Health & Science

When do-gooders go bad

It’s a familiar story: A moralistic preacher or respected politician gets caught indulging in extramarital pursuits or dipping into funds that don’t belong to him. Why is such hypocrisy so common? A new study finds that people who think of themselves as highly moral can become the worst cheats, because they think their virtue entitles them to flout the rules that govern common sinners. “When people have a strong moral identity, their behavior tends to go to the extremes,” study author Scott Reynolds of the University of Washington tells LiveScience.com. In a survey of 290 workplace managers and 230 college students, Reynolds found that some of the subjects who described themselves as exceptionally moral were very frank in admitting that for them, their good intentions justified cutting ethical corners. People in this category were far more likely to cheat on tests, pad their expense accounts, steal, and lie, according to their own accounts of their behavior. Their breaches of ethics, moreover, were often major and frequent. Since these supposed do-gooders tell themselves they’re entitled to special rewards for their piety and their virtue, Reynolds says, “they do it in spades.”

Land of the superbugs

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If bugs, spiders, and scorpions scare you, you should be glad you weren’t around 390 million years ago. Rivers, lakes, and marshes of that era were stalked by predatory scorpions the size of a car, say British paleontologists who found part of one such monster’s claw in an ancient swamp in Germany. This ancestor of today’s scorpions and spiders had giant claws, like a crab, and was 8 feet long—the biggest bug ever discovered. The scorpion preyed on fish and other giant bugs, scientists say, lying in wait and attacking with their claws. “These things would tear their prey to shreds and then eat the little pieces,” paleontologist Simon Braddy tells the Associated Press. The discovery indicates that giant millipedes, cockroaches, dragonflies, and other bugs were commonplace during this period in Earth’s history, when arthropods—most of which “inhale” through their skin—thrived in the atmosphere’s higher oxygen levels. These superbugs grew to such enormous sizes because they needed to compete with one another for food. “We never realized until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were,” Braddy says. The giant bugs dominated aquatic environments until giant fish with huge jaws and teeth evolved and wiped them out.

Getting randy after 55

Young people usually think that sex is only for the young. Not so. Women over 55, several new surveys have found, are having sex more frequently than women in their 30s—and they’re enjoying it more, too. Many women who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s learned to be comfortable with their sexuality, and continue to take good care of their bodies, Massachusetts sex therapist Aline Zoldbrod tells USA Today. “I’m 59, and I look very different from my mother at that age,” she says. “I still see myself as a sexual person.” New surveys on the sex lives of women ranging from their 30s to their 70s have found that the younger women are often so preoccupied with child-rearing, work, and other responsibilities that sex falls far down the list of priorities. But after their children leave the nest, today’s older women put much more thought and effort into having a satisfying sex life with their husbands or partners. “There’s more permission in society for my generation to be sexual,” Zoldbrod says. That permission, a University of Chicago study found, extends into what previous generations considered “old age”—the 60s and 70s.

Great art isn’t subjective

Beauty is not strictly in the eye of the beholder, a new study says. Great works of art appear to follow rules of proportion and design that have universal appeal, at least in Western culture. Italian neuroscientists showed images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures by the likes of Michelangelo and da Vinci to 14 volunteers with no artistic training—some of whom had never been to a museum. Some of the images were altered so that the original proportions of the sculptures were slightly modified. When subjects viewed the pictures of the original sculp tures, scans of their brains showed a strong emotional response; they were clearly moved. There was much less response to the sculptures with subtle changes in proportion. “We were very surprised that very small modifications to images of the sculptures led to very strong modifications in brain activity,” researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti tells LiveScience.com. He believes that the human brain may have a special attraction to images that demonstrate the “golden ratio,” an eye-pleasing proportion of 1-to-0.618 that shows up again and again in art and nature. This ratio can be found in a nautilus shell and spiral galaxies, and in Michelangelo’s Pietá and the Pyramids. When the brain sees these magical proportions, Rizzolatti says, it interprets them as evidence of great beauty.