Health & Science

The next California quake

It’s virtually a certainty that a major earthquake will hit California sometime in the next two decades, says a new geological report. Using historical earthquake data and seismological assessments, the U.S. Geological Survey has calculated that there’s a 99.7 percent chance the state will be rocked by a big quake—one with a magnitude of 6.7 or higher on the Richter scale—before the year 2028. The forecast “basically guarantees it’s going to happen,” geophysicist Ned Field tells the Associated Press. Though scientists can’t tell whether the temblor will occur next month or in 20 years, they say it is more likely to hit Southern than Northern California. And when the quake does hit, it has a high likelihood of exceeding the magnitude 6.7 disaster that hit the San Fernando Valley in 1994, injuring more than 9,000 people and causing $25 billion worth of damage. The risk of a magnitude 7 shock in California is 94 percent, while the risk of a 7.5 is 46 percent.

The hooker in all of us

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In polite society, the exchange of sexual favors for goods and services is called “prostitution,” and it is held in low regard. But if you don’t see everyday people trading sex for stuff, says a new study, you’re not looking hard enough. Scientists know that in nature, many animals, including penguins and hummingbirds, frequently exchange food and other goods and services for sexual access. So they examined 475 University of Michigan students to see if that behavior is “hard-wired” into the species. They found that even among these relatively affluent young people, a remarkable number had consciously or unconsciously engaged in attempts to trade goods for sex. Twenty-seven percent of men said that they had attempted to buy sex with gifts or services, offering such things as tickets to the big game against Ohio State, study help, a load of laundry, voice lessons, and a Louis Vuitton handbag. Among women, 14 percent said they had attempted to give gifts to men they wanted to sleep with, and 9 percent admitted providing sex in exchange for things. In the general population, researchers said, the percentages are probably much higher.

Is free will a myth?

Most of us believe that we make decisions based on conscious deliberation. But a new study has found that, in fact, our unconscious brains are engineering our decisions milliseconds before our conscious brains can get around to them. The research, which Wired says has culminated in “possibly the most debated single paper in the whole of neuroscience,” questions whether free will is truly a driving force behind our behavior, or whether we’re actually mechanistic creatures in which self-aware consciousness is an illusion. When German brain scientist John-Dylan Haynes performed MRI scans on 14 people, instructing them to decide spontaneously whether to press a button on their left or right, he noticed a flurry of activity in the unconscious brain long before the subject made his or her “spontaneous” decision. The pre-decision usually pointed to the button that the subject ended up choosing. “The outcome of a decision is shaped very strongly by brain activity much earlier than the point in time when you feel to be making a decision,” Haynes tells Science. Our brains, he contends, make decisions based on emotions and rational assessments that we’re not aware of; only later, after the decision is actually made, do we explain our decisions and actions to ourselves.

Why boys like cars

When small boys say they want to play with toy cars, not dolls, it’s often explained away as cultural conditioning or social pressure. But male rhesus monkeys display similar preferences, says New Scientist, even though there’s no social pressure on them. Researchers from the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta gave young rhesus monkeys of both sexes a choice of wheeled toys, such as dump trucks and cars, and rag dolls. The females played with both the dolls and the vehicles, but the males ignored the dolls and spent all their time playing with the cars. The monkeys’ preferences, said researcher Kim Wallen, appear to be innate. “They are not subject to advertising. They are not subject to parental encouragement, they are not subject to peer chastisement.”

There goes the jet stream

The jet stream, a shifting river of high-speed wind that determines much of the weather in the U.S., is slowly shifting northward, new research shows. A shift in the average position of the jet stream, say climate scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, Calif., will make the South and Southwest hotter and drier, while bringing more extreme storms to the Northeast. The climatologists found that the jet stream—a “conveyor belt” of air that usually dips down from Canada and streaks across the central U.S.—has been moving northward at the rate of 1.25 miles a year, perhaps because of global warming. The jet stream drives storm systems and colder air across the country; when it moves away from a region, high pressure and clear, sunny weather tend to predominate. This is exactly what’s happened in the South and Southwest, which have both suffered through prolonged droughts. The jet stream “is the dominant thing that creates weather systems for the United States,” climatologist Ken Caldeira tells the Associated Press. “Look south of where you are and that’s probably a good guess of what your weather may be like in a few decades.”