. Researchers caution, however, that they are not referring to chronic anger, which may very well contribute to heart disease and hypertension. “We're showing for the first time that when you are in a situation that is maddening and in which anger or indignation are justifiable responses, anger is not bad for you,” said Jennifer Lerner, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon and lead author of the study, which was published in the November issue of Biological Psychiatry. Lerner and her colleagues analyzed the facial expressions of 92 people as they responded to artificially created dilemmas. They also measured various physical reactions such as pulse rates, heart rates and blood pressure, and they found that stress – not anger – was more taxing on the body.

Killer Mosquitoes
It’s called the Plasmodium parasite. Carted around by mosquitoes, it infects between 350 million and 500 million people with malaria each year, and of those, more than 1 million die from the disease. But the mosquitoes themselves are immune to malaria. They have a protective gene that prevents them from getting sick, and a team of investigators from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Texas and the Imperial College of London have identified the gene. They’ve also found that by tinkering with the gene they can control – at least to some extent -- a mosquito’s resistance to the parasite. What they hope is that the study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will lead to better tools for controlling malaria. “These results provided new insights into how the mosquito defends itself from the malaria parasite. More research is needed, but we plan to apply this knowledge in the development of new approaches to control the disease,” said co-author Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, a professor of molecular biology at Johns Hopkins.

Mangrove Protection
Mangroves, it turns out, were an essential line of defense against last year’s tsunami. A study conducted by a seven-nation research team and published in the journal Science found that areas protected by coastal forests in the Cuddalore District of southeastern India suffered far less than areas that did not have a tree-lined buffer. “The tsunami left a horrific human tragedy in its wake but also some lessons,” said co-author Faizal Parish, director of the Global Environment Center in Malaysia. “Among them is the tremendous importance of mangroves, which are one of the world's most threatened tropical ecosystems.” The study notes that 30 trees per 100 square meters may reduce the maximum flow of a tsunami by more than 90 percent. The study’s authors said mangroves probably would not have been of much help where the tsunami was most intense, but they made a significant difference in less hard hit areas, and they would provide the same kind of protection from other coastal storms, such as hurricanes. “Just as the degradation of wetlands in Louisiana almost certainly increased Hurricane Katrina's destructive powers, the degradation of mangroves in India magnified the tsunami's destruction,” said Neil Burgess, a conservation specialist with World Wildlife Fund.

The Dustbin Effect
There’s a lesson to be learned from an asexual fungus called Penicillium marneffei, according to researchers at the Imperial College London. And that lesson is this: abstinence – in all probability -- leads to extinction. Penicillium marneffei, which causes disease in people with damaged immune systems, is found in a limited area of Southeast Asia, and it does not adapt well to new environments. Mat Fisher, who co-authored a recent paper on P. marneffei published in PLoS Pathogens, said the fungus does not adapt well because it “has largely dispensed with sexual production,” which is needed to mix up the gene pool in a way that helps organisms adapt to the world in which they live. “By being asexual, P. marneffei is not only limiting its ability to adapt, it may be at risk of becoming extinct,” said co-author Bill Hanage. “While becoming asexual may provide short term advantages to a species, in the long term,” he said, “they are likely to end up in evolution's ultimate dustbin.”

An Eye For Color
The age-old tug of war between nature and nurture, which typically applies to temperament and human behavior, has entered a new frontier – the eye ball. Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin have found that how one detects color may have as much to do with conditioning as it does with the eye itself. “We’ve shown that color perception goes far beyond the hardware of the eye,” said David Williams, director of the Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester. Williams and his team of researchers, who published their findings in the journal Neuroscience, asked 10 people to pick the “yellowist of yellow” on a computer screen, and each one picked essentially the same shade (there were very slight variations). Yet, when researchers used a laser-based technology to map out color cones in their inner eye, they found a large variation in the number of receptors each had for the color yellow. “Color is defined by our experience in the world, and since we all share the same world, we arrive at the same definition of colors,” Williams said.