Health & Science

Why Lindsay Lohan is still famous

Ever wonder why certain celebrities can be “famous for being famous”—even if they have no discernible talent, or if their talent has long faded? The answer, a new study suggests, is that people eagerly seize on celebrities like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton because they’re desperate for a common topic to talk about. To better understand the nature of fame, researchers at Stanford University chose to study the relative celebrity of baseball players instead of movie stars or singers, since the players’ achievements on the field could be objectively measured and compared to their stardom. A group of volunteers was given a list of players and their statistics and asked to strike up e-mail conversations with other volunteers. Two-thirds chose to discuss well-known players such as Ken Griffey Jr., even if they were long past their prime, while ignoring obscure players who put up great numbers, like Miguel Cabrera. Even the more baseball-savvy participants gravitated toward the stars. “The very experts who could inform everyone else don’t,” lead researcher Nathanael Fast tells New Scientist. “They actually keep feeding them the information they already know, because that helps establish a connection.” It’s that hunger for connection, researchers say, that creates such huge audiences for stories about Lindsay Lohan’s latest meltdown, Jon and Kate’s marital woes, or Michael Jackson’s death. We know it will serve as social currency, and connect us to a larger national conversation.

Climate change is shrinking sheep

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Polar ice caps aren’t the only things that are shrinking as a result of global warming, says the Los Angeles Times. A new study by U.S. and British researchers found that sheep on a remote Scottish island are gradually getting smaller—dramatic evidence that animals are already evolving to adapt to climate change. Reviewing years of data and employing sophisticated mathematical models, researchers found that the average weight of the sheep has been falling 3 ounces per year since 1985, for a cumulative 5 percent reduction in body size. Scientists say that milder winters in the region allow the grass to grow later in the year; as a result, small lambs that would not have survived earlier winters are living to grow up and reproduce. “Most of the thinking about how climate change is going to affect species is fairly simplistic,” says UC San Diego biologist Kaustuv Roy. “These dynamics are fairly complex.”

A pill to extend life

The search for a magic pill to extend the human life span has a new candidate, says The Wall Street Journal. Researchers at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, found that rapamycin, an antibiotic used in organ transplants, increased the life span of mice by 9 percent to 14 percent—the first case in which a man-made substance extended the life expectancy of normal mammals. Mice given the drug when they were 600 days old—the equivalent of 60 human years—typically lived some 100 days longer than the ones that didn’t get the drug. The drug, say researchers, apparently “retards the mechanisms of aging.” Rapamycin, which suppresses the immune system, would probably be fatal in humans if taken at the equivalent dosage, and scientists strongly warned against taking it at this stage of research. But the results suggest that it may, in fact, be possible to slow down the aging process. Researcher David Harrison says he was startled by the “extreme” response of mice to rapamycin, saying, “No other intervention that I know of has been effective starting so late in life.”

Fighting Alzheimer’s with coffee

Drinking two cups of strong coffee a day may ward off Alzheimer’s—and even help restore the memories of people with the disease. In a study of mice genetically engineered to develop the degenerative brain disorder, researchers from the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and two universities found that a daily dose of caffeine produced a 50 percent reduction of the abnormal protein that proliferates in Alzheimer’s and destroys brain cells, causing dementia. Mice protected by caffeine performed twice as well on memory tests as the mice not dosed with the drug. The protective effect was provided by the equivalent of 500 milligrams of caffeine a day—the amount in two cups of strong coffee (like that served in specialty coffee shops), 14 cups of tea, or 20 cola drinks. “Caffeine could be a viable treatment for established Alzheimer’s disease, not simply a protective strategy,” researcher Dr. Gary Arendash tells the London Daily Telegraph. “It easily enters the brain, and it appears to directly affect the disease process.”

Advantage, Travolta

There’s a sound biological reason why women find it hard to resist a man who can dance, says a new study. German researchers found that men whose dancing was rated by women as skillful and sexy—think John Travolta or Patrick Swayze in their primes—were generally physically stronger and more dominant than those who couldn’t dance, making them more likely to produce healthy offspring. Skillful, self-assured male dancers had other pronounced masculine traits, indicating they had been exposed to more testosterone in the womb, said anthropologist Bernhard Fink. Women assess how men move and dance, Fink tells New Scientist, as a means of weighing their “strength and dominance—traits which eventually signal status.”