Nature has a shifty side. Bees cheat flowers. Flowers cheat bees. Fish cheat other fish, and so on. The more biologists look, the more skulduggery turns up.

In this sense, cheating means pretty much what it does among people, says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of VU University Amsterdam: One party exploits another, taking more than its fair share or happily reaping benefits without paying the costs. “There is always that one person that orders the most expensive meal on the menu and then insists on splitting the bill evenly,” Kiers says.

Diners in nature don’t always mind their manners, either. A bee that bites through a flower wall for a long, sweet drink of nectar but doesn’t reciprocate by moving pollen, for instance, has cheated the plant. Such nectar snatches violate an evolutionarily ancient arrangement of trading food for pollination.

No outraged tablemates crack down on freeloaders in the wild. Yet, Kiers says, “Nature has its own tools.” These safeguards help keep pollinators pollinating and many other vital, two-partner biological processes humming along.

Theorists have long predicted that such anti-exploitation measures would have evolved. Now a burst of studies are revealing how real organisms cope with cheating. Most dramatic are the lethal punishments enacted by otherwise harmless-looking partners. “Plants can be brutal,” Kiers notes. Other creatures deliver sanctions that aren’t so harsh, or instead switch partners when things don’t work out. And in some cases of natural larceny, the cheating amounts to an annoyance that is easier to live with than to fight.

Click HERE to read the entire article…

sciencenews.org 21 July 2010 http://sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/61138/title/Nature’s_recourse

Is sadness a sickness? It appears to spread like one, a new study has found.

Researchers at Harvard University and MIT wanted to see if a mathematical model developed to track and predict the spread of infectious diseases such as SARS and foot-and-mouth disease could also apply to the spread of happiness — and found that it worked.

They used data collected from 1,880 subjects in the Framingham Heart Study, a long-term research effort that has followed subjects since 1948 (and added some new ones along the way), giving them physical and emotional exams every two years. At each visit, subjects were classified as content, discontent or neutral. The researchers monitored how these emotional states changed over time and how these changes depended on the emotions of the people with whom the participants came into contact.

When the information was put into a traditional infectious-disease simulation, slightly modified to reflect the unique qualities of emotional spread rather than actual disease, the researchers found a correlation between an individual’s emotional state and those of the person’s contacts.

In other words, it appears that you can catch happiness. Or sadness. Moreover, the “recovery time” doesn’t depend on your contacts at all, which is a hallmark of diseases but surprising in an emotional context, since continuing contact with happy or sad people could be expected to affect one’s emotional state even after the initial “infection.”

Click HERE to read the entire article…

latimes.com 14 July 2010 http://www.latimes.com/news/health/la-heb-sadness-happiness-infectious-diseases-20100708,0,3088234.story

WASHINGTON, May 25, 2010 –— With the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and growing concern about the global oil supply, the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) latest ChemMatters video podcast couldn’t have a timelier topic: Using food crops instead of petroleum to make plastics.

The high-definition video podcast, entitled “Plastics Go Green,” is based on an article about bioplastics featured in ChemMatters, the ACS’ award-winning high school chemistry magazine. It is available at www.bytesizescience.com and on the Bytesize Science podcast on iTunes.

Viewers can expect an entertaining and educational saga about an important facet of green chemistry. The episode explains how scientists are making plastics with sugar from corn, sugar cane or sugar beets as a substitute for oil. These natural, renewable crops make bioplastic production more environmentally friendly than traditional plastics manufacturing as well as save petroleum.

ChemMatters has been demystifying the chemistry in our everyday lives for more than 25 years. Released quarterly, each issue contains readable articles about the chemistry used in everyday life, and is of interest to high school students and their teachers.

portal.acs.org 4 June 2010 http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_024971&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=c627bed3-9c6d-4e8a-926f-bbde0c6839ee