To honor the anniversary, Edge.org published a few articles on the importance of science communication. I especially liked Oxford philosopher A.C. Grayling’svideo exposition regarding the largest questions of the 21stcentury, since it greatly reinforced my inflated sense of self-worth.

Of four “big questions” presented, the first involved how to keep the public interested in and abreast of scientific developments, as the consequences of scientific endeavors have increasingly become the central drivers of human history. The third big question involved how scientific culture can continue to synthesize insights from neuroscience and psychology and apply them to computing. He argues that understanding the tricks of cognition will become ever more integral to progress in information technology and the heath of service economies.

At least that’s the implication of a new study from Kansas State University that indicates dog owners that kiss their pets are no more likely to be infected with dangerous strains of bacteria than those who don’t. The real risk, say the researches, is to the dog.

A close examination of dog and owner poop—the duty of a graduate student, no doubt—revealed that owners’ intestinal tracts contained far more antibiotic-resistant bacteria than did the dogs’. Don’t hold back the love though. Swapping slobber with your dog isn’t too dangerous for them. In fact, the article’s authors suggest bonding with pets through kisses and food sharing underlies many of the psychological benefits of pet ownership, for both of you. It turns out the greatest danger is in allowing your dog to lick your grubby paws.

“Halt! Wash your hands.” That’s a good human.

Over time, the flight paths of nearly 20,000 planes filled in the shape of the country without directly depicting any of its geographic features. The emergence of artistic forms from scientific and technical data is a central artistic trope in much of Koblin’s work.

A revealing animation made using similar flight data can be viewed on Koblin’s website, here.

Oh yeah, Koblin also helped make an interactive music visualization for Radiohead without using film or video.

No, that’s not a cover from a 70s-era psychedelic rock album, but if you were thinking “Dark Side of the ‘Shroom,” you’re closer than you think. This is a dark photo of a bioluminescent bunch of Mycena lucentipes mushrooms. They’re an especially radiant species among the 65 different mushroom varieties known to glow.

Why does this tropical mushroom bother to put energy into lighting up the forest floor? Well, besides the survival value inherent in not being accidentally stepped on by mycologists crazy enough to trudge through the Amazon at night in search of them, a few theories have sprouted up. Researchers suggest that, like moths to a flame, the mushrooms attract bugs. Considering that only a few bugs eat the mushrooms themselves, but that a lot of bugs eat the mushroom-eating bugs, it makes sense for the fungi to foot the energy bill for lighting an all-inclusive party. Also, breeze doesn’t often find its way through the dense foliage of jungles, and so anything a mushroom can do to get a curious cougar or another animal to sneeze on its spores is advantageous.

If you were to draw lines representing your social connections to all your friends, your friends’ friends, and your friends’ friends’ friends, what would it look like? For Jeffrey Heer of the University of California, Berkeley, it looks like a big blue ball of glittery fuzz.

In this image Heer appears at the center of the fuzz ball as the brightest point, with his friends appearing second dimmest, and their friends still dimmer, with the pattern continuing through three degrees of separation. The resulting network encompasses 47,471 people, all tangled together in a web of 432,430 friendship relations as viewed over the social networking site Friendster.

Though Heer’s social network visualization project, Vizster, is an academic project intended to clarify the structure of online social communities and serve as a communication tool, online marketers are very interested in procuring similar maps. Facebook and similar sites already sell demographic information about their users to marketers that in turn use it to deliver individuals customized ads (yeah, you agreed to that when you checked that box below the stuff you didn’t read during registration).

Information contained in social maps—like how many connections a person has and whether those connections were first initiated by or, conversely, accepted by that person—can be combined with ever-accumulating demographic data to draw rough conclusions about a person’s social influence and the likelihood that they will buy certain products. So finally the diet people will know you’re fat, Haagen-Dazs will pop up to offer sweet escape when you break up with your boyfriend, and the fake Rolex makers will be able to sniff out the insecure unhindered. It’s a brave new world indeed.

You’d think having an extra hand on the wheel would be a big improvement, but research suggests hands-free or not it’s still about as dangerous as driving legally drunk. If that’s the case, soon we may find that the only place we’ll be able to get away with our habit is Louisiana.

The good news is we can still share inane gossip with our passengers without endangering computer-generated pedestrians. That’s because researchers have used a driving simulation to answer the long-standing question: “what’s the difference between talking on a hands-free cell phone and a passenger?” The answer, essentially, is “two extra eyes.”

Though none of the experiment’s participants anticipated they would enjoy a program with commercials more than one without, they all reported significantly higher satisfaction with the same programs when they were interupted.

The reason, say researchers, has to do with a much more general phenomenon called desensitization or adaptation. The human mind seems to have an infinite capacity for boredom, such that no matter how good we have it we grow accustom to what first made it great. Thankfully it also works in reverse, such that we overestimate how bad traumatic events will affect us. Adaptation is so powerful that a year after the defining event, paraplegics and lottery winners report similar levels of happiness. In the experiment, complex, fast-paced television shows that viewers do not easily adapt to do not show the effect.

Of course this doesn’t mean take the TV and punctuating your child’s elementary school play with pre-recorded pleas for cash will have any special enhancing affect. Frequently walking out of the play or talking on your cell phone loud enough that you can’t hear the kids’ voices should have the same beneficent influence on your experience.

As Dr. Olaf Blanke indicates, up to 75 percent of us are partial to the rubber hand’s flimsy mind trick. For this experiment, paintbrushes were used to induce the illusion. But in the context of parlor games and Dutch game shows, amateur “experimenters” prefer sending a jolt through their victim’s illusory limb by smacking it with a sledge hammer!

Cognitive psychologists aren’t certain what the precise neurological mechanism is behind the trick, but decreases in the temperature of participants’ body-snatched hands have been measured during the illusion. Why heat something that, as far as our feeling brain is concerned, is not there?

A similar trick using mirrors has been employed to reduce phantom limb pain in amputees. The success of these illusions reveals a fundamental disconnection between what we know consciously to be true and what we physically feel. Cognitive psychologists say it makes sense to keep conscious understanding out of the loop and wire what we see happening to our limbs directly into the brain systems that produce our physical sensations, since something like spotting our hand on a sizzling hotplate is processed much faster than our understanding of it.

Rhesus macaque behavior reflects most of what’s despicable about human behavior without retaining much of the redeeming stuff. Given such a repertoire, it’s unsurprising that they’re the second most successful primate on the planet in terms of their numbers and territorial spread. In other words, they’ve got most of what makes us successful but they’re not quite smart enough to use it to finish us off. … That doesn’t mean they’re not trying.

Throughout their evolution, the macaques have instinctively developed habits that mirror Machievelli’s keys to power. That is, they use intimidation, violence, cruelty, and deception to conquer the natural world. But now that human habitats are increasingly encroaching on theirs, they are turning their tactics on us.

In New Delhi, India, tens of thousand of the monkeys roam the streets in gangs. They’ve even been spotted in the prime minister’s office. They steal food and attack those that dare to resist them, and rule the Indian capital with an iron monkey paw. Shipping the macaques away is no longer an option, because neighboring states are becoming overpopulated with the screeching menaces.

The Hindu religion forbids killing them as they are worshiped as sacred animals. The macaques have no spiritual objection to killing people however. In Oct. 2007 a marauding gang of them pushed the Deputy Mayor of New Delhi, SS Bajwa, off the terrace of his home as he was attempting to fend them off.

Rhesus macaques live in complex societies with strong dominance hierarchies and long-lasting social bonds between female relatives. Their politics is replete with nepotism and only overturned through violent revolution.

The females prostitute themselves for protection, status, and favors from the alpha male, who keeps his power through random outbursts of violence. They have sex with him as much as possible to placate his fury, but then secretly have sex with lesser males just in case the guy is sterile.

Those lower in rank are relegated to the outer banks of the Rhesus’ territory as lion fodder. Rhesuses seem to hate any of their own species they aren’t familiar with, and reportedly viciously attack their own image in a mirror.

Dario Maestripieri, Associate Professor of Comparative Human Development and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, is the researcher predominately responsible for fleshing out the Rhesus’ social behavior. He gave a lecture on his research and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. In my view, the most interesting thing he said at that time was that even in captivity, when all the resources a macaque could ever want are provided to them and no outside competition exists, their Machiavellian tendencies persist. Their violence and cruelty towards each other continues even in the absence of the evolutionary forces that originally made such behavior necessary for survival. So like us.

I’ll keep it quick, but one thing I’ve learned is that anything with human-like emotions and the power to embellish them (like a derivatives trader) should not be kept as a pet. I won’t pull the “chimpanzees share 98 percent of their DNA with humans” card like some others speaking on this topic will to make my point because, though quantitatively impressive, it doesn’t add up to much … We share about 60 percent of our DNA with a head of cabbage, enough said.

That’s all right though. Some lessons about humanity’s bestial nature don’t require gene analysis. It may be enough to note chimpanzee males’ atrocious behavior to make the point: they are the only animals besides humans that pro-actively seek out, terrorize and murder members of their own species.

Why? Well, evolution outfitted chimps, among other primates, with the intelligence to realize certain brute realities. For one, that calculated, ruthless, self-interested cruelty works well to do away with competition for bananas and females. Further applying their Machiavellian wisdom, once chimpanzee males have the females, they use beatings and sexual terrorism to keep them, sometimes even killing their mates in fits of rage. Janet Burger learned that firsthand in the 1960s when her own famous and highly trained chimpanzee, Oliver, sexually assaulted her when he was 16 years old. It is rare that owners keep chimps through adolescence because the time is often characterized by power displays and the chewed off fingers of houseguests. Male chimpanzee behavior is so horrific that Harvard’s Richard Wrangham famously put forth the Demonic Male Hypothesis to explain the roots of the most heinous kinds of human violence.

Given the persistence of primate ownership in spite of all this, one wonders if owners think a psychopathic sex criminal might make an adorable pet. Many reportedly treat their chimps like family members, and emotionally use the animals as surrogate children. After all, chimps are like little people. Yes, they are. That’s what makes them so dangerous.