Fail to Reject

This interesting article appeared at LiveScience.com The Science of Hit Songs By Bjorn Carey LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 09 February 2006 02:01 pm ET When Ashlee Simpson tops the charts while a critically acclaimed ex-Beatle's album fails to crack the top 200, eyebrows go up in the marketing world. So what makes a hit? A new study reveals that we make our music purchases based partly on our perceived preferences of others. Popularity contest Researchers created an artificial "music market" of 14,341 participants drawn from a teen-interest Web site. Upon entering the study's Internet market, the participants were randomly, and unknowingly, assigned to either an "independent" group or a "social influence" group. Participants could then browse through a collection of unknown songs by unknown bands. In the independent condition, participants chose which songs to listen to based solely on the names of the bands and their songs. While listening to ...

Science Tuesday. Here is an incredibly interesting story about a parasite that has an interesting procedure for procreating. It seems like straight out of a science fiction story. Found at Corante The Wisdom of Parasites Posted by Carl Zimmer I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa. As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head. The wasp slips her stinger thro...