Health & Science

Why so many people have quit smoking

Most people start smoking in response to social pressure—to look cool, to be like friends or movie stars. Now that millions have given up the nasty habit, says a new study, it’s clear that the decision to quit is also largely the function of peer pressure. When Harvard researcher Dr. Nicholas Christakis mapped smokers by their social circles, he noticed a pattern. Rather than giving up tobacco one by one, smokers dropped off the map in groups. “It’s not like one little star turning off at a time,” Christakis tells The New York Times. “Whole constellations are blinking off at once.” Peer pressure to quit the nicotine addiction, he says, is just as strong as the pressure to start smoking. When a smoker finds himself smoking alone out on the company doorstep, quitting becomes more and more attractive. Christakis says the findings point to the power of social networks on human behavior; we’d all like to think of ourselves as individuals, but, in fact, we often act like birds in a flock. “If a bird three birds over starts flying to the right, you end up flying to the right, too,” he says. Only 21 percent of Americans now smoke, down from 45 percent in 1971. Persuading the remaining 45 million smokers in the U.S. to quit may be difficult, the study suggests, because they tend to belong to lower-income groups in which there is little social pressure to quit.

Do nanotubes cause cancer?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Carbon nanotubes, the microscopic, high-tech fibers now widely being used in consumer products such as bikes and tennis rackets, can cause the same types of cancerous lesions as asbestos, a new study has found. Engineers have enthusiastically embraced the use of nanotubes in electronics and other products because the fibers stick together in a network that is superstrong and superlight. But when a team of British and American researchers injected the tiny fibers into the lung tissue of mice, the animals’ tissue responded in the same way it does to asbestos fibers. Cells that fight infection tried to engulf and digest the tubes, which were too long, so the cells split open and died, causing inflammation. This kind of reaction is known to lead to a lung cancer called mesothelioma in patients who have inhaled asbestos fibers. In the real world, there’s no evidence that these fibers are causing the mesothelioma effect. But researchers are urging that manufacturers use safeguards when working with carbon nanotubes—the same safeguards already established for the use of asbestos. “The good news is that nanotubes are probably not very ‘dirty,’” study author Ken Donaldson tells New Scientist. “They are quite highly charged and stick together, so they don’t seem to get airborne easily.”

Squeaky voices are more sexy

A woman’s voice becomes more attractive, to both men and women, when she is at the most fertile point in her monthly cycle, says New Scientist. Researchers at the State University of New York recorded female volunteers counting from one to 10 at various points in their menstrual cycles, then asked a panel of men and women to listen to the tapes and rate the voices’ sexiness. “The results showed a significant increase in voice attractiveness ratings as the risk of conception increased across the menstrual cycle,” said the researchers in the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior. “Growing evidence points to the impact of hormones on the larynx as being the source of these changes.” Separate studies have found that women’s voices become more high-pitched at times of peak fertility, and that men are more attracted to high-pitched voices.

Catching a star’s death throes

By lucky chance, astronomers were peering at a galaxy 88 million light-years away when they witnessed the initial blast of a star exploding into a supernova—the first time that rare stellar event has been seen as it happened. The blast was discovered by two astronomers who live together in a romantic relationship. Alicia Soderberg and Edo Berger of Princeton were just finishing up dinner when they decided to take a look at the data coming in from NASA’s Swift spacecraft. “There was nothing interesting on the TV,” Berger tells the Los Angeles Times. “I decided to take a quick look at the observation.” The telescope’s X-ray detector was picking up an extremely intense, five-minute burst of radiation, which signaled that a star had run out of nuclear fuel, was collapsing under its own gravity, and then exploding outward. Soderberg says she was so excited by the discovery that “I didn’t sleep for a week.” The couple’s paper has now been published in Nature, and they’ll be married next year.

How to close a sale

To maximize your chances of coming out on top in a negotiation, subtly mimic your opponent’s mannerisms. New research suggests that this tactic is among the most powerful forms of persuasion in the salesman’s toolbox, says New Scientist. As part of a study in France, 166 students took part in a role-play experiment involving buying and selling: 67 percent of sellers who mimicked the person they were targeting achieved a sale, as opposed to just 12.5 percent of those who did not mimic the person. But even the second group may have been subconsciously mimicking their opposite numbers, so to guard against this possibility, researchers at Stanford University, in a different experiment, used computer-generated “sellers” instead of humans. Some of these virtual-reality “salespeople” were programmed simply to move in a human-like way; the rest to mimic their adversaries’ head movements, with a four-second delay. Again, the mimics had a far higher hit rate than the non-mimics. But be warned: If your mimicry is detected, it can backfire, so be subtle.