The anger myth: Read this before blowing up

Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld, author of "50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology," and his co-authors write in Scientific American Mind about the bewildering mix of fact and fallacy in pop psych lore:

"Popular media assure us that anger is a monster we must tame by 'letting off steam,' 'blowing our top' and 'getting things off our chest.' In the 2003 movie Anger Management, the meek hero (played by Adam Sandler) is falsely accused of 'air rage' on a flight, causing a judge to order him to attend an anger management group run by psychiatrist Buddy Rydell (played by Jack Nicholson). At Rydell’s suggestion, Sandler’s character tosses dodgeballs at schoolchildren and throws golf clubs to purge his anger.

"Rydell’s advice echoes the counsel of many self-help authors. One suggested that rather than 'holding in poisonous anger,' it is better to 'punch a pillow or a punching bag. And while you do it, yell and curse and moan and holler.'

"Yet more than 40 years of research reveals that expressing anger actually amplifies aggression. In one study, people who pounded nails after someone insulted them became more critical of that person than did their counterparts who did not pound nails. Other research shows that playing aggressive sports, such as football, actually boosts self-reported hostility. And a review of 35 studies ... suggests that playing violent video games such as Manhunt, in which participants rate assassinations on a five-point scale, heightens aggression in the laboratory and in everyday social situations."

Read the full article.

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Invention lets art sleuth see through walls

Four hundred and fifty years ago, a Leonardo da Vinci mural of clashing soldiers disappeared from the hall where Florence’s political leaders used to meet. Art sleuth Maurizio Seracini has strong clues that the "The Battle of Anghiari" lies hidden behind a brick wall, built during a renovation of the hall. In order to prove it, however, he needs to see through the wall.

Emory physicist Ray DuVarney came up with an idea, based on the fact that paints get colors from different chemical elements. White paint from da Vinci’s time contained lead, for instance, and red paint contained mercury. DuVarney reasoned that shooting a beam of neutrons through the brick wall should induce the paints’ atoms to send back gamma rays, each emitting an energy distinctive to a particular color. These “pixels” of color could then be plotted onto a graph to indicate whether they formed an image akin to the missing mural.

"This is a passion project," DuVarney says. "It's more than a physics problem. It's about finding one of the lost wonders of the world."

Seracini has tested the technology successfully, and is now building a portable machine to scan the actual wall in Florence. The mystery of one of the world’s greatest missing masterpieces may be solved by the end of this year. If it works, it will open a new era in art sleuthing. As Seracini told Scholastic’s Free Library: “Once we have built this portable unit, we will use this technology to search for hundreds of murals hidden everywhere on the planet.”


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Tiny aphids hold big surprises in genome

Pea aphids, expert survivors of the insect world, appear to lack major biological defenses, according to the first genetic analysis of their immune system.

“It’s surprising,” says Emory biologist Nicole Gerardo, who led the study, published this week in Genome Biology. "Aphids have some components of an immune system, but they are missing the genes that we thought were critical to insect immunity."

Pea aphids are major agricultural pests and also important biological models for studies of insect-plant interactions, symbiosis, virus vectoring and genetic plasticity. These resilient insects thrive despite a host of enemies, including parasitic wasps, lady bugs, fungal pathogens and frustrated farmers and gardeners the world over.


The immune-system analysis is among a group of findings generated by the International Aphid Genomics Consortium, which just published the full sequence of the pea aphid genome, and sponsored dozens of in-depth analyses of different areas of the sequence.

"This is the first look at the genome of a whole group of insects we know little about," says Gerardo, an evolutionary biologist who focuses on host-parasite interactions.

All insects previously sequenced belong to a group that undergoes metamorphosis. Pea aphids, however, belong to an insect group known as basel hemimetablous – meaning they are born looking like tiny adults.
"We went into this expecting to find the same set of immune-system genes that we've seen in the genomes of flies, mosquitoes and bees," Gerardo says. “Given these missing genes, it seems that aphids have a weak immune system. Our next step is to figure out how they protect themselves.” One hypothesis is that aphids may compensate for their lack of immune defenses by focusing on reproduction. From birth, a female aphid contains embryos that also contain embryos.

“She is born carrying her granddaughters,” Gerardo says. “In a lab, a female aphid can produce up to 20 copies of herself per day. About 10 days later, those babies will start producing their own offspring.”

Over 50 million years, aphids have evolved complex relationships with beneficial bacteria that supply them with nutrients or protect them from predators and pathogens. It’s possible that the weak immune response in aphids developed as a way to keep from killing off these beneficial microbes, Gerardo says. “A key question is whether these microbes could have changed the aphid genome, or changed how the aphid uses its genes.”

Further study of how the aphid immune system interacts with microbes could yield better methods for controlling them in agriculture.

Aphids are not just pests, Gerardo says. They are also potential resources for questions related to human health.

"Humans need beneficial bacteria for proper digestion in the gut and to protect against cavities in the teeth," she says. "Some people feel sick when they take antibiotics because the drug kills off all the beneficial bacteria. If we can study the process of how to keep beneficial bacteria while clearing out harmful bacteria across several organisms, including aphids, we might be able to understand it better."

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Bad science in films bugs physicist

The next time you see a sci-fi film with people battling insects as big as houses, consider this: An insect scaled up to that size would collapse under its own weight, according to physicist Sidney Perkowitz.

From the Guardian in London:

"Science fiction movies should be allowed only one major transgression of the laws of physics, according to a US professor who has won backing from a number of his peers after creating a set of guidelines for Hollywood.

"The guidelines are by Sidney ­Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University and a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, an advisory body run by the US National Academy of Sciences.

"The Science and Entertainment Exchange is backed by Dustin Hoffman, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Perkowitz said: 'The hope is that it will get better science into films while still making them interesting.'"

Read the full article.

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Biology may not be so complex after all

By Carol Clark

Centuries ago, scientists began reducing the physics of the universe into a few, key laws described by a handful of parameters. Such simple descriptions have remained elusive for complex biological systems – until now.

Emory biophysicist Ilya Nemenman has identified parameters for several biochemical networks that distill the entire behavior of these systems into simple equivalent dynamics. The discovery may hold the potential to streamline the development of drugs and diagnostic tools, by simplifying the research models.

The resulting paper, now available online, will be published in the March issue of Physical Biology.

"It appears that the details of the complexity of these biological systems don't matter, as long as some aggregate property, which we've calculated, remains the same," says Nemenman, associate professor of physics and biology. He conducted the analysis with Golan Bel and Brian Munsky of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The simplicity of the discovery makes it “a beautiful result,” Nemenman says. “We hope that this theoretical finding will also have practical applications.”

He cites the air molecules moving about his office: “All of the crazy interactions of these molecules hitting each other boils down to a simple behavior: An ideal gas law. You could take the painstaking route of studying the dynamics of every molecule, or you could simply measure the temperature, volume and pressure of the air in the room. The second method is clearly easier, and it gives you just as much information.”


Nemenman wanted to find similar parameters for the incredibly complex dynamics of cellular networks, involving hundreds, or even thousands, of variables among different interacting molecules. Among the key questions: What determines which features in these networks are relevant? And if they have simple equivalent dynamics, did nature choose to make them so complex in order to fulfill a specific biological function? Or is the unnecessary complexity a “fossil record” of the evolutionary heritage?

For the Physical Biology paper, Nemenman and co-authors investigated these questions in the context of a kinetic proofreading (KPR) scheme.

KPR is the mechanism a cell uses for optimal quality control as it makes protein. KPR was predicted during the 1970s and it applies to most cellular assembly processes. It involves hundreds of steps, and each step may have different parameters.

Nemenman and his colleagues wondered if the KPR scheme could be described more simply. "Our calculations confirmed that there is, in fact, a key aggregate rate," he says. "The whole behavior of the system boils down to just one parameter."

That means that, instead of painstakingly testing or measuring every rate in the process, you can predict the error and completion rate of a system by looking at a single aggregate parameter.


Charted on a graph, the aggregate behavior appears as a straight line amid a tangle of curving ones. “The larger and more complex the system gets, the more the aggregate behavior is visible,” Nemenman says. “The completion time gets simpler and simpler as the system size goes up.”

Nemenman is now collaborating with Emory theoretical biologist Rustom Antia, to see if the discovery can shed light on the processes of immune cells. In particular, they are interested in the malfunction of certain immune receptors involved in most allergic reactions.

"We may be able to simplify the model for these immune receptors from about 3,000 steps to three steps," Nemenman says. "You wouldn't need a supercomputer to test different chemical compounds on the receptors, because you don't need to simulate every single step, just the aggregate."

Just as the discovery of an ideal gas law led to the creation of engines and automobiles, Nemenman believes that such simple biochemical aggregates could drive advancements in health.

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