How to be a better liar

Rice by babbagecabbage, Photoshoppery by yours truly.

Listen up, liars. Society is onto you. Well, its machines are anyway. Computers can spot your fake online hotel reviews, and they know when you’re shaving ten pounds off your weight on your Match.com profile. They’re sharpening their skills daily and, with their help, even the human brain (a device notoriously terrible at truth detection tasks) might get wise to your chicanery. So if you’re not going to change your wicked ways, you can at least try to improve your technique a bit.

But how? Researchers say the telltale signs of deception are difficult to hide. Even in written form – where the author has the opportunity to edit his or her appalling untruths – liars still leave behind linguistic clues. But I say, what kind of defeatist attitude is that? We can make our résumés more appealing to employers by replacing passive phrasing with exciting ACTION words. Why should lying about the rest of our lives be any different? Before we throw in the towel and resort to honesty, shouldn’t we at least try to apply what science has learned to our own deceitful endeavors? Of course we should. Let’s have a go at it.

Mind your language

Certain outward signs can draw attention to a poorly executed lie: fidgeting, stammering, sweating, shaking, heartbeats audible from two rooms away. Humans took note of this and have concocted lie-detecting technologies that attempt to exploit such physiological cues. The earliest example usually given is China, circa 1000 B.C., where suspected criminals were asked to place rice powder (or rice, by some accounts) in their mouths and then spit it out during interrogations. The idea behind this test was that the stress of lying dried out one’s mouth. Thus those answering honestly should be able to spit out more than liars, whose mouths the starchy stuff would stick to like feathers on tar.

The modern polygraph, which measures pulse, blood pressure, and other indicators while suspects answer questions of varying stakes (“Is today Tuesday?” vs. “Did you kill your wife?”), is basically a twentieth century upgrade of the rice test.* Both rely on finding signs of nervousness exhibited by guilty liars. Problematically, both also risk merely capturing the anxiety of innocent people freaking out over being accused of a crime.

A more novel way of discerning between factual and fabricated statement involves not measuring the body, but analyzing the words used by the speaker (or writer). While not initially conceived as lie detectors, computer algorithms that examine linguistic patterns have been used experimentally to search for hallmarks of deception. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), software designed by James Pennebaker, Roger Booth, and Martha Francis is one such tool. It sifts through documents (written text or transcribed speech) and tallies the instance of various word categories, including significant but harder to control “function words” - pronouns, articles, and the like.

LIWC was most recently unloosed in the jungle of online dating and proved superior to human judges at assessing “trustworthiness” from the content of daters’ profiles.

Thinking cues and feeling cues

Having spent some time tackling this idea of liars’ linguistic cues, scientists have come up with a few observations. The giveaways can be divided into two types: cognitive (thinking) and emotional (feeling). These distinctions are based on the proposed causes of the cues. The idea is that lying is 1) morally troubling and 2) intellectually difficult. Let’s tackle the second one first.

Because liars have the challenge of creating and managing the details of a fictional tale, their accounts should theoretically reflect this by being shorter and simpler. Experimental analysis has found that false statements generally do have lower overall word counts. They also contain fewer exclusion words. These are words like “except” and “but”, which are used to make the kind of fine distinctions in stories that can be a headache to keep track of when they’re not actually true. For instance, when playing hooky from work, the cognitively-taxed liar might claim, “I have a cold.” or even, “I have a cough and a sore throat.” But you can improve upon this by throwing in an exclusion, “I have a cough and a sore throat, but I’m not feeling feverish.” Just make sure you have more symptoms than exclusions, else your employers will think you’re being lazy.

Due to ease of handling, motion verbs are also common in dishonest accounts. “I fell and sprained my ankle; I won’t be coming in today.” “The car ran over a nail and got a flat; I won’t be coming in today.” And so on. You may not want to lean too heavily on motion verbs. Try adding a little detail about what it was that caused you to fall in the first place, or the crummy pot-hole-strewn road you driving on. Be careful though. As a child, my instinct when lying was to construct elaborate narratives with well-developed characters and lengthy passages of dialogue designed to answer questions no reasonable person would think to ask. It was perhaps overkill, as I can report anecdotally that my results were not stellar.

Emotional cues stem from feelings of guilt and fear related to lying, rather than its cognitive demands. These are especially important in our modern computer-driven world, because they’re harder for the liar to filter out, even when given the chance to edit their work (the online dating profiles found more emotional than cognitive giveaways of deceit). Unhappy words and negations both crop up more frequently in the ramblings of the untruthful. Though you might have a hard time eliminating these entirely when you’re lying about a dour subject. I mean, is it better to say, “I feel lousy” or “ I don’t feel well”?

Perhaps we should focus instead on paring down instances of “distancing”. Apparently, liars want to detach as much as possible from their ghastly falsehoods and often do so by avoiding first person pronouns. So make sure to use, “I” and “me” whenever possible.

Of course, as with physiological measures, none of the above pitfalls are likely to affect an evil genius (clinical definition: high functioning antisocial personality with IQ of 140 or greater). But, given that you’re sitting around reading this rather than out devising a kryptonite trap for Superman, you’re probably not in that category.

Man vs. machine

Something else you might want to keep in mind in all this wordsmithing, is who or what you are trying to dupe. So far, everything we’ve discussed relates to outwitting computer algorithms. But humans and machines rely on different cues to decide whether or not to trust you. And even though humans suck at spotting a lie (we tend to fare at about the rate of chance), that shouldn’t stop you from peppering your fictions with the very elements we incorrectly perceive as signs of honesty.

The only linguistic trait that both evokes distrust in humans and actually correlates to lying is word count. Shorter stories are more likely to be false and more likely to be perceived as false by a human audience. † But from that point on, our poor species gets lost and gravitates toward linguistic patterns that have nothing to do with honesty. While we like long descriptions with plenty of details, we also want individual sentences to be on the short side. Got it? Use lots of words. Make short sentences.

Also popular is concrete language. Abstract or convoluted sentences inspire suspicion (not to mention boredom). And do try to use the word “we”. The plural first person pronoun “we” makes listeners feel included, whereas the second person “you” or third person “they” makes us feel like outsiders. To test this, I made a point of using “we” in describing human lie-catching ineptitude, so that you wouldn’t think me a snob accusing you of being a bumbling simpleton. Did it help? Were you filled with trust? Perhaps an urge to lend me money?

And Now the Caveats

WARNING: Don’t try this in a language other than English. All the studies I looked at were conducted in English and, as anyone who has struggled to learn a new language knows, grammar varies considerably between languages. Culture likely has an effect too. Who knows if first person pronouns have the same appeal outside of the egocentric U.S.

Also, results may vary with the degree of the lie being told. A lie created to conceal a major transgression will likely leave more clues in its wake than one told to praise an unremarkable meal.

And while we’re on the subject, those big lies about where we were and who did or didn’t kill aren’t the most common type of dishonesty. The majority of our deceptions work to mask our socially unacceptable opinions and feelings, or to hide our perceived shortcomings. Given the banality of our lies and the effort required to tell them convincingly, it might be easiest to just fess up to those unpopular attitudes and lackluster achievements.

* Bonus trivia: The man who invented the blood pressure measuring component of the lie detector, William Moulton Marston, was also the creator of Lasso-of-Truth-wielding comic book heroine Wonder Woman (under the name Charles Moulton).

† This is not to say that any short sentence is false. It’s all relative. And, relative to a truthful account on a similar topic, an untruthful one is likely to be shorter.

Eek-o-tourism: Belize’s diseases and other holiday hazards

My Central American vacation is rapidly approaching, and I’m giddy with anticipation and light-headed from attempting to complete the many long-put-off tasks on my pre-departure checklist. The other day I spent an hour at the travel clinic getting vaccines and chatting with their awesome nurse, who seemed almost as obsessed with creepy microorganism as I am. Some of the pathogens we discussed were familiar favorites, others complete surprises. And germs aren’t the only things to worry about. Belize offers up a glorious buffet of perils for those prone to worrying (btw, avoid buffets, especially if you haven’t been vaccinated for hepatitis A). You might be wondering why such a polyphobic person would elect to vacation in the tropics in the first place. Well, like many a hapless traveler, I was lured by pretty pictures. The flora, the fauna. Belize’s biodiversity is hard to resist. Let’s have a look at some…

Image: Andrew Coyle

Large, carnivorous biodiversity

Jaguars are the largest wild cats in the Americas. Males can reach upwards of 300 lbs. They are stalk and ambush predators that can hunt day or night, sometimes going so far as to climb trees to get a jump on their prey. Also good swimmers, they can even kill things in the water – big things, like caimans. A jaguar’s bite is strong enough to pierce skulls and break turtle shells. They’re such impressive killing machines, that someone named a luxury car after them. Not to mention a Macintosh operating system.

ROAR!!!     Image: digiclad

Troubleshooting: While Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary (the third stop on our itinerary) is touted as a “jaguar reserve” it’s not exactly overrun with the majestic cats. Seeing a jaguar in the wild is an uncommon event, and attacks on humans seldom occur. Being eaten by a jaguar is a rare privilege bestowed on precious few lucky tourists.

Venomous biodiversity

Like many warm, rainforesty places, Belize has its share of snakes, some of which are capable of injecting lethal venom with their fangs. I could sit here and enumerate the various species of scary, slithering reptiles found in the region, but it would just upset us both. For me, perhaps the most disconcerting piece of information is that, once one leaves the herpetologically well-organized U.S., coral snakes sometimes fail to adhere to the rhyming rule of “Red on yellow, kills a fellow. Red on black, friend of Jack.” Head south, and everything you thought you knew about snakes is wrong. Even those with the should-be-harmless, red-touching-black striped pattern can kill you. Best to revise the pneumonic to, “Red, yellow, black in whatever configuration… you’re screwed”.

Troubleshooting: Coral snakes aren’t especially aggressive, so if they see you first, they’ll run for the hills. They’ve also got teeny little fangs. Leather boots are usually sufficient to thwart any defensive attacks that might be provoked by flailing and screaming instead of backing away slowly. I wish I could say the same about the fer-de-lance, a snake noted for being both grumpy and jumpy.

Parasitic biodiversity

Christ, who knew there were so many insect-vector-spread diseases out there? I’ve rambled at length about malaria here before, so I won’t spend too much time on it now. Compared to sub-Sahara Africa, Belize is a malarial lightweight. But the disease does occur, and it has the extra bonus of being primarily caused by the P. vivax parasite. While less deadly than the more famous P. falciparum variety, this parasite can hang out in a latent form in the liver and cause relapses months after the initial fever has faded. Super.

Malaria is, of course, spread by mosquitos, but there are other blood-sucking insects to watch out for. Sand flies carry parasites of the genus Leishmania, which cause cutaneous leishmaniasis. There’s a more serious form of leishmaniasis in other parts of the world, but the Belizean version just causes skin ulcers. Still, not the ideal vacation souvenir.

Kissing bug. Image: Dr. Erwin Huebner

But wait, there’s more… Chagas’ disease! The illness – named for its discoverer, Brazilian physician Carlos Chagas – is caused by the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite and spread by a comparatively cute vector, the triatomine bug. It’s also called the “kissing bug”. Quaint, no? If you see one, kill it.

Troubleshooting: Bug spray. Lots of bug spray. For whatever silly reason, I opted not to bother with malaria “chemoprophylaxis” (drugs that prevent the disease by rendering your body too harsh an environment for the parasite to survive). It wouldn’t protect against the other germ-toting insects anyway. I’ve wisely avoided reading anything about possible harmful effects of excessive DEET application. The information would only confuse me. I’ll worry about it when I come home.

Oh, and there’s also zoonotic hookworm. Ugh. I’d totally forgotten about this thing prior to my briefing at the travel clinic. A human-hosted form of hookworm exists too, but the one common to Belize shacks up in dogs and cats. The eggs are shed in the animals’ feces and can hatch and grow into larvae on a lovely, sandy beach where a canine or feline host did its business. The larva can enter the human body through the skin (i.e., walking barefoot on the above-mentioned lovely, sandy beach). And they don’t even need an open wound to gain entry, they just grab on and burrow their way in. What an organism! Once inside, though, they can’t mature and are stuck wandering aimlessly through the epidermis. This results in an itchy skin condition called “cutaneous larvae migrans”. It’s not remotely life-threatening, just uncomfortable and disgust inspiring. According to the CDC, the stranded larvae will die off even without medical intervention in 5-6 weeks. Five to six. Weeks. Gross.

Troubleshooting: Flip flops. Oh, the indignity.

Bon Voyage

Even with all that in mind, I’m still psyched about leaving the country. After all, if the only priority was feeling safe and comfortable, we could have just booked an all-inclusive package trip to Disneyworld. Part of the excitement of foreign travel is getting away from one’s normal routine and being exposed to the unfamiliar (and sometimes also the anxiety-provoking). And there’s something fun and novel about staying in places where “24 hour electricity” is considered an amenity worth boasting about on the website. Now if I can just remember to call my aggressively paternalistic bank and let them know I’ll be accessing ATM machines in a foreign land. I’ll go do that now.

Wall of Death: Why You Shouldn’t Put a Fountain in a Hospital

Image Credit: star5112

The dastardly duo of water and bacteria have teamed up again to assault our species. Not content to sicken and/or kill us when we drink water or pour it up our noses, the pair have now conspired to stage their ambush from a vector few would suspect - decorative “water wall” fountains. An investigation into a 2010 outbreak of Legionnaires disease in Wisconsin concluded that the source of the deadly bacteria was the soothing, cascading water of a fountain situated in a hospital lobby.

In case you don’t spend as much time as I do reading about obscure illnesses, allow me to bring you up to speed. Legionnaires disease is an acute and potentially fatal respiratory ailment caused by Legionella bacteria (mostly the Legionella pneumophila species, if you like to keep your microorganisms straight). Both disease and pathogen got their names in 1976, when a particularly large and well-publicized outbreak occurred at the Philadelphia convention of the American Legion. 

The disease causes pneumonia, along with other symptoms that usually accompany it, including high fever, chills, and a cough. According to the CDC, Legionnaires disease kills between 5% and 30% of those afflicted with it. A less severe form of infection – without the troublesome pneumonia – called Pontiac fever can also result from the same bacteria. Collectively the two maladies are known as Legionellosis.

A person contracts Legionellosis by breathing in tiny aerosolized droplets of water contaminated with Legionella. The bacteria thrive in warm water, so any poorly cleaned water system may harbor them. Swimming pools, hot tubs, and cooling towers for large air conditioning systems have all been culprits in previous outbreaks. 

It’s uncertain just how much pathogenic mist one needs to breathe in to get Legionnaires disease. Of the eight individuals sickened by the Wisconsin hospital fountain (all recovered, by the way) most had only minimal contact with the bubbling bacterial menace, such as picking up prescriptions at the hospital pharmacy or delivering a package to the lobby.

The CDC reports that in the United States 8,000-18,000 people are hospitalized for Legionnaires disease annually. But given that the country’s population is estimated at over 310 million, even 18,000 is really nothing. This water wall fiasco is a fluke then, right? I mean it’s not like this has happened before or anything? 

Well, actually, the Wisconsin incident is the second documented outbreak of its kind. In 2007, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, two cancer patients contracted Legionnaires disease following exposure to a similar fountain. Notice a pattern yet? Sick people and those with weakened immune systems are more susceptible to this disease.† And where’s a good place to find sick people? Yep.

It seems like it might be a wise for decorative fountains to stay the hell away from hospitals, doctors’ offices and any other haunts of the under-the-weather set. The Wisconsin hospital that was the source of the 2010 outbreak ditched its fountain, and many others in the state have followed suit. Farewell water walls.  You were a bit too Las Vegas for hospitals anyway.

* Named for a 1968 outbreak in Pontiac, Michigan.

† All eight of the Wisconsin Legionnaires disease sufferers had some underlying condition that rendered them vulnerable to the bacteria.

Note: Due to phonetic similarities to the term “water wall”, I’ve had the song “Wonderwall” by Oasis going through my head the entire time I was writing this. It’s not a happy feeling. I will now use the power of suggestion to inflict the same curse on you – “Wonderwall” is going through your head (unless you’re unfamiliar with the song, in which case consider yourself lucky).

Making the Most of Your Midnight Toast

Image Credit: Alex Brown.

It’s been a slow news week for science. The days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve can be a wasteland of year-in-review lists and other fluff concocted to facilitate holiday vacations. But all it took was an animated short on the science of sparkling wine from the American Chemical Society to stop my grumbling and get me on board with the lightness of the season. Forget real discoveries and real news and real whatever else. Let’s talk champagne.

What makes Champagne and other sparkling wines special is, of course, their bubbles. These are not only fun to observe, they also release aromas as they reach the liquid’s surface and burst, increasing the whole sensory experience thing. Dissolved carbon dioxide (CO₂) gives champagne its sparkle. Higher pressures and lower temperatures allow more CO₂ to be dissolved into wine than the liquid could hold in standard conditions. Your chilled bottle of champagne is under a good deal of pressure (thus the signature pop made when the cork is removed). Once uncorked, this pressure drops, and the amount of CO₂ that can be crammed into the liquid drops with it. CO₂ gas makes a break for it through the surface of the beverage and voila – festive bubbles. The trick to enjoying a glass of sparkling wine is too maximize the spectacle of bubbles without losing the molecule that makes them too quickly. Nobody likes flat Champagne.

Putting the Bubbles in the Bottle

The simplest way to get bubbles into liquid is just to inject CO₂ gas, which is how soda is made. But sparkling wines can take advantage of fermentation to form their fizz. Officially, Champagne is only Champagne if it comes from the Champagne region of France. But the “méthode traditionnelle” (aka méthode champenoise, when in France) by which it is made isn’t proprietary information. Spanish Cava for instance (my preferred bubble water) is also made using the Champagne method.

Here’s how it works. All wines are made through fermentation, that process where yeast metabolizes sugar and turns it into ethanol (drinkin’ alcohol) and CO₂.* This “primary fermentation” occurs in tanks and CO₂ generated is allowed to dissipate into the atmosphere. Champagne and its ilk, however, undergo a second fermentation once already tucked into their bottles.† Some other gunk also accumulates in the process (dead yeast cells and such) and must be ousted before the final corking. To collect and remove the “lees”, the bottles are stored at an angle, cork-side facing downward, and periodically prodded so that the stuff pools near the mouth of the bottle and can be removed with minimal wine loss. These are some of the bells and whistles that can make Champagne pricier than more crudely made sparkling beverages, even before the retail mark-up.

Ideal Glass Law

In late November I served my father, a wine enthusiast/wine snob, sparkling wine in a juice glass. For this transgression I was rewarded with an early Christmas gift – a set of champagne flutes. The most obvious reason why stemware is the best choice for sparkling wine is that the stem helps keep your sweaty hands off the bowl of the glass. Holding a glass from its stem prevents heat transfer to the liquid (recall that increasing heat speeds up CO₂ escape).

But the shape of the glass matters too. The two dominant vessels for sparkling wine serving are the flute (the tall one) and the coupe (think Champagne fountain). Scientists have done a lot of gas measuring to help you choose your glass, and mostly the flute wins. Being taller and narrower, flutes not only keep beverages cooler, they also offer less surface area for CO₂ gas to launch. Coupes basically hemorrhage CO₂ for the first few minutes after being poured and then calm down, by which time the wine has lost a lot of its fizz. Flutes maintain a steadier movement of bubbles. Flutes are also better designed to showcase the bubbles. The entire vertical column is filled with bubbly movement, whereas coupes have a less effervescent “dead zone” at the portion of the bowl furthest from the center.

Less than half of the CO₂ exiting the liquid departs in the form of aesthetically pleasing bubble. Much of it disappears through unceremonious “invisible diffusion” into the air. This too is higher in the coupe, though less so than expected, given that glass’s abundant surface area. This finding can be attributed to the greater bubbling going on in the flute. The bubbles travel further and mix more vigorously, and thus more gas is lost per unit of surface area. But overall, unless you have your heart set on that champagne fountain, you’re better off with the flute.

Right Angles

Now that you have the perfect glass, don’t ruin everything by pouring the wrong way. It turns out that the angle at which the glass is held during the pour also impacts how much CO₂ escapes before you even get the flute to your mouth. While champagne is normally poured like any other wine – into a glass standing straight up on a table – painstaking experimentation has demonstrated that you’re better off holding the glass at an angle – as if you were pouring a beer. The pour is a turbulent time for newly uncorked Champagne, and an angled glass minimizes the CO₂ loss during this vulnerable stage, leaving more bubbles to bounce around once you’re finally drinking your drink.

Well cheers then. And don’t forget to hold the glass from the stem. In addition to the temperature issues we discussed, you’ll also get a better clink that way. Clink!

* There are more steps, but just face it, if I started telling you about glycolysis, you would stop reading.

† Another method, used for sparkling wines like Prosecco, does a second fermentation in tanks and then bottles the wine under pressure before it loses its pop.

Terror from the Tap: How a deadly amoeba can sneak into your neti pot

Image Credit: Antonio Foncubierta.

Last summer, when a friend told me about a brain-eating parasite that lurks in warm freshwater swimming areas and can kill you in just one week, I thought, “Hmm, interesting, but a bit obscure even by my standards.” A quick check with the CDC website confirmed that such infections were absurdly rare – only 32 were reported in the United States in the entire decade from 2001 to 2010 – and so the topic was shelved in favor of more newsworthy science. But now, with two people in Louisiana dead at the (figurative) hands of the grisly microbe, and the state issuing a warning about the perils of improper neti pot usage, Naegleria fowleri is suddenly looking more relevant. 

The Louisiana cases are peculiar in that their victims didn’t have to dive into a warm lake or pond to encounter the parasite. Rather, it came to them, straight from the tap they used to fill a neti pot – a popular device for irrigating the sinuses.

How does this happen?

The microorganism responsible for all this trouble, Naegleria fowleri, is an amoeba that inhabits warm fresh water (a sustained 80˚F or above is its preferred aquatic climate). While content to live in water, it can also make its way into the human body via the mucosa in the nasal cavity, i.e., if you happen to get water up your nose. After gaining entry, it crawls along the olfactory nerves into the brain, where it chows down on vital central nervous system tissue. The ensuing illness is dubbed Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM).

The standard way to contract PAM is swimming in warm, amoeba-friendly waters (the microbe is found through the world, though is most common in warmer areas). Activities that increase the chance of water getting into your nose – such as diving or jumping – also up the risk of being infected by Naegleria fowleri.

Genie? No. Brain-eating amoebas? Maybe. Image: Kurt Yoder.

The amoeba can live in lakes, rivers, ponds and hot springs. It occasionally even crops up in poorly maintained swimming pools. It isn’t considered common in tap water, which undergoes a purification process to render it potable. Yet apparently, Naegleria fowleri has turned up in Louisiana’s tap water at least twice this year* And the neti pot, which is used to pour water through the nostrils (with the head tilted sideways, not directly up the nose) provides an interaction with the tainted water similar to that experienced splashing around in lakes during the summer months.

Could it happen to me?

Counterintuitive though it may sound, tap water teeming with Naegleria fowleri is still safe to drink. That’s because the microbe needs to enter your nose rather than your mouth to cause PAM. And neti pots are okay too, just not for use with tap water. Additionally, the illness is not communicable from person to person and the amoeba doesn’t live in saltwater. Although pouring ocean water through your nose doesn’t sound like a great idea either.

With so many other pathogens out there, how seriously should you take this one? Well, as with many splashy media maladies – such as mad cow disease – PAM is scary not for its prevalence (extremely low) but rather for its prognosis (extremely grim). The disease is usually fatal, and rapidly so at that. Initially symptoms are similar to those of bacterial meningitis – headache, fever, nausea, stiff neck – but these will soon progress to confusion, loss of balance, hallucinations, seizures and the like. By the time these second wave symptoms set in, there has already been significant destruction to brain tissue. So, yeah, you want to avoid getting this infection in the first place.

Its rareness means that the odds are already on your side. You can improve your chances even more by using a nose plug when swimming underwater, and by sticking to distilled (or thoroughly boiled) water when loading up your neti pot.

* The first case occurred in June of 2011, the second in October. Caveat alert: the cases are still under investigation.

It came from outer space

Image Credit: Ed Sweeney.

Guess who’s coming home for the holidays? Russia’s broken 15-ton Mars probe. Well, probably. You know how unreliable malfunctioning probes can be. Early reports claimed the unmanned spacecraft would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere around November 26, just in time for Thanksgiving leftovers, but now it’s looking more like late December or early January (which could still qualify for Christmas if you go by the Russian Orthodox calendar).* All this, of course, is assuming that the prodigal probe doesn’t change its mind again and decide to complete its originally scheduled mission to Mars.

You might be interested to know that Russia has been aiming various contraptions at the Red Planet for about half a century without much luck (I know, kind of ironic during the Soviet years). Following a 1996 mission failure, the past 15 years have been silent of Mars attempts, but on November 8^th, Russia got back on the horse and launched Phobos-Grunt into space. The space-bot’s goal was a lofty one: land on the surface of Phobos – Mars’s largest moon – collect soil samples, and then bring them back to Earth.† To achieve this, the probe needed to fire a second set of engines after its initial launch, which would direct it toward Mars. Everything went swimmingly for the launch, but the probe failed to activate those second phase engines. Now it’s stalled in Earth orbit, circling the planet as though it can’t find the on-ramp to the freeway.

Russian scientists are frantically working to reestablish communication with the probe. It’s seemingly intact and its fuel tanks are full and ready to complete the journey. Russia would like nothing more than to reboot the probe and send it on it way, but Phobos-Grunt is not taking their calls.

With the window to set the wayward spacecraft back on track narrowing, what you should really be asking yourself is how and where Phobos-Grunt will land, should it fall back to Earth. Because it was suited up to go all the way to Mars and back, most of the probe’s 15-ton mass is composed of fuel, which would allegedly burn up upon reentry (probably generating an impressive fireball for anyone watching). But if any of the rocket fuel does reach the ground it’s not very reassuring to know that it’s composed of toxic hydrazine. Plus there’s still the possibility of probe shards to contend with. Early projections of likely landing sights included “most of the U.S., part of Europe, all of Africa and Australia and virtually all of South America and Asia”, which pretty much translates into “somewhere on Earth”.

Before you start accusing Russia of imperiling us all, I should mention that Phobos-Grunt is poised to be the third uncontrolled spacecraft reentry this season. NASA’s UARS satellite crashed into (probably) the Pacific Ocean on September 24, and just a month later, Germany’s ROSAT came down somewhere in Southeast Asia on October 23. ‡

Coincidentally, Phobus-Grunt was launched on the same day our planet had its much-publicized near miss with the asteroid 2005 YU55. The 400-meter (1,300-foot) diameter asteroid got within about 200,000 miles of Earth (which is closer than our moon, FYI). § The last time a huge asteroid got uncomfortably close to us was in 1976, so this isn’t exactly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. According to the Washington Post, NASA spends 5 million dollars annually keeping an eye out for asteroids capable of, you know, killing everything on the planet. (None scheduled for the near future, in case you’re wondering.)

So are you more likely to get hit by a satellite or an asteroid? Ugh, that question has far too many variables. Any satellite or asteroid? A specific one? Any person on earth or just you? I can tell you this much, apparently your odds of being killed by an asteroid are greater than the odds of being struck by one. And, if it’s any consolation, in all the years our species has been lobbing metal into outer space, only one person has ever been hit by the stuff on its return. That person was Lottie Williams of Tusla, Oklahoma, who in 1997 was clocked on the shoulder by a chunk of the Delta II rocket. She was fine.

* Russia being my place of birth, I use this excuse annually when presenting cards and gifts well after the western version of “the holiday season” is over.

† Hence the probe’s name. “Grunt” translates into soil. (It’s pronounced groont by the way.)

‡ ROSAT’s plunge was particularly threatening because it had primarily functioned as a telescope and, as such, was equipped with massive (over 1.5 tons total), and very heat-resistant mirrors – exactly the kind of thing you don’t want falling on your house… or your head.

§ If 400 meters sounds like an abstract and unimpressive figure to you, then you might prefer Purdue University professor Jay Melosh’s description of its potential impact, “If a space rock the size of 2005 YU55 ever hit Earth, it would explode like 500 nuclear bombs, trigger a 7.0 magnitude earthquake and, if it splashed down in the ocean, generate a 70-foot tsunami.”

Got a fever? Best to cool it on the pills.

Thermometer by Andres Rueda, pills by Tyler Sparks, collaging by yours truly.

It’s time to wake up and smell the cough syrup, people; cold and flu season is here.* Soon everyone you know will be hacking and sneezing and generally assaulting you with their horrible germs. Illness is inevitable. You will get sick. And what to do then? If you’re like me, you probably gave up on store bought cold remedies ages ago. What’s the point? They merely suppress symptoms in exchange for other side effects. All you need to battle a run-of-the-mill virus is rest, fluids and maybe some over-the-counter pain reliever (Advil or Tylenol or the like) to reduce the fever, which is really the bulk of what’s making you feel so crappy. Right? After all, blowing your nose is just inconvenient, while a fever is incapacitating.

Well, you may want to reconsider even such modest medicating, because fever does more than just make you miserable, it also restores your health. This isn’t exactly news. It’s well known that an increase in body temperature can slow down bacteria and other microscopic invaders while the immune system mobilizes against them. Fever can even help accelerate the clearing of the parasite that causes malaria. In addition to thwarting cooties, fever can also improve the body’s pathogen fighting mechanisms. A recent study in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology found that a 2 degree centigrade increase in body temperature in mice resulted in improved differentiation of the lymphocyte CD8+ T – one of the cells involved in the immune response to viruses. While it may be detrimental to your performance of normal daily tasks (like staying awake and sitting upright), a fever actually makes your immune system more efficient.

So why are we still so quick to swallow fever-reducing pills? Certainly part of it is comfort (nobody likes feeling awful), but another problem is the perception the fevers are dangerous. While fever can be a part of serious illness, many high fevers result from minor ailments (and conversely, serious illness may present with only a mild fever). 103°F is a figure frequently given as an appropriate panic point (i.e., when call a doctor). But haven’t you had a 104° fever at some point in your life and not sought medical attention? And you were fine, right? The fever didn’t keep rising exponentially until it broke the thermometer and literally cooked your brain? Same here. The reason for concern over high fevers has more to do with possible complications of elevated body temperature than the fever itself. Dehydration, seizures – these are issues that might benefit from the presence of health care professionals.

“But can’t a fever be life-threatening?” you ask, “I’m sure I saw it on television once.” You are perhaps confusing cold/flu-induced fevers with something like heatstroke. Heatstroke occurs when the body has been pushed by strenuous exercise and ridiculously hot weather (think football practice in August) to the point where standard mechanisms for thermoregulation (sweating, dilating blood vessels, etc.) aren’t doing the trick anymore. The individual’s temperature rises not as defensive response to pathogens, but because the body has lost control of its internal environment. It’s potentially fatal, and gives one a sense of what reptiles have to worry about daily.

And while we’re empathizing with snakes and lizards, it’s worth noting that ectothermic animals (often described as “cold-blooded”†) also respond to infection with fever. How? While they can’t regulate their body temperatures internally like we do, reptiles can raise or lower their temperature behaviorally – for instance, by choosing a sunnier or shadier rock to lounge on. Research has shown that reptiles injected with bacteria will aim for a slightly higher temperature than non-infected control animals. Basically, when lizards get the sniffles, they cope with a behaviorally-induced fever rather than a bottle of ibuprofen.

The fact that even reptiles exhibit a fever response tells us that it’s a pretty old strategy for fighting infection. It’s certainly been around longer than NyQuil, echinacea, and chicken soup. While nothing cures the common cold, toughing out one its more uncomfortable symptoms is more likely to speed the healing process than your favorite home remedy.

Does this mean you have to forgo the pills entirely? Hey, I’m not your mom. Do whatever you like. There are plenty of good reasons for attempting to pull yourself together for a few hours despite being sick (birthdays, rock concerts, possibly even jobs). You just need to accept that you’re in for a certain volume of misery regardless. The only real decision is whether to spread the suffering out over more days, or just get it over with already.

* Well, at least here on the northern side of the Equator. I’m guessing that might not be the case elsewhere. Feel free to tune this one out for now, Southern Hemisphere.

† Their blood isn’t actually cold, they just have to stay warm behaviorally (by basking in the sun and that sort of thing) rather than with the fancy metabolic tricks of endotherms like ourselves.