Running short of worries? Then ponder the super-volcanoes — earth-bombs that can vomit 10 or 100 or 1,000 cubic kilometers of molten rock. Super-volcanoes can change history by creating rivers of red-hot ash moving at highway speed, spreading dust across hundreds of kilometers and spewing vapors that block the sun, destroy crops and start famines.

A volcano may go dormant for thousands of years after such a huge eruption, so they may be even harder to predict than smaller ones — which are also unpredictable at this point…

But this week, Nature published a new analysis of Santorini, a Mediterranean monster, that shows the movement of molten rock that preceded the eruption.

Santorini’s sudden release of 40 to 60 cubic kilometers of rock and ash was followed by a giant collapse that left a characteristic ring of hills called a caldera. Thousands may have died in the eruption, which laid down a 60-meter layer of ash and rock.

Eruptions of this general size happen about every 300 years, says Timothy Druitt, a volcanologist at the Université Blaise Pascal in France, who lead the current study. The most recent was in 1815 at Tambora, in Indonesia.

Druitt’s new analysis of crystals within the frozen magma offers a rough schedule for the entry of molten magma into a holding tank — the magma chamber — below the volcano, which is a precursor to eruption.

Caldera-forming eruptions rival earthquakes and tsunamis as the deadliest natural disasters. “People who work in the field know these volcanoes are not rare, even on a human time scale,” says Druitt, but “we have never been able to monitor one of these big eruptions during the long buildup phase, so we are not really sure how that happens.”

The crystal analysis detects microscopic changes in chemical composition, offering a unique, after-the-fact picture of the gestation of eruption.

In the crystals

As crystals grow in the cooling magma, atoms of trace elements diffuse within them, and both growth and diffusion are affected by conditions within the hot magma, says Druitt. “These crystals grow progressively, and as they do, their chemical composition changes according to the composition of the magma around them, and the temperature and amount of water in the magma.”

The crystals revealed that a big gob of magma — perhaps 10 percent of the magma chamber’s total contents — entered in the decades before the eruption. “Looking at the crystals in this magma, we were able to reconstruct very crudely events taking place in the last few decades prior to the eruption,” Druitt says.

That final addition probably made the magma chamber unstable, leading to the eruption, Druitt explains.

If such a late, large magma movement proves typical of super-volcanoes, that could contribute to a distant early warning system for mega-eruptions, based on more conventional methods, such as seismic monitoring.

Distant early warning

But the findings also carried a caution, Druitt says, since Santorini was apparently dormant for about 18,000 years before the last apoplectic outburst. “That is a slightly alarming result. There are lot of these big caldera systems, but most are in a stage of repose.”

The upshot is more proof that a dormant volcano can still be a dangerous one, he adds. “We can imagine that a big caldera in a remote region of the world, such as the Andes, which is not monitored very well, could reawaken pretty quickly on a human time scale.”

The crystal method gives after-the-fact data on an eruption. Current attempts to anticipate eruptions rely on data about earth shaking, deformation of the crust, and release of gases.

“It’s a very timely topic, and solid science in terms of the measurements and observations,” says Bradley Singer, a volcanologist and professor of geoscience at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “They admit that there are issues about the time scales,” largely because the diffusion of strontium and titanium is imperfectly understood in the hot magma.

The study’s title, however, specifies that the final growth of the magma chamber occurs on “Decadal to monthly timescales,” Singer notes. “It could be centuries or even longer, which implies that we’d have a longer time prior to the eruption” to worry about the effects of the rising magma.

Singer concurs on the importance of understanding the relationship of magma flows, instability and eruption, and says the crystal analysis is gaining traction in volcanology.

That’s just as well, since giant caldera-forming volcanoes may be frighteningly common. The one at Yellowstone, for example, released 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock 640,000 years ago. Wouldn’t you want to know if something like that was building on your continent?

If many scientific quests should be marked with an academic form of caution tape: “Progress = 2 steps forward + step back,” cosmologists have been in steady retreat for decades.

The “cosmo” girls (and mainly boys) who explore the origin and fate of the universe were once mocked as data-free arm wavers. Then, in 1964, cosmo was promoted into a science by the discovery that echoes of the Big Bang were rattling around the universe.

The unexpected arrival of data — of fingerprints of the ultimate past — allowed observational astronomers to budge the theorists in the search for the origin and fate of everything.

Here’s the big picture of cosmology: Big Bang creates matter, which expands for an instant faster than light (please hold your questions for the end). Matter proceeds to form galaxies, black holes, stars and weird beams of energy.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding: The further the object, the faster it recedes from us.

The biggest explanation of all began to leak when astronomers noticed that galaxies were spinning so fast that they should fly apart as their centrifugal force overwhelmed the gravity that their mass created.

Galaxies have not gotten the memo, and they are calmly rotating rather than flying apart.

Desperate, cosmologists cooked up the idea that a vast quantity of matter was missing. Was invisible. Was “dark.”

Dark matter was the first tragedy inflicted by data on cosmo theory.

When cosmologists tried to decide if gravity would eventually recall the far-flung stars and galaxies back into a “big crunch,” they found something utterly inexplicable: In 1998, two scientific teams announced that the rate of expansion was rising.

Some anti-gravity force — some “dark energy” — was apparently to blame.

If dark matter is hard to find, dark energy is hard to envision.

As the news about dark energy sank in, the prospect of figuring out what’s what melted faster than a frozen butter sculpture in July.

Today, the embarrassing accounting of our cosmological conundrum says that, astronomers, with all their fancy education and ultra-slick telescopes, can only see 4 percent of the universe.

Most scientific books proceed from the unknown and proceed to make it known. But The 4% Universe, ensnared in the twin realm of darknesses, does the opposite. It’s deeply unsatisfying, but as any cosmologist would say, so is that 4 percent picture.

The 4% Universe documents a more familiar form of dark energy — the thirst for headlines among two gangs of “bickering eggheads” that more or less independently found the accelerating expansion.

Without shying away from scientific subtleties, Richard Panek has written a biography of dark matter and dark energy, and of the legion of physicists and astronomers who chased the ultimate question mark. You’ll meet star-chasers, careerists, self-promoters and lone geniuses intent on answering a simple question: What’s out there?

– David J. Tenenbaum

2010 marked the completion of a bizarre telescope composed mainly of ancient ice. One billion tons of ice.

Buried a mile deep in the ice at the South Pole, IceCube is the world’s strangest telescope. Composed of water, it’s looking for the neutrino, nature’s most unusual particle. Eighty years after the neutrino was “invented” to balance a physics equation, it remains ultra-difficult to detect, measure and understand.

IceCube is focused mainly on particles that come all the way through the Earth. In other words, this telescope looks down.

Scientists say neutrinos can pass unscathed through a long bar of lead. How long? Say, one light year long — about 10 trillion kilometers. Because neutrinos can slip through everything in their path, including stars, galaxies and vast clouds of dust, they are unrivaled tattle-tales of ancient explosions in the deep universe.

The bad news is that the same property makes neutrinos extremely difficult to see.

But if you can somehow observe the neutrino’s insanely rare interaction with matter, you could learn something about the universe, and the gargantuan energy released by exploding stars.

Roots of a frozen telescope

That is the promise and the premise of IceCube, a $271-million project intended to solve a problem posed in 1930, when physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new and rather odd particle. Tiny, energetic, with no electric charge and not necessarily any mass, it would be virtually undetectable.

Pauli himself admitted “I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”¹

The “now-you-don’t-see-it-and-you-never-will” neutrino was tailor-made for controversy; scientists detest what they can’t detect. Pauli’s idea was mocked² as “simply wrong” or “crazy.”

Today, scientists are sure nature is full of these shadowy characters: Rough calculations say a hundred trillion neutrinos whistle through your body every second.

Why make a big deal about neutrinos, which are, after all, less offensive than campaign ads? Because that ability to pass through all manner of interstellar crud allows neutrinos to carry messages from the far reaches of the universe.

Moreover, some neutrinos carry more punch than the wildest gamma ray. And just as you can’t pull a hot coal from a cold fire, you shouldn’t get “hot” neutrinos from “cool” sources like ordinary stars. These neutrinos, in other words, may deliver signals of some hip, blazingly hot stuff — neutron stars, active galactic centers, and exploding stars.

Finally, according to some scenarios, lower-energy neutrinos may comprise a small proportion of the mass — the stuff — of the universe, but they played a key role in the evolution of the universe.

In astronomy, as in love and antiques, “hard-to-get” translates into “most-wanted.” “The hope is that the particle that is almost nothing will tell us almost everything about the universe,” says Francis Halzen, a theoretical physicist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Halzen directs IceCube, and did the same at IceCube’s predecessor, AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array.

Search strategy for an elusive character

Neutrinos may be shy, but once in a great while, they actually hit an atom and produce a subatomic particle called a muon, which is easier to see.

Because the odds of a neutrino hitting anything are so dismal, physicists require bigger targets. It’s the same principle that lottery players use to “beat” the tiny odds of winning by buying hundreds of tickets.

Previous neutrino targets have included tubs of oil or dry-cleaning fluid and 5,000 tons of steel plates salvaged from battleships. To block spurious signals due to cosmic rays rather than neutrinos, these detectors have been sunk in the ocean or placed inside deep mines.

IceCube relies on a two-step detection sequence: First, the tiny percentage of neutrinos that interact with atomic nuclei in the ice produce muons. Second, these muons create Cherenkov light when they interact with matter.

When the detectors see Cherenkov light, they digitize the data and send it through electric cables to the surface for analysis. The detectors are housed inside 5,160 crush-proof glass spheres placed in holes drilled through the ice, and located 1450 to 2450 meters deep.

Another 324 detectors at the surface detect muons made by cosmic rays arriving from the Southern sky.

The Antarctic ice also has little radiation, and the detectors are so deep that air bubbles have been squeezed out, ensuring great optical clarity. Yet while the detectors are shielded from damage, they are under crushing pressure, and if they go bad, they will be busted forever.

IceCube will only look at muons that trigger at least eight detectors, says Halzen, and is most interested in muons moving upward — coming from the Northern Hemisphere. Downward signals can be confusing, as most of them are due to cosmic rays or lower-energy neutrinos, which Earth blocks.

Data from IceCube should suggest where the neutrinos originated and what sort of cosmic engine started them on their journey.

This desire to concentrate on neutrinos rather than cosmic rays explains why this frozen telescope, oddly but logically, looks downward.

What can these neutrinos tell us?

Neutrinos, “invented” to balance a physics equation, have grown to fascinate astrophysicists, galactic voyeurs seeking signals from astonishingly energetic structures and events in the deep universe. The direction and energy of neutrinos from each source should offer clues about the origin:

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO

Located 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a massive star that died in a violent supernova 325 years ago. The dead star (turquoise dot in center) became a neutron star surrounded by a shell of junk blasted away in the explosion. Image is a composite from three orbital telescopes: Infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope is red; Visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope is yellow; Chandra X-ray Observatory data is green and blue.

Although supernova neutrinos have low energy and are hard to detect, a nearby supernova could light up IceCube enough to overwhelm the system. To prep for a supernova, Reina Maruyama, an assistant professor of physics at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is working to ensure that IceCube can handle this once-in-a-lifetime chance to get good data on a stellar explosion.

If something like the 1987 supernova exploded nearby in our galaxy, Maruyama says, “there would be so many neutrinos, the whole ice would glow. We expect that a few supernovas will occur each century in the galaxy, if one goes off, IceCube has to be ready. We stand to learn a whole lot about how they explode, and about the particle nature of neutrinos.”

Dark matters

Even weirder than neutrinos, IceCube may explore dark matter, a type of, well, something, that comprises 23 percent of the overall universe. A measly 4 percent of matter, including the galaxies, stars and planets, is visible. The balance is an even stranger quantity called dark energy.

The first inkling that some matter is invisible came in the 1930s, when a physicist noticed that galaxies rotate too fast: their visible mass would create too little gravity, and thus they should spin themselves into oblivion.

The explanation for that increased gravity is now called dark matter, and the race is on to detect it.

Since dark matter affects gravity, Maruyama says it must gather in the sun and the galaxies. When dark matter particles collide, they are expected to release a type of neutrino called muon neutrinos. But IceCube found no muon neutrinos coming from the sun and the Milky Way, using a technique that was 1,000 times more sensitive than previous ones.

Does absence make the heart grow fonder?

It depends on your perspective whether that’s good or bad, says Halzen. “There was a big celebration when we published, because we placed limits on that particular type of dark matter, but I looked at it another way: We had gone 1,000 times deeper, and it was very disappointing not to see dark matter.”

However, an experiment in Italy may have seen dark matter interacting with a hunk of sodium iodide, based on an annual variation in the signal. If Earth indeed orbits through a cloud of dark matter, the detector would register alternating downstream and upstream motions that could account for that annual cycle.

The cycle could, however, be due to something unrelated to dark matter.

To answer that riddle, Maruyama wants to place a similar detector deep in the Antarctic ice, and has already piggybacked two prototypes onto IceCube strings. The prototypes are working well enough to justify a larger, more expensive detector, Maruyama says.

If and when the experiment is replicated in Antarctic Ice, Maruyama says, “A positive result would be interesting, and a negative result would be interesting. If we can see a signal with the same timing, that confirms the [Italian] results. If we don’t see a signal, the source must be something aside from dark matter.”

Lurking behind the IceCube project is the tantalizing prospect of learning more about the bizarre particle it detects — the neutrino. We already know that neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, and that they range in energy through at least 30 orders of magnitude — an unimaginable range of energies. There have been recent — and controversial — reports that neutrinos can travel faster than light — breaking a basic law of physics.

Why so weird?

That’s another indication that neutrinos exist at the edge of the standard model that attempts to explain everything by gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear forces, Halzen says. “We are measuring the properties of neutrinos any way we can, and extrapolating to see what the standard model predicts, and looking for variations. The simple way to describe the experiment is that we collect muons and neutrinos, and everything you don’t understand is a discovery, either it’s physics beyond the standard model, or it’s new astrophysics.”

Halzen anticipates spotting an extremely high-energy particle called the GZK neutrino. “These are predicted by theory, and if one hits the detector, we won’t have to do any analysis, we will be able to look at the event display and know that we have made the discovery.” GZK neutrinos are, according to theory, made by cosmic rays that strike photons in the microwave background, Halzen says, and thus could finally reveal the origin of the cosmic rays, one century after their discovery.

Neutrinos are slippery characters; shy, coming in incomprehensible numbers, being emitted by sources we cannot pinpoint. Maruyama notes that neutrinos seemingly change to a different “flavor” without any apparent cause, and says this “oscillation” from one state to another is the strangest part of the neutrino story. “Oscillation could have implications on how the universe evolved to have matter, and not anti-matter,” she says. “These tiny particles could have such an influence on the universe.”

So what?

Why should non-scientists worry about neutrinos? Halzen, who has answered this question many times, says “I have a personal answer. The reason we know our place in the universe is not because of French philosophers, it’s because of physicists. With dark matter and dark energy, we know most of the universe is not made of the same material we are made of. … Is that important to know? I think so.”

IceCube is not intended to produce technology or solve today’s problems, Halzen acknowledges. “This is total curiosity-driven science, and you are allowed not to care. But if you don’t do fundamental research, we’re going to be a developing country, that is clear.”

Particle physics proves that theoretical pursuits can have results that are unpredictable, yet practical and profitable, Halzen says. “My previous job was at CERN [the European particle-physics lab], where people discovered the Web in 1989, to enable collaboration among remote scientists. I think we have paid for all theoretical physics with that one discovery.”

The seas’ most sought-after fish are swimming between a rock and a hard place: the fisherman’s net and an encroaching mass of suffocating water.

A recent study has uncovered a new dose of bad news for ocean fish and the fishing industry. Areas of the deep ocean with little dissolved oxygen, called dead zones, are expanding and, thus, shrinking many fishes’ watery homes.

One driving force behind the predicament is none other than that pesky climate problem.

“Climate change is actually working in tandem with overexploitation of the animals to push these populations into a real dangerous place in terms of population collapse,” said Eric Prince, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center and co-author of the study.

For example, Prince and his colleagues calculated that the Atlantic blue marlin, an economically valuable fish that was a focus of their study, has lost about 15 percent of its habitat from expanding dead zones since 1960. Dwindling habitat threatens not only the lives of fishes, but also the sustainability of the already ailing fishing industry.

Breathing room

Like their above-water brethren, fish need oxygen, which is dissolved in the water. Big, predatory fish, such as the blue marlin, need more dissolved oxygen than most, because they require lots of energy to grow and survive. Without sufficient oxygen, they’ll suffocate.

The level of oxygen in the water thus partly delineates fish habitat boundaries. Dead zones often draw these borders.

As climate change causes open ocean dead zones to balloon, fish habitat deflates.

Diagram modified from one originally published in Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers, Vol 57, Issue 4, Lothar Stramma, Sunke Schmidtko, Lisa A. Levin, & Gregory C. Johnson. Ocean oxygen minima expansions and their biological impacts, 587-595, Copyright Elsevier (2010).

Technically known as oxygen minimum zones, dead zones are actually a natural occurrence. Found at depths of between 200 and 1000 meters, they are caused partly by seawater circulation and partly by the decomposition of organic matter, namely deceased sea critters that sink from surface waters.

As aerobic bacteria nosh on the organic matter, they use up the oxygen in the water. Eventually, hypoxia happens—the water becomes so depleted of oxygen that many creatures can’t survive.

Since deep-sea dead zones are insulated from the ocean’s surface, where the water borrows oxygen from the atmosphere, they can only reload with oxygen if currents make a long-distance delivery, according to Sunke Schmidtko, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia, the other co-author of the study.

Deep-sea dead zones are different from their coastal cousins like the one in the Gulf of Mexico. Coastal dead zones form due to a buildup of agricultural fertilizer that rivers, such as the Mississippi, collect and then flush out to sea, causing abnormal blooms of plant life.

De-fizzing the ocean

But climate change is turning what Mother Nature does normally into a big problem. As the air is getting hotter, so is the water, and warmer water can hold less oxygen than colder water.

This is similar to what happens to a soft drink on a hot day. After sitting in the heat and sun, the fizz fizzles, and you are left with a flat, carbon dioxide-depleted beverage.

Also, warmer surface waters are less likely to sink to the ocean’s lower layers, because warm water is lighter than the colder water below, Schmidtko explained. In other words, as the oxygen-rich surface layers heat up, they could have a harder time delivering oxygen to the deeper ocean.

Schmidtko clarified that oceanographers are still trying to determine how exactly climate change is affecting the ocean, but with their knowledge of how water works, these represent their current speculations.

The rock below

With less oxygen to go around, oxygen minimum zones are swelling and intruding on many fishes’ living zones.

For example, marlins often dive deep to feed, sometimes as far down as 800 meters. However, in the eastern Atlantic’s growing dead zone, which is already one of the largest in the world, Prince found that marlins can’t dive as deep as their west-side counterparts.

“They need to go where the food is and where they can breathe,” he said.

With less breathing room below, the floor of their habitat rises, and they are pinned to the surface layers. With nowhere to go but up, marlins become squished into tighter, testier quarters with other predatory fish and their prey. They also find it harder to dodge a waiting fishing hook or net.

“Concentrating them makes it much easier for overexploitation by [humans],” said Prince.

The increasing concentration of animals at the top could also lead to a boost in the amount of sinking organic matter, which would further worsen the oxygen shortage below.

Softening the hard place above

As a prized catch, Atlantic blue marlins are already victims of overharvesting. In fact, their populations have dropped 60-64 percent over the past three fish generations (14-18 years).

But the growing dead zones can actually fool scientists and fishermen into thinking fish populations are doing just fine, since more fish are squeezed into a smaller area. Thus, to ensure the dead zone-fishing vise does not become their demise, Prince said scientists must more carefully monitor fish populations, as well as the expansion of the dead zones.

While fish stock assessments are starting to incorporate this information, Prince warned the pace needs to quicken.

And if the Earth is to continue warming, as most scientists predict, Schmidtko added that humans should chill out on fishing.

After all, we will never be capable of “ventilating the ocean,” he said.

You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Robots are great at what they do — if the job is dull and predictable. Throw in the unexpected, and robots can do the unpredictable.

The task of programming a robot’s brain for the real world can be gnarly, says Josh Bongard, an assistant professor in the University of Vermont College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. “It turns out that building a robot, and programming it to do something interesting is a very non-intuitive process, and it’s a difficult one for humans to do well.”

The real world, he says, “is quite messy.”

Robots, in the jargon, need “adaptive behavior” to accommodate changing circumstances, says Bongard. When programming a free-roaming robot, “We are not likely to factor in a lighting change or people moving in and out of the field of view.”

It’s not clear how animals or people make adaptations, Bongard says, “and so it’s difficult to program a robot to do them.”

Robots: Are they alive?

Bongard, like a number of roboticists, is turning to biology for answers. But he does not want to emulate living structures. Instead, he wants to use evolution to craft robot control.

The process is akin to the “artificial selection” that helped lay the foundation for the science of evolution. Darwin, after all, wrote about how animal breeders had changed their livestock by repeatedly breeding the best animals and eating the rest.

In January, 2011, Bongard reported that he had taught four-legged, digital robots to stand and run toward a light source, by grading their control software on its ability to meet those goals.

Adaptive behavior was necessary, he says, because the light source could appear anywhere, or even take evasive action, “so the robot can’t just move its legs blindly every time.”

The robots had five seconds to do or die, and their first movements were grotesque because the control software initially moved their body parts at random. After every attempt, the control programs were graded by their ability to walk, stay upright and approach the light.

It’s brutal. More than 100 million failed programs went to the virtual graveyard in the name of science, Bongard says. The programs that showed some promise were retained, randomly varied and re-tested.

The same process is found in nature, where successful genes that face random mutation are re-tested by tomorrow’s environment.

Like the average biological mutation, the mutated robot software usually failed. But over a year of supercomputer time — equivalent to 1,000 years on a desktop computer — the winning programs evolved the ability to walk toward the light.

Weird winners

Considering the amount of trial and error, that was a satisfying but not necessarily surprising result. But here’s something to chew on. Bongard found that robots “born” with four legs had a handicap. During repeated simulations, the robots that started as snakes and developed legs during the five-second experiment were much quicker to learn the task.

You might guess — we would have — that the quick learning would have occurred in robots with full-time four-leg drive, given their longer experience with legged locomotion, but Bongard says the leg-free starters benefited by chunking the challenge: a) learn to approach the light, and b) learn to walk.

These robots “could evolve the ability to go from point A to point B while they still look like a snake, they don’t have to worry about balance, because they are already on the ground,” Bongard says. “Once evolution has figured out how to move toward the light, the ability to move on four legs could evolve.”

Meanwhile, the four-legged counterparts may still be flipping, flopping and floundering (Note to self: sell soul as political hit-man if science-writing gig crash-burns?) “The robots that had to stand upright would fall over, and it took evolution a long time to master balance,” Bongard says.

The approach — take the winners and vary them for a retest — resembles directed chemical evolution, which aims to create a better antibiotic by modifying and retesting molecules that show some ability to kill bacteria. “It’s basically the same idea,” says Bongard, “but instead of a candidate drug, we have virtual robots, and instead of selecting for … resistance to disease, they are selected for the ability to get to the light.”

Robots resemble rodents?

As a final exam for the digital robots, Bongard tested their balance with a blast of air. Although the leg-less robots “had evolved into legged robots that looked exactly like the other species, they were better able to run around under simulated windy conditions,” Bongard reports.

Bongard is first to acknowledge that he is “stealing from biology to help us build better robots,” but says, “the more interesting question is what this tells us about biological evolution. This recent work suggests that robots that change their bodies gain an adaptive advantage … and you see the same radical changes in body plan in nature: in insects, reptiles and in humans as they develop from infant to adult.”

Astronomers have just discovered two Earth-size, rocky planets around a nearby star. Though the planets are way too broilsome for life, they suggest that steady improvements in telescope technology has made the discovery of habitable planets just a matter of time.

But as astrobiologists continue to search for life in space, geo-biologists (ok, we coined that) continue to find bizarre life in strange places on Earth: in the dark ocean depths, between grains of sand, and at roasty-toasty temperatures once considered deadly.

Hot, humid, and totally alive!

Fifty years ago, nobody believed organisms could survive near the boiling point of water. When Thomas Brock started probing the hot springs in Yellowstone in the 1960s, he was not looking to overthrow a ground rule of biology. Instead, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, then at Indiana University, sought to study bacteria in a simplified, real-world environment.

At the time, and even today, precious little was known about how bacteria live their lives — unless they cause disease.

As Brock sampled his way up a hot stream, he approached its source in a hot spring, and the water temperature rose steadily.

At the time, biologists thought life would not tolerate temperatures near 80° C. But Brock kept finding bacteria, so he kept looking. Eventually, he found some that could live and reproduce near the temperature of boiling water — 100° C.

The prize of his collection was a bacterium he named Thermus aquaticus (for its hot-water habitat) and placed in a public repository for study by other scientists.

Over the years, T. aquaticus proved interesting indeed. For one thing, it was the first of more than 50 species of thermophilic bacteria known to tolerate or require temperatures near water’s boiling point.

For another, it was the first of the Archaea (ancient ones), primitive microorganisms that scientists now regard as a separate and highly primitive kingdom of life.

Deep roots indeed

Because thermophiles are Archaeans, and prefer the steamy conditions typical of early Earth, many scientists think they may tell us about the origin of life itself.

To any basic scientist, those contributions would be enough. But because their enzymes work in high temperatures, where chemical reactions are faster, the thermophiles have proven to be extraordinarily useful.

Today, enzymes derived from thermophiles are used to convert millions of pounds of corn (maize) into sugar to sweeten soft drinks.

But more important, at least to scientists who don’t guzzle fizzy pop at the lab bench, T. aquaticus supplied TAQ polymerase, the essential enzyme for polymerase chain reaction, AKA PCR.

PCR is an artificial technique that does what living critters do every day — replicate DNA. But PCR is the rocket ship of replication, since it allows you to multiply a piece of DNA a billion times in a few hours. That produces enough DNA to analyze to your heart’s content — for genetic engineering, biotechnology and forensic purposes.

PCR depends on TAQ polymerase.

Aware that PCR and soda pop are both billion-dollar industries, corporations and scientists around the world have frantically searched for other thermophiles that may have equally useful enzymes. They’re looking in odd places — not just hot springs and volcanoes, but also deep-sea vents, hot petroleum-bearing rock, the outflow of geothermal power plants, and smoldering piles of garbage.

Prowling for glow-in-the-dark squid

Call me Bob.

Short for bobtail squid. (Did I mention that I’m a 3-4 centimeter cephalopod, formally Euprymna Scolopes?)

Anyway, I hang out in shallow waters around Hawaii. Save your crocodile tears — somebody’s got to live in the sunny, tropical ocean. Anyway, here’s my problem: Even though I have 10 tentacles, I don’t have spines, poisons, or any other decent defense.

So I spend my days burrowed in sand at the ocean bottom, trying to keep out of mischief. Still, a fellow’s got to eat, don’tcha know, so I cruise at night, looking to grab a bite.

Here’s the snag: All sorts of nocturnal predators seem to have this thing about calamari sushi.

Light before flashlights

A long time ago, my ancestors evolved a nifty defense against their big teeth: stealth. Even their tiny squid brains figured out that predators could see them from below, as tasty dark blobs against the bright ocean surface.

Since this was before flashlights, my relatives had to improvise. So they press-ganged billions of luminescent bacteria into making light for them. The idea was to make us just as bright as the ocean surface — and hence invisible.

At least, this is how my great-aunt Tentacla tells it. To tell the truth, I think it had more to do with the evolutionary advantage of being hard to see.

Anyway, my ancestors fed the bacteria, and gave them a home in two specialized light-emitting organs. These “photophores” have a reflective membrane to shine all their light down, toward the hungry predators. They use a diaphragm to control brightness, and even have a lens to spread the light.

The photophore reminds me of a backwards eye — one that makes light rather than detects it.

My folks even figured out how to switch the bacteria “on” when needed.

In return, the bacteria got room and board, in the biological deal they call “symbiosis” or “mutualism.” Sometimes I think people could learn from this cooperative spirit….

But that’s enough thinking for today. My squid brain is squashed.

As I burrow into the sand for another daytime nap, permit me to introduce somebody who considers me almost as fascinating as I do.

Seriously speaking…

Margaret McFall-Ngai, a biologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the bobtail squid may pretend it’s cooperating in a symbiosis with those light-making bacteria, but the reality is more ominous.

She says there’s evidence that this may be slavery, not symbiosis, since the squid, “inhibits the growth of the bacteria to enhance their luminescence.” The bacteria, Vibrio fischeri, could make a better living drifting in the ocean, or in the gut of another marine animal, McFall-Ngai observes.

The concept of bacterial enslavement broadens our perspective on the many possible relationships in the living world.

Most people, if they think about bacteria at all, conjure up disease and decay, but people would be dead without bacteria, since the little critters play essential roles in producing vitamins and preventing disease.

Since the bacteria in our guts vastly outnumber the cells in our bodies, it helps that they’re helpful!

Nevertheless, and for understandable reasons, bacteriologists have traditionally focused on disease-causing organisms, and, for simplicity, on one species at a time. But that skews our view of how bacteria actually live, says McFall-Ngai.

Three cheers for complexity!

Complexity and subtlety may be the hallmarks of these interactions, and the complexity begins by recognizing that V. fischeri is closely related to V. cholerae, which causes the human intestinal disease, cholera.

Cholera is caused by a V. cholera toxin similar to a toxin produced by the light-emitting bacterium. But far from harming the poor little bobtail, that toxin signals it to secrete food for V. fischeri, so the toxin is really a chemical “dinner bell.”

And this raises the intriguing notion that a cholera bug secretes toxins not to kill its host but to discuss its menu. If so, our whole notion of pathogenesis may need rewriting, McFall-Ngai suggests. “Maybe when we’ve been studying cholera pathogenesis we’ve been studying an aspect of a normal conversation that’s gone wrong.”

Indeed, the traditional bacteriological view of bacteria as pathogens to be studied in pure culture may be “like trying to understand the complexity of all the cultures that lived in Paris by studying the activity of the Nazi occupiers,” McFall-Ngai suggests. “You are studying groups that don’t belong there, and have disrupted the normal activities.”

Want more on how the flashlight squid bullies its bacterial brethren?

Between the grains

(1996 story, only photos have been updated)

To zoologist Robert Higgins, small is beautiful. His infatuation with small creatures — “meiofauna” — dates to a student job in a biology lab that paid 35 cents an hour. Instead of quitting for more lucrative work, Higgins was intrigued.

He’d heard about tiny, amazingly diverse creatures, and put grains of sand and muck through a fine mesh, and used a microscope to find hundreds of organisms.

Forty-four years later, Higgins has retired from the Smithsonian Institution, but he’s still goggling at meiofauna — a complex group of animals found in most Earthly environments.

Indeed, a handful of wet sand could contain more biological diversity than a whole rain forest, Higgins says.

In the course of peering through countless microscopes, Higgins has discovered hundreds of species. With Danish biologist Reinhardt Kristensen, he found an entire phylum, called Loricifera.

Phyla are the broadest categories of organisms, based on structure, and according to the International Association of Meiobenthologists, “The majority of recognized phyla have meiofaunal representatives. Currently, 20 phyla considered to be meiofaunal from the 34 recognized phyla of the Kingdom Animalia. Out of these 20 phyla, five are exclusively meiofaunal in size.”

Photo: Giulio Melone, department of biology, Milan University.

A bdelloid (a type of meiofauna) shrinks when it undergoes anhydrobiosis. The dormant, dehydrated bdelloid has greater resistance to environmental stress but is ready to spring back to the active form in conducive conditions.

Meiofauna living between grains of sand have made some fancy adaptations to their harsh environment. Some have hooks on their feet, used to grab the sand. Others have hooked mouthparts, also useful for locomotion.

Beyond freeze-dried

To survive a difficult environment, meiofauna called tartigrades have evolved an amazing adaptation called “anhydrobiosis.” In this form of suspended animation, the animals replace water in their cell membranes with sugar, protecting the membrane from destruction through radiation and freezing. Microorganisms die when their cell membrane ruptures.

During anhydrobiosis, organisms are rather like plant seeds or bacterial spores, Higgins explains. “They can dry up for 100 years, and be rewetted, and come right back to active metabolism.”

Fun is fun. But what is the practical importance of studying stuff that can hardly be seen, doesn’t seem to cause disease, and is — at least to some — utterly ugly?

In other word, who cares about microscopic beach crud?

Meet the beach-cleaning crew

Anybody who likes to hang on the sand should be interested, Higgins says. “This is the system that helps keep our beaches clean.” Plankton, bacteria, all sorts of dead material is continually washing ashore, and a lot of people love to sit on beaches.

There’s a public-health angle here. Hookworms occur on beaches where dogs defecate, but meiofauna may consume hookworms, along with other nematodes. “So if we upset that, we could upset beach cleanliness,” Higgins says.

Higgins notes that meiofauna comprise a basic part of the food web, and disturbing them could have unforeseen consequences for the entire system.

Still, it’s hard to escape the notion that most of the motivation here is the pure scientific urge to discover, to classify, to understand. Meiofauna, Higgins notes, were seen under the microscope Anton van Leeuwenhoek invented in 1683.

The key to finding these things, Higgins indicates, in patience, technology, curiosity — and institutional support. “If you stare through a microscope for hour after hour, you have a chance of finding these things, but if you need to get out a certain number of papers each year, you have to take shortcuts and you won’t find as much.”

Fantastic freak show

If you’ve hung around a big-city park, you may think that pigeons are countless — or uncountable. But according to scientists from New Zealand, pigeons now join the short list of animals that can count — or at least, can places images containing two countable items in numerical order.

It’s blue news for those who think only humans deserve human capacities. From empathy and altruism to murder and war, animals seem to have caught on to some of our best — and worst — tricks.

Now Damian Scarf, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Otago, with his colleagues, has taught three pigeons to order pairs of numbers in the range from one through nine.

This is not exactly counting, but it certainly is a sign of numerical awareness in birds.

More important, the researchers have taught these retired racing pigeons the concept of smaller-to-larger, Scarf says. “Previously, this number abstraction was only known in primates, and now we have shown that it is not unique to primates.”

Serious screen-time serves science

The experiment began with a year-long training period, during which the birds were shown pairs of images, each containing one, two or three countable items. If the birds pecked at both images, smaller number first, they were rewarded with some wheat. (Although the images never contained a numeral, we refer to the “number” they contain for brevity.)

To prevent the birds from focusing on color, shape or other non-numerical details, the images showed a range of items, so that the only correct answer would reflect their number rather than other distinctions.

“The training time reflects how difficult it is for them to abstract,” Scarf says. “It’s such a foreign situation, number is not the first port of call when presented with a stimulus to discriminate. That’s why we had so many shapes, colors, surface areas.”

Even if the birds originally made their judgments based on color, “we pushed them to use a different strategy, to break away from that. Number is not the default discrimination mechanism” for pigeons, says Scarf, who worked under advisor Michael Colombo of Otago.

A genius for abstraction?

This does not mean that the birds are counting, says Scarf. “It’s more a fuzzy representation in the brain of what ‘three’ is. We can apply this verbal label to three, but they cannot. Pigeons, and animals in general, don’t have a definite idea of a number, that’s why they don’t perform perfectly, and why we see the distance effect.”

When the numbers on the test pair are further apart, Scarf found, “the fuzziness overlaps a little less.”

A greater distance between the numbers produced a quicker response and greater accuracy. For adjacent numbers, like four and five, the birds scored about 66 percent accuracy, compared to more than 95 percent for numbers separated by at least six. Once the difference rose to at least three, the pigeons did as well as monkeys in a path-breaking 1998 study that opened the field of numerical “thinking” in animals.

Scarf stresses that the birds were not just regurgitating what they had learned, but were learning numerical rules. “The goal was to find out whether they could acquire an abstract rule. We were just training for one through three, but they learned some flexibility, an abstract, ascending rule for ordering numbers” that would apply to other numbers on the screen.

Rooted in evolution, but where?

Being able to recognize that one thing is more numerous than another could help an animal survive, Scarf says. “When food is available in multiple places, an animal has to develop an optimal strategy for figuring out where the most food is, and I think we have subverted that capacity for this task.”

Where this capacity arose is anybody’s guess at this point. The evolutionary lineage of mammals and birds divided about 300 million year ago, Scarf says. “If this derived from a common ancestor, it’s very old. It’s also possible that primates and birds have evolved this independently.”

“I do think it’s important, just as our study of mirror self-recognition in monkeys, from the fundamental standpoint of how these abilities come about,” says Luis Populin, a professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has found that, under certain conditions, monkeys can recognize themselves in a mirror. “It’s very nice and is yet another step toward understanding how our cognitive functions develop.”

You have to hand it to these birds, which have set a new standard for avian aptitude. “The new part is the idea that this abstraction of numbers is not tied to training,” says Scarf. “Most numerical tests with animals involve training and testing with the same numbers, but we were training with a limited set of numbers and testing them with numbers outside the range. They learned an abstract rule, and that’s what makes this study unique.”

Could good come from a wave of poisonings eight decades ago? Yes, argues Deborah Blum, in a quick, entertaining read that, for better not worse, does not teach exactly what the title promises.

Rather than a handbook for agents of arsenic or quaffers of chloroform, the book instead shows how a scientific establishment grew up to detect poison and deter poisoners.

Writing in the daily-paper style she honed while writing for newspapers, Blum, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is deft, direct and matter of-fact. Introducing an outbreak of arsenic poisoning in 1922 (60 cases, six deaths), she writes, “According to police reports, on July 31 Lillian ordered a tongue sandwich, coffee and a slice of huckleberry pie. It was the pie that killed her.”

Blum then gives as much detail as you’d want on the gory steps of an arsenic-poisoning autopsy, and ends: Lillian’s poisoner “walked away.”

The ’20s became a heyday of poisoning, with chloroform and mercury joining arsenic in the anti-medicine chest. It was a time when even over-the-counter medicines contained a bewildering array of poisons, including thallium and radium.

New York City in the 1920s saw the rise of the professional medical examiner to replace a corrupt coroner, and Blum’s hero is the City’s exemplary examiner, Charles Norris, a public servant dedicated to preventing poisoning and prosecuting poisoners, in addition to solving common crimes.

In what would seem a paranoid fantasy rather than a fact of history, thousands of those poisonings were the inevitable consequence of a federal campaign to enforce Prohibition — the ban on drinking ethyl alcohol that lasted from 1920 until 1933. The feds coerced manufacturers to make industrial alcohol undrinkable — or deadly — by adding toxic compounds like acetone, benzene, mercury, chloroform, formaldehyde, and the old standby, wood alcohol.

In 1926, toxic alcohol killed 400 in New York City.

If the idea of your government poisoning your drink is, well, unpalatable, you cannot not like the tales of skunky characters and their poisoning campaigns. But I would have appreciated more coverage of workplace poisoning.

Blum does deal with lead at a Standard Oil refinery, and radium, used to illuminate watch dials. But during her period of interest, pioneers in industrial hygiene were revealing the occupational carnage due, for example, to the neurotoxin carbon disulfide, used to make rayon. And the same fight against poisoning that occupied the medical examiners was also being pursued by industrial-hygiene crusaders like Alice Hamilton.

Still, Blum has written a painless history that both recounts the roots of forensic science and yet retains the momentum of “you were there” newspaper stories. Count on her for a nice kicker to close a section and keep you turning pages:

“It was a rough beginning, a bloody one, and a messy one, but he had to start somewhere.”

“That meant the investigation was back where it had started, with two dead bodies and no good answers.”

If you dig skullduggery in general or CSI in particular, here’s your read.

– David J. Tenenbaum

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”