Results showed that elevated power is positively associated with infidelity because power increases confidence in the ability to attract partners. This association was found for both actual infidelity and intentions to engage in infidelity in the future.

There are two potential ways to spin this information:

1. Scientific fact has set the bar. With power is associated with increased risk for infidelity, then people in authority such as politicians need not be held to the same expectations of monogamy as everyone else.

2. Take preventative measures. Recall the Prohibition era when temperance advocates pushed to ban alcohol because it was considered a threat to the home. Apply the argument to upholding the promises made in a committed, long-term relationship; if absolute power is bad, then giving the power to the people would mitigate this concern.

This isn’t the first time the Northern Lights have been captured on film – check out the 2009 footage from National Geographic

(Seemingly random trivia: If you’re a follower of NCBI ROFL like me, then it might be worth your while to check out a JGI video that features one of the UC Berkeley grad students that apparently created this sorta-like-Ig-Nobels-but-not collection of news. You can see this video on SciVee, the HD version on YouTube, and a slightly longer but easier to follow talk on SciVee again.)

Are you ready to send a message to the stars? If so, head over to HellofromEarth.net (header above) and type in a 160-character message in English (think of it as an extra-long but non-pointless Tweet if you need to) on the site.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, these messages are being aimed at Gliese581d, a planet located 20 lightyears from Earth which is supposed to be orbiting another star in what’s being called a Goldilocks (“not too hot, not too cold… just right”) zone.

The messages are expected to be sent on August 24th via NASA’s Tidbinbilla space station outside Canberra, Australia. Don’t expect a quick answer though: delivery isn’t scheduled until 2029. And replies aren’t expected to reach us until 2049 at the earliest.

I have to start by saying that the BBC rocks.

Seriously, how many news services can deliver a straight-faced story about crop circles caused by wallabies high on poppies?  And I had never once considered the possibility that these smaller cousins of the kangaroo had Gummi-Bear-jumping-here-and-there-and-everywhere powers when under the influence of an opiate. Surely they’d need said jumping abilities to cross continents and states, popping up all over the world and leaving behind tamped down grass and earth in a concentric circle.

To think, all this time I’d been pinning the blame solely on aliens in circular spacecraft.

But I have to admit the wallaby story just reaffirms my passion for the stoic-faced Brits pounding out these stories for online consumption. The BBC first caught my attention, and my undying affection, back in 2007 with a story about how the British Army was in no way responsible for unleashing man-eating badgers on the villagers of Basra, Iraq.

Yes, you really did just read that last sentence. Go back and read the BBC story for what has to be the single best statement ever delivered and recorded at a press conference. (P.S. If anyone knows where video footage of this moment resides, please let me know. I would love to find out if the British Army spokesman gets through the categorical denial statement with the expression I’ve been imagining for the past few years.)

//

Somewhere in one of J.D. Robb’s stories is a time-travelling boy who gleefully discovers flying cars in 2060.

But in one of those cases where truth is stranger than fiction, flying cars already exist in this time period. And this isn’t an April Fool’s Day hoax either. Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a startup called Terrafugia teamed up to develop a car with fold-up wings that also has the capability to get airborne. Unsurprisingly, the vehicle has been named the Transition.

Conveniently the Federal Aviation Administration has come up with a classification that the Terrafugia Transition and other such cars can fit under: Light Sport Aircraft. It’s good to know that if Terrafugia does get “roadable planes” on the market by 2011 as they seem to think they can, potential owners and drivers – or should they be called pilots? Drilots? Pivers? No matter, we have at least two years to come up with an acceptable term – will know who they’ll need to contact to become qualified behind the wheel of a Transition or similar vehicle.

Admittedly all the transition talk brings back memories of the flying car that made it into the pages of the Neiman-Marcus Christmas Catalog a few years ago with a price tag of nearly half a million dollars. Sorry, Transition, but the Batplane-looking Moller SkyCar still looks cooler, and not just because of the shiny red paint, or the promise of taking to the skyways at 350 miles per hour when traffic is at a standstill.

Word of warning: at this speed, it’s probably not a good idea to ask for a top-down model…

Sometimes the best defense is the smallest one

For 2,000 years a pest that measures about the width of a pinkie fingernail from end to end has menaced the olive trees of the Mediterranean.

In 1998, the olive fruit fly was  detected in Los Angeles; it has since managed to spread to all olive growing regions in California. That’s not good for the state since it produces nearly all of the olives grown in the country. Olive production, which can rise to as much as 166,000 short tons in a year, sunk last year to just 65,000 tons, barely half of the originally projected production figures.

Combating the Mediterranean pest has been tricky, and research into countermeasures got dissed by Sarah Palin during the recent presidential campaign.

One method being applied involves controlling the fruit fly’s population by unleashing predators, in this case wasps, into the area. The trick with unleashing a non-native species into a new territory however, is finding out whether or not the biological control can stick to its previously determined prey. Otherwise, it could become a new pest that in turn needs to be controlled.

An article in the February issue of the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research magazine features Agricultural Research Service entomologist Victoria Yokoyama, who led a team that recently unleashed a new biological weapon  to counter the olive fruit flies’ depredations in the state: an African wasp that eats the young fruit flies hatched in the olives before the flies can grow up to eat the olives themselves.

Its worth noting that Yokoyama’s team isn’t the first one to come up with a biological control for the olive fruit fly, just the most recent. A couple of years ago, researchers at UC Berkeley released a Pakistani wasp that specifically targets the olive fruit fly called Psyttalia ponerophaga in several test orchards.

Behind every liberated woman is a ... hard-working washer?

In time for International Women’s Day, described as a day to celebrate “the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future,” comes an article from the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano with the following introductory sentences:

“In the 20th century, what contributed most to the emancipation of western women? The debate is still open. Some say it was the pill, others the liberalization of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. Others go even further: the washing machine.”

Articles like this one have already covered the controversial lines. The article in the original Italian appears here; use your own translator of choice to parse the entire text.

If you read the rest of the article, the argument appears to be that the washing machine countered attempts made post-World War II by men who came home to find their wives had gone Rosie the Riveter instead of just staying home and tending the house and family left behind.

The washing machine, wrote Giulia Galeotti, was a technological development that meant anyone could do the laundry, which in turn meant women suddenly had the time to do what they wanted outside the home.

The logic behind the above statement boggles the mind. Really? Then what about baking mixes ( Duncan Hines is named for a man) and TV meals and refrigerators and the pill? Oh wait, the Vatican has nothing nice to say about that. Maybe that’s why they chose to honor the washing machine instead.

Galeotti added at the end that the creation of the laundromat transformed laundry into a social activity.  But haven’t washerwomen gathered at rivers and other bodies of water for centuries? Didn’t Jesus meet washer women in the Gospel of John? Did Renoir paint this from his imagination alone?