Newborn stars? Planets beyond our solar system? Black holes? The annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society has these and every other (it seems) denizen of the universe, but I have to mention three among my favorites of the discoveries being presented:

Our Milky Way galaxy is heavier, moving faster and therefore more likely to smack into its nearest neighbor than astronomers thought. Precision measurements of the Milky Way show that the galaxy is rotating about 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously understood, said Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—so here in our part of the galaxy, our little solar system is moving at about 600,000 miles per hour rather than the previously estimated 500,000 miles per hour.

The additional rotational velocity implies that the Milky Way’s mass is half-again as great as what had been thought, making it just about as hefty as the Andromeda Galaxy. “No longer will we think of the Milky Way as the little sister of the Andromeda Galaxy in our Local Group family,” said Reid. That extra mass means the Milky Way exerts a greater gravitational pull, which in turn makes it more likely that we will collide with Andromeda or smaller galaxies.

The scientists used the Very Long Baseline Array, a system of 10 radio telescopes stretching from Hawaii to New England to the Virgin Islands, to map the Milky Way in great detail—specifically, the distances to and motions of various regions of it. That brought another surprise: our galaxy probably has four, not two, spiral arms of gas and dust where stars are forming, as you can see in this cool artist’s rendition.

A third discovery addresses the conundrum of how young stars manage to exist in the center of the Milky Way. Logically, they either formed there or fell there. Two problems: the black hole at the galactic center produces such strong gravitational tides that any nearby stellar maternity wards (molecular clouds) should be ripped apart, preventing stars from forming. Yet stars falling inward after forming elsewhere is a rare occurrence.

Using the Very Large Array of 27 radio telescopes in New Mexico, astronomers led by Elizabeth Humphreys of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics spied two protostars 7 and 10 light-years from the galactic center. That means starscan form there, despite the proximity of a black hole that gobbles everything it can reach. “We literally caught these stars in the act of forming,” said Humphreys.

I'm filing this under the heading "e-mails I wished I never opened."

Foe decades the innocuous words “artificial colors” or “color added” has been allowed to hide the presence of—sorry, but there’s no way to soften the blow here—insects in foods. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has long allowed food- and cosmetics-manufacturers to use those phrases on their ingredient labels when the ingredient is carmine or cochineal, which are extracted from the dried bodies of the cochineal insect. But in a decision published yesterday, the FDA has ruled that carmine and cochineal have to be named.

The action comes 10 years after a consumer group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, petitioned the agency to require the labels.

If you want to avoid eating insects because you’re a vegetarian, or because you’re Jewish or Muslim, or . . . well, just because, now the ingredients list will tip you off to what to avoid. (Also, a few people have reported allergic reactions to the ingredients.) Carmine and cochineal tend to be in reddish foods and drinks, including fruit drinks, ice cream, yogurt, and candy. And, yes, we all know that foods from flour to cereals can be contaminated with insect parts, but that's accidental. When the little buggers are in there on purpose, I want to know.

Every December the online intellectual salon called Edge, presided over by literary agent John Brockman, asks a select (virtual) assembly of scientists to ponder a question, such as what they are optimistic about (2007), what “dangerous” ideas they have (2006) and what they believe is true but cannot prove (2005). As the bell tolls on 2008 and rings in 2009, Edge is unveiling this year’s: “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

As usual, the offerings vary as much in quality as a cheap spumante does from Dom Perignon. Predictably, contributors foresee space colonization and the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. More intriguing, there are predictions that a new human species will evolve from Homo sapiens, and that we will discover how to identify the brain pattern that indicates a person is about to commit a violent act (and will also discover how to suppress that pattern).

Read them yourself, but here are a handful that will give your brain a good workout to start the New Year:

*Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner  foresees a day when it will be possible to “delineate the nature of talent.” Genetics will reveal whether “highly talented individuals have a distinctive, recognizable genetic profile,” while neuroscience will show whether there are “structural or functional neural signatures” of talent. As for the game-changing part (especially in a society where people have the delusion that everyone is equally talented, or can become so), imagine what happens if these signatures can be recognized in infancy.

*Physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study imagines the development of “tools to observe and direct the activities of a human brain in detail from the outside,” making possible “observation or control of a brain.” Since microwaves travel through brain tissue, putting a microwave transmitter inside a brain would let its activity be sent to the outside world, making possible what he calls “radiotelepathy, the direct communication of feelings and thoughts from brain to brain.” Change everything? Oh yeah. Radiotelepathy could be used for good or for evil, Dyson writes, “a basis for mutual understanding and peaceful cooperation of humans all over the planet . . . [or] a basis for tyrannical oppression and enforced hatred between one communal society and another. . . . A society bonded together by radiotelepathy would be experiencing human life in a totally new way.”

*Neurobiologist Leo Chalupa of UC Davis looks forward to the day when science can restore the plasticity of the adult brain to what it was in early childhood. If “the high degree of brain plasticity normally evident only during early development can now be made to occur throughout the life span,” he writes, it would be “a game changer in the brain sciences. Imagine being able to restore the plasticity of neurons in the language centers of your brain, enabling you to learn any and all languages effortlessly and at a rapid pace. The restoration of neuronal plasticity would also have important clinical implications since unlike in the mature brain, connections in the developing brain are capable of sprouting (i.e. new growth).”

A good way not to win friends in an immigrant community is to blame its high rate of birth defects on the practice of cousin marriages. That’s what British environment minister Phil Woolas did in February, blaming birth defects in children in the UK’s Pakistani community on marriages between first cousins. “If you have a child with your cousin, the likelihood is there will be a genetic problem,” he told the Sunday Times. (Calls by a Muslim activist group that Woolas be fired went for naught; he was promoted in October to immigration minister.) That belief is reflected in laws in 31 U.S. states that either bar cousin marriage entirely or permit it only if the couple undergoes genetic counseling or cannot have kids.

But in a paper in the journal PLoS Biology, Hamish Spencer of New Zealand’s University of Otago and Diane Paul of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology argue that the genetic risk to children born of cousin marriages is much less than widely believed.

Risk is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But in 2002 an expert panel convened by the National Society of Genetic Counselors found that the risks of a first-cousin marriage are about 1.7% to 2% above the background risk for congenital defects and 4.4% above background (which is vanishingly low to begin with) for dying in childhood.

Whether 2% and 4% seem like a big extra risk or a piddling one probably depends on how much you want to marry your cousin, but Spencer concludes that “neither the scientific nor social assumptions behind [anti-cousin-marriage laws] stand up to close scrutiny. Women over the age of 40 have a similar risk of having children with birth defects and no one is suggesting they should be prevented from reproducing. People with Huntington’s disease or other autosomal dominant disorders have a 50 per cent risk of transmitting the underlying genes to offspring and they are not barred either.”

And what of the belief that humans have an incest-avoidance gene that keeps people from lusting after their cousins? None has ever been found. And if avoiding incest with a cousin is part of human nature, as some evolutionary psychologists contend, then an awful lot of humans haven’t noticed. In Turkey and Morocco, first-cousin marriages account for 22% of all marriages, and second-cousin marriages for another 29%, finds demographer Georges Reniers of the University of Ghent. Cousin marriages are similarly common among China’s majority Han ethnic group and in the Middle East and sub-Sahara Africa.

If boredom sets in over the holidays, take a page from some freshmen engineering students at Johns Hopkins: try to build a racecar powered only by two mousetraps and six rubber bands.

Many of the students went with wood slabs for the body, and there were more than a few wheels made of DVDs. The cars needed not only propulsion but also maneuverability: they had to navigate an 11-foot-long curved course and somehow slalom around two sand-filled soda bottles blocking the way. The winners hit on an ingenious solution: they attached rods to the top of their cars, and when the rods hit the soda bottles it forced the front wheels to turn, steering the cars around the obstacle.

But words do not to justice to these feats of engineering: watch the video. Best rubber-band-and-mousetrap racecar at your holiday gathering wins an extra piece of fruitcake.

That sigh of relief emanating from laboratories around the world is the sound of scientists reacting to reports that president-elect Obama will name physicist John Holdren his science adviser. Holdren has a resume longer than your arm (he is Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, President and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center, Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and former president, and chairman of the board of American Association for the Advancement of Science), but what he will bring to the table is an unflinching commitment to evidence-based policy making.

That, of course, has been in short supply over the last 8 years, as I detailed in Newsweek's recent election issue. Whether it was programs on sex education (abstinence only! who cares if that doesn't reduce teen pregnancy, STDs or achieve other outcomes you'd think would be one of the purposes of sex ed), or policies on endangered species or climate change or stem cells or . . . (the list goes on), the Bush Administration seemed to have never met a fact it wasn't perfectly content to dismiss.

Climate change is arguably the most egregious example, and on this issue Holdren has been a leading voice for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as adapting to the inevitable changes already locked into the climate system. Among the themes he has reiterated in public as well as private:

• "Global warming" is a misleading term because it suggests something "uniform, gradual, benign," Holdren says. "What is happening is nonuniform, rapid and damaging."
• Global climate change is already "causing serious harm to human well-being in many places around the world," including increased floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and severe tropical storms, plus, "probably, more tropical disease."
• And Holdren is clear on what this means for policy: "Continued 'business as usual' [in terms of carbon dioxide emissions] in fossil-fuel burning and deforestation will lead to much greater disruption and . . . soon: more of the above plus falling crop production, loss of coral reefs, disruption of ocean fisheries, accelerating sea-level rise."

Holdren is known as the consummate insider, a quiet-spoken scientist who does impeccable work. One anecdote from years ago: Holdren co-authored a number of books and papers on population and other environmental issues with Paul Ehrlich, the fiery Stanford University biologist best known for his Cassandra-esque book The Population Bomb. To many in the business community and on the political right, Ehrlich is Satan incarnate. A friend once asked Holdren how it felt to be associated with Ehrlich--whether he, too, caught flak from anti-environmentalists and those who denied the threat of the population explosion. No, Holdren answered, it actually has never been a problem: whenever people attack our work, he said, it's always aimed at 'Ehrlich and that other guy.'"

If Holdren becomes Obama's science advisor, at a time when science issues drive so many aspects of controversial public policies, he's not going to be "that other guy" much longer.

Thinking of moving? Go nowhere until you consult the “death map,” a county-by-county snapshot of the likelihood of dying from a natural disaster like an earthquake or hurricane.

Assembled by geographer Susan Cutter and grad student Kevin Borden of the University of South Carolina, it reflects nationwide data from 1970 to now on which spots were hit how often by floods, extreme weather and other manifestations of the wrath of the gods. As they report in the December 17 issue of the International Journal of Health Geographics, southerners are way more likely to die due to a natural disaster than are people in other regions of the country, mostly because of severe weather such as tornadoes. The northern Great Plains is a hotspot of deaths due to heat and drought, while in the mountainous West winter weather and flooding are the big killers. In the south central states, floods and tornadoes are the grim reaper’s instruments of choice.

Of all deaths by natural disaster, heat and drought took the greatest toll, accounting for 20 percent of total deaths, followed closely by severe summer weather (19 percent) and winter weather (18 percent). It’s a bit ominous to realize that these are precisely the kinds of events that are becoming more common due to glibal warming and the ensuing climate change. In contrast, geophysical events such as earthquakes, wildfires and hurricanes accounted for less than 5 percent of total hazard deaths.

Check out the risk in your area on the map.

Slaying medical myths is like playing whack-a-mole: no sooner do you eliminate one than another pops up. Last year Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll of Indiana University School of Medicine exposed seven medical beliefs as myths (more on this below), and now they are refining their aim: in a paper in BMJ, the duo shows that seven medical beliefs related to Christmas are as shaky as an underdone plum pudding:

Sugar makes kids hyperactive? “While sugarplums may dance in children’s heads, visions of holiday sweets terrorise parents with anticipation of hyperactive behaviour,” they write. But no matter what parents believe, sugar has gotten a bum rap. At least a dozen rigorous studies and have compared how children behave on diets containing different levels of sugar, and not a single one found any differences in behavior between the children consuming lots of sweets and kids who never came within hailing distance of a sucrose molecule—not even kids considered “sensitive” to sugar.

What happens instead is that parents who believe their children have gulped down a sugary drink or other goodie rate their children’s behavior as more hyperactive. “The differences in the children’s behaviour were all in the parents’ minds,” the scientists write.

Suicides increase over the holidays? The stress of family, loneliness and more depression during cold, dark months may make more people consider ending it all, but “there is no good scientific evidence to suggest a holiday peak in suicides,” the authors write. One U.S. study of suicides over 35 years found no increase before, during, or after holidays, and people are not more likely to kill themselves during dark winter months: suicides peak in warmer months and are lowest in the winter.

Poinsettias are poisonous? Apparently no amount of reassurance from public health officials that poinsettias are safe seems to get through to some people. But in an analysis of 849,575 cases of people eating plants, none of the 22,793 cases involving poinsettia caused significant poisoning. No one died, and 96 percent did not even require medical treatment—not even the 92 children who chowed down on poinsettia as if it were arugula.

You lose most heat through your head? Even the U.S. Army Field manual says you lose “40 to 45 percent of body heat” through the chimney effect. But as the Indiana scientists point out, “if this were true, humans would be just as cold if they went without trousers as if they went without a hat. But patently this is just not the case.” There is nothing special about the head and heat loss.

A midnight snack—just one more slice of fruitcake!—makes you fat? A study here and there has found that obese people report eating more meals in the afternoon, evening, or night than non-obese people. But just because obesity and after-hours eating go together doesn’t mean the latter causes the former. A midnight calorie counts no more than a noon calorie, which is why studies find no causal connection between eating at night (that is, not eating at night in addition to eating at regular times) and weight gain.

You can cure a hangover with aspirin or bananas or anything else? “No scientific evidence . . . supports any cure or effective prevention for alcohol hangovers,” the authors point out. Randomized trials of various “cures” have come up empty . Prevention, not cure or even treatment, is the only solution, though since alcohol can dehydrate you you may feel better if you drink (booze-free) fluids.

Vreeman and Carroll debunked medical myths unrelated to the holidays in a BMJ paper last year:

• People need to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day? “Complete lack of evidence.”
• We use only 10 percent of our brains? We use much more.
• Hair and fingernails grow after we die? No, though skin and flesh may retract, making it seem that nails are hair are growing.
• Shaving makes hair grow back faster, darker or coarser? “Shaved hair lacks the finer taper seen at the ends of unshaven hair, giving an impression of coarseness. Similarly, the new hair has not yet been lightened by the sun or other chemical exposures, resulting in an appearance that seems darker than existing hair.”
• Eating turkey makes you sleepy? “Any large solid meal (such as turkey, sausages, stuffing, and assorted vegetables followed by Christmas pudding and brandy butter) can induce sleepiness because blood flow and oxygenation to the brain decreases . . . . Accompanying wine may also play a role.”

Or, at this time of year, eggnog.

Going, going . . . . The universe as we see it—that starry expanse in the night sky—may never get better than it is now, at least in a visual sense: dark energy, the mysterious springy stuff that is causing the cosmic expansion to accelerate, is also squelching the growth of the largest entities in the universe, clusters of galaxies. From here on out, those clusters will grow no more than a ballerina on a diet.

The discovery, to be reported in two separate papers in the February 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, also gives astronomers the best clues yet about the nature of dark energy, which was discovered in 1998, and what it means for the fate of the universe.

Using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, astronomers led by Alexey Vikhlinin of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., measured how dark energy has affected the growth of galaxy clusters—the largest entities in the universe—over billions of years, which required spying some that lie halfway across the cosmos.

What they found is that the mass of the clusters increases over time, with the oldest clusters also being the most massive. Galactic clusters grew like Topsy for the first 10 billion or so years after the big bang, the scientists infer, but for the last 5 billion have been bulking up no more than an anorectic ballerina. In other words, dark energy was a wimp for the first two-thirds of the universe’s existence, but strengthened into a bully, keeping galactic clusters in check, in the most recent one-third.

The anemic growth of galactic clusters caused by dark energy makes sense: just as it would be harder for any two party-goers to find themselves up close and personal if the gathering were held in some sci-fi expanding room, so it is harder for cosmic objects to come together gravitationally if the universe is being stretched, as it is under the influence of dark energy. It’s sort of like “arrested development of the universe,” said Vikhlinin. “Whatever is forcing the expansion of the universe to speed up is also forcing its development to slow down.”

That suggests that dark energy, a sort of repulsive or anti- gravity, is the energy of empty space rather than the result of a more general energy field or the result of something weird happening with the shape of spacetime (which would mean Einstein’s theory of general relativity breaks down at very large scales). Einstein first gave this repulsive force the name cosmological constant, though he later said it was the worst mistake of his scientific life. “Putting all of this data together gives us the strongest evidence yet that dark energy is the cosmological constant, or in other words, that ‘nothing weighs something’,” said Vikhlinin. “A lot more testing is needed, but so far Einstein’s theory is looking as good as ever.”

If dark energy is indeed the manifestation of the energy of empty space, then the expansion of the universe will continue to accelerate. "The expansion of the universe will continue forever," said Vikhlinin (sorry, Woody Allen), but slow down enough "that it will not result in a big rip, tearing the structure apart." Phew. Still, in about 100 billion years, we won’t be able to see any other galaxies from our own Milky Way. Get out there with a telescope while there’s still lots to see.

Does anyone else feel that one of life’s singularly unfair phenomena is that some people can live on buttered eggs, dripping bacon and marbled steak yet never show any sign of heart disease? You know—the people who live to 95 and smugly assert that they never so much as met a low-fat food.

A study in today’s issue of the journal Science goes a long way toward solving the mystery, which you can probably guess: some people carry a genetic mutation that defends the heart against the effects of a high-fat diet—specifically, breaking down triglycerides, those fats that clog arteries like hair in your bathroom drain.

The researchers, led by Toni I. Pollin and Alan R. Shuldiner of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, hit on a neat approach: they recruited 809 volunteers from among the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pa. The virtue of this population is that they are pretty genetically homogeneous, compared to a random group of Americans. That means that if a gene has a certain effect, the researchers are more likely to find it. Think of it this way: the effect of any one gene—for, say, levels of an enzyme—depends on all the rest of the genes an individual carries. If some of those “background” genes wash out the effect of the gene of interest, by (say) affecting levels of the same enzyme, then the gene of interest will have different effects in different people, and the study will have a hard time linking it to any particular phenotype. Genetic homogeneity should prevent that complication.

The scientists gave their volunteers a high-fat milkshake (78 percent of the calories were from fat), and then drew blood samples immediately as well as 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 hours afterwards. They then looked for correlations between triglyceride levels and genes.

One gene stood out: about 5 percent of the Amish had a mutation in a gene called APOC3. This gene encodes a protein, called apoC-III, that inhibits the breakdown of triglycerides, those nasty fat particles in the blood. People with the mutation produce half the amount of apoC-III that the rest of us do. With only half of the protein that inhibits the breakdown of triglycerides, that breakdown can proceed at warp speed—and the result is fewer triglycerides sloshing around the bloodstream and clogging arteries, including after that high-fat milkshake. The people with the mutation also had high levels of “good” (HDL), low levels of “bad” (LDL) cholesterol and, not surprisingly, less atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). In short, they are less likely to develop cardiovascular disease even if they eat all the wrong things.

“Our findings suggest that having a lifelong deficiency of apoC-III helps to protect people from developing cardiovascular disease,” Pollin said.

The practical import of this isn’t that you should rush off to have your genome tested for this mutation so you can safely switch from skim milk to 78-percent-fat milkshakes. For one thing, genetic analysis suggests that the mutation was introduced into the Amish of Lancaster County by someone born in the mid-1700s, which is when the Amish arrived in Pennsylvania from Europe. If you do not trace your ancestry to this group, there’s about zero chance that you have the protective mutation. (Though I can certainly foresee the day when people with other protective mutations will tell dietitians to take their advice, meant for the general population, and shove it).

Instead, Pollin and her colleagues think the discovery may pave the way to drugs that target apoc-III. Just as the mutation causes a body to make less of the protein that inhibits the breakdown of triglycerides, so a drug might also lower levels of apoc-II and make triglycerides sitting ducks for enzymes that tear them apart.

You can tell a lot about a society by its movie demons, such as the fear of nuclear weapons parodied in “Dr. Strangelove” (1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis) or the unease about biology run amok as captured in 1971’s “The Andromeda Strain”. In “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, which opens tomorrow nationwide, the great fear is environmental.

Because humans have so trashed Earth, a visitor from another planet—a benevolent-looking Klaatu, played by Keanu Reeves—arrives to eliminate humanity in order to save the planet. As he tells one earthling, “this planet is dying; the human race is killing it. . . . But if you die, the Earth survives.” Notably, in the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Klaatu’s mission was to warn earthlings about the danger of nuclear weapons: “The threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated,” he says at one point. “If you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.”

“The entire canon of science fiction in America in the Fifties was constructed in such a way as to reinforce Western fears of the Eastern Bloc,” producer Erwin Stoff says in the production notes. “The ‘other’ to be feared was always a metaphor for Communism. What was remarkable about [the 1951] ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ was that it placed the onus of responsibility on everyone equally. The ‘other’ to fear was ourselves—the nature of man and the terrible violence that humanity is capable of.”

The metaphors pile up fast and furious in the new version, too, and subtlety is not in abundant supply. But it’s a lot of fun—I won’t pretend to be a movie critic, so I won’t throw around any more adjectives. I'll just mention that you won’t envy astrobiologist the job Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) has of convincing Klaatu that mankind is worth saving.

One of the coolest examples of tool use by animals (the non-human kind) isn’t chimps that twist sticks into termite mounds to haul out a nice insect dinner, or that use rocks to crush nuts—impressive, to be sure, but I think many of us have come to take for granted that our close cousins are clever enough to use tools. To my mind, the most startling example of tool use by animals is bottlenose dolphins that use sea sponges: they spear the sponges with their noses and then poke around in rocky crevasses to scare out the fish hiding inside or swab the sandy sea floor to expose hidden, burrowing prey. The sponges protect their noses, and the custom has persisted for generations, passed down from mother to offspring.

But the behavior, first discovered in the mid-1980s in Shark Bay, in the Indian Ocean off western Australia, has always puzzled scientists. Only a few of the bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay are “spongers.” If the behavior helps them survive and reproduce, it should be more widespread. If it carries too high a cost, it should die out within a generation or so, but it hasn’t. So is sponging adaptive for the dolphins or not?

In a fascinating paper being published this evening in the open-access journal (that means it posts all its content free) PLoS ONE, scientists led by Janet Mann of Georgetown University ask, “Why Do Dolphins Carry Sponges?” They compared sponger females to non-sponger females, finding that spongers are “more solitary, spent more time in deep water channel habitats, dived for longer durations, and devoted more time to foraging than non-spongers.” Each of these is a “cost”—that is, if you have to spend more time looking for food that’s time away from other evolutionary-desirable activities, such as mating and raising offspring. Yet Mann finds that even with these costs, “calving success of sponger females was not significantly different from non-spongers.”

Bottlenose dolphins “spend more time hunting with tools than any non-human animal,” says Mann, who has been studying the dolphin population in Shark Bay for more than 21 years. “This is the first and only clear case of tool-use in a wild dolphin or whale.”

Yet out of thousands of dolphins in this population, she has found only 41 that use sponges. She also finds that almost all the spongers are females. They teach sponging to both male and female offspring, and “while a few males carry sponges, they seem to be slow learners in this regard,” says Mann. All female calves started sponging before they were weaned, but male calves rarely used sponges, and if they did, it was after weaning. That suggests that daughters adopt the social and foraging behaviors of their mothers, but sons are less interested in what mom is doing and more concerned with palling around with other males. “We believe these early sex differences foreshadow the long-term reproductive interests of males and females, with males being focused on alliance formation, necessary for successful mating, and females focused on foraging skills, necessary to meet the demands of three to eight years of nursing each calf,” says Mann.

The two Mars rovers that have been investigating the geology (areology?) of the red planet since soon after they landed on opposite sides of Mars in 2004 have nice, safe names that combine solidity and seriousness with a soupcon of inspiration: Spirit and Opportunity. Can you do better?

NASA and WALL-E, Disney’s hit movie, are sponsoring a contest for students aged 5 to 18 to come up with a name for the next Mars rover, which is to be launched in the autumn of 2009 for an October 2010 landing. Currently weighed down with the less-than-inspiring name Mars Science Laboratory, the six-wheeled car-sized rover will collect soil and rock samples and analyze them for carbon-containing molecules indicative of life or its precursors, as well as environmental conditions that can support microbial life now or have done so in the past.

Students have until January 25 to submit their proposed name—no living people, nothing copyrighted, and no recycling of NASA mission names from the past—along with an essay explaining why it’s appropriate, and NASA will pick a winner in April. The nine finalists (three each from grades K-3, 4-7 and 8-12) will get to send a “special message to the future to be placed on a chip” carried by the rover, NASA says (presumably for some future advanced civilization to find when it makes a pit stop on Mars?), and the grand prize winner gets a trip to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, where the Mars missions are developed and controlled. One Small Step for a Rover? Life Search? Organic Dreams? I have no doubt you can do better.

What’s wrong with this picture? Americans’ health has failed to improve for the fourth year in a row, as America’s Health Rankings, released earlier this week, reports. Yet the country spends more than $2 trillion a year (one-sixth of our total economic output) on health care, more per person than any other nation.

We’ve all read how a big chunk of the nation’s health dollars go for insurers’ administrative costs, drug companies’ marketing and advertising, and other things that do exactly zero to keep people healthy and alive. But in a refreshingly direct analysis, experts led by neurologist Marc Nuwer of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA argue that the problem with our health-care system is that we persist in thinking like Americans. As they explain in two papers in the current issue of the journal Neurology, we “prize individual choice and resist limiting care. We believe that if doctors can treat very ill patients aggressively and keep every moment of people in the last stages of life under medical care, than they should. We choose to hold these values. Consequently, we choose to have a more expensive system than Europe or Canada”—and one that does not keep us healthier or alive longer.

First, the sobering findings of the Health Rankings, which are based on 22 health measures:

• The prevalence of obesity has more than doubled in the last 19 years.
  The U.S. is 28^th in healthy life expectancy at 69 years. In Japan it’s 75.
• The U.S. has the worst mortality rate from treatable conditions of 18 other industrialized countries. That’s four spots worse than 5 years ago. In other words, get sick here and you’re more likely to die than you are in Canada, France, Britain and 15 other countries. Our mortality rate after age 75 is 50 percent higher than in France, Japan, Spain, Italy, Canada and Australia. In 1997, the U.S. ranked 15th in this mortality rate. Since then, Finland, Portugal, United Kingdom and Ireland have passed us.
• The U.S. is 20^th of 21 developed nations for child well-being, reflecting high infant mortality rates, a high percentage of low-birth-weight infants, and a low rate of immunizations.
• The U.S. health care system performance is worse than that of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—though we spend twice as much as these countries per person on health care.

“These statistics indicate that what we are doing as a nation is not working,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “We know improvement is possible because other nation’s have achieved far better health outcomes at less cost, indicating that we, too, can do the same.”

Earlier this year I wrote that this pablum our political and business leaders keep feeding us about how the American health-care system is “the best in the world” (an argument that special interests have long used to block health-care and health-insurance reform) is completely bogus. The U.S., as I wrote then, is “well behind other developed countries on measures from cancer survival to diabetes care that cannot entirely be blamed on the rich-poor or insured-uninsured gulf.” These data underline that.

But back to Marc Nuwer’s diagnosis. The UCLA neurologist and his colleagues make these points:

• 31 percent of what we spend on health “care” goes toward administration. “We push a lot of paper,” says Nuwer. “We spend twice as much as Canada, which has a more streamlined healthcare system that demands doctors complete less paperwork.”
• 10 percent of what we spend goes to defensive medicine, such as expensive tests ordered by doctors afraid of missing anything, however unlikely. “Doctors don’t want to be accused in court of a delayed diagnosis, so they bend over backwards to find something, even if it’s a rare possibility, in order to cover themselves,” says Nuwer. I have to add that much of this is driven by patients and their families who have no understanding that the test will not lead to anything actionable. Hint: when your doc orders a test, ask if the results will tell her something about how to treat you that she doesn’t already know.

Part of the problem, says Nuwer, is that doctors are oblivious to the price of whatever they’re prescribing. “Does a fancy electric wheelchair cost $500 or $50,000?” he asks. “Most doctors have no clue. We need to give physicians feedback about the dollar signs behind their orders.”

Advice for anyone who wants to be happier: pick the right friends.

For the increasing number of Americans who view happiness as a goal in and of itself rather than (sorry to be so old-fashioned) the result of, oh, leading a rewarding life or helping others or achieving something—a trend I bemoaned recently—the latest study provides a simple recipe. Happiness, conclude political scientist James Fowler of UC San Diego and sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School, spreads far and wide through social networks. Not only can one person’s happiness be infectious for those in her immediate circle, but happiness can spread to friends of friends of friends (that is, three degrees of separation). Therefore, pick happy people to be your friends.

The same team reported last year that obesity, too, can spread through social contagion. As Fowler told Newsweek then, obesity is “spreading through ideas about what appropriate behaviors are, or what an appropriate body image might be.” Or as Christakis said, “If I see you gaining weight, and I respect you, and want to emulate you in other ways, that changes my ideas about what is an acceptable body size. I think, ‘All my buddies are getting obese, so it’s OK for me to be obese too’.”

In the case of happiness, the scientists are reporting in a paper published online in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) this evening, the basic idea is that “one of the key determinants of human happiness is the happiness of others,” said Christakis. Just as with their obesity-is-contagious study, the scientists used data from the Framingham Heart Study to map out the social networks of 4,739 people whose happiness they measured from 1983 to 2003 by asking how strongly four statements described them: “I felt hopeful about the future”; “I was happy”; “I enjoyed life”; and “I felt that I was just as good as other people.”

On average, they find, for every one happy friend in your social network, your own chance of being happy rises by 9 percent. Every unhappy friend decreases your chance of being happy by 7 percent. Not surprisingly, the fewer degrees of separation between you and a happy person the stronger their influence on your own mood. Being friends with a happy person makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy; having a friend who is a friend of a happy person makes you 10 percent more likely to be happy, and having a friend whose friend’s friend is happy makes that 6 percent.

I can see it now: Americans from coast to coast dumping their depressed, dour, unhappy friends, shunning them like lepers. As if the unhappy didn’t have enough to make them miserable.

The key question, of course, is whether the correlation the researchers are reporting is causal. In other words, let’s accept that your chance of being happy is a function of the number of happy people among your friends and friends’ friends. But are those cheery pals causing your happiness?

There is one head-scratching finding in the data. If one person becomes happy (or happier), a friend living within a mile has a 25 percent greater-than-otherwise chance of becoming happy. But if your spouse become happy, you have only an 8 percent increased chance at moving up the happiness meter. If happiness is contagious, shouldn’t spouses make more of a difference?

Alternative hypothesis time. Happy people, being superficial and self-absorbed and delusional, can’t stand being around unhappy people, and so won’t accept any as friends. Therefore the correlation between the number of happy people you’re connected to and your own happiness is just coincidental, not causal.

Christakiss argues instead that “the spread of emotion has a fundamental psychobiological aspect.” “Physical personal interaction is necessary, so the effect decays with distance”—which is why a friend who lives within a mile of you and who becomes happy (or happier) increases the chance that you, too, will feel happy, but a friend who lives farther away has almost no effect.

All you unhappy people out there can now obsess on yet another reason for feeling miserable: you’re not doing your part to increase your social network’s level of happiness. At least sadness does not spread through social networks they way happiness does, the researchers conclude—but while you may not be infecting people with your glumness you are still failing in your responsibility to increase humanity’s sum total of joy. For isn't that our paramount goal these days?