Proofiness, slightly different than Stephen Colbert's truthiness, is basically finding statistics you want to believe to enhance your confirmation bias.  It was coined by Charles Seife, a long-time science writer who teaches journalism at New York University, because he was outraged at skewed representation on both sides of the aisle, like Al Gore for cherry-picking data about global warming and George Bush for cherry-picking data about how tax refunds would save poor people money.   He wrote a book on it called "Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception" to clobber everyone he found doing it.

If you are worried about big changes in Arctic sea ice, you are not alone - but it is hard to know how much is worth worrying about.  If you are worried, there is some slightly good news - even if we lose half, it will not be a 'point of no return' according to a new study.

Sea ice comes and goes without leaving a record so our knowledge about variations and extent was limited before we had satellite surveillance and observations from airplanes and ships.  Not any more.  Researchers at The Centre for Geogenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen say have developed a method by which it is possible to measure the variations in the ice several millennia back in time.

Psychology does not usually lend itself to live experimentation but the The American Psychological Association intends to change that perception.    They are featuring three public demonstrations of psychological science applications at their annual convention this week.

The goal: to show practical uses of psychological research and how it can be of great service to individuals and society as a whole.

As a teaching assistant for the pilot section of Bio 44Y, I spend Wednesday afternoons accompanying 10 students of field ecology to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Only five miles from the main quad, we’ve battled rattlesnakes and squeezed past poison oak — but the nearest I’ve come to disaster was almost letting a wasp fly into our class van.

When we’re worried about being stung (knock on wood, I’ve so far evaded the experience), we tend to see bees and wasps as the flying enemy, rather than as pollinators, critical to the reproductive life of most of the world’s flowering plants. Of course, the value of pollination isn’t lost on farmers or beekeepers: the former pay the latter to haul hivefuls of bees from crop field to orchard every spring.

As Tiger Woods returns to action this weekend at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, mortal golfers wonder what's inside his head that makes him so much better than us. Well, chances are his brain actually has more gray matter than the average weekend duffer.

Researchers at the University of Zurich have found that expert golfers have a higher volume of the gray-colored, closely packed neuron cell bodies that are known to be involved with muscle control. The good news is that, like Tiger, golfers who start young and commit to years of practice can also grow their brains while their handicaps shrink.

Most of us don’t have a problem attributing emotions to primates, dogs, horses and other vertebrates. But what about invertebrates? That seems less obvious. They have smaller, less complex brains, but is that enough to boldly claim they have no emotions? Of course, studying animal emotions is a precarious business. Studying human emotions has already proven difficult enough, and in animals it is bound to be a lot harder.

One way to go about it, is to take a look at so-called cognitive biases, biases in the processing of information that are typical of negative affective states. An example of this is the pessimistic bias, an increased expectation of punishment, greater attention to potential threats and a tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli as if they were threats.

The quality of TED talks is in free fall and has gotten only worse since the last time I mentioned this. So it is worth to point to a rare good presentation whenever one comes along.

Geoffrey West’s The Surprising Math Of Cities And Corporations shows nicely how other than biological systems, namely cities and corporations, undergo similar evolutionary shaping by natural selection, even though they do not necessarily die or go through generations. Therefore, they can be described - and their development predicted - with simple scaling laws, which physicists like yours truly always find endearing (since that is all we ever really do).

Squids, as I may have mentioned before, are the snacks of the sea. Everyone who can eat them, does. Whales. Sharks. Birds. Other squids. They're swimming tubes of protein with no scales or bones to get in the way, and they're highly abundant. If you're any kind of marine predator, squids are the perfect prey.

But one has to wonder: if squids fuel everything from albacore to albatross, what fuels the squids? Sure, they'll eat each other, but the ouroboros model doesn't really work that well for ecology.

With several articles recently appearing that were based on various aspects of evolutionary psychology, I thought it would be worth taking a closer look.

One of the ironies in examining evolutionary psychology is how many stories we can make up for ourselves without a shred of conclusive evidence, beyond simply sounding plausible.  This doesn't mean that they may not be true, but they certainly can't be considered scientific.  I thought it would be interesting to examine several points regarding evolutionary psychology before going further:

It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it. (1)

My wife and I once saw a rainbow and we discussed how it happened. She listened somewhat patiently for the first few sentences and then told me I was spoiling the magic of the rainbow, like it was somehow less romantic if she knew how it happened.(1)

Men, you are with me on this; she has a man who can make a rainbow for her any time she wants - and will. That's a higher order of romantic, I think you will agree. Plus, I have to defend all rainbow-making men and note that because my rainbow is a special distribution of colors whose reference point is her eyes, no one else will ever see it. Is it literally for her eyes only.