So how did we evolve to be so freakishly helpful?

A new analysis of the Hadza people in Tanzania, who live as hunter-gatherers, sheds some light.

The researchers asked two questions of Hadza individuals:

1: Who do you like to camp with?

2: I’m giving you some honey sticks; who will you share with?

They got a ton of information about the networks that humans form. But here’s the nugget that sheds light on how cooperative behavior can rule the day: Birds of a feather stick together.

Cooperative people wanted to camp with other cooperative people; and not-so-sharey people wanted to camp with not-so-sharey people.

The surprise is that not-so-sharey people don’t seem inclined to exploit sharers. They stick with their own kind, where the expectations of behavior are similar to their own. Humans end up in segregated clumps.

OK, but… why does cooperation eventually win out?

Well, rain down hardship on both camps — flood, famine, plague, what have you. Which camp is more likely to survive? The camp full of people who habitually help each other, or the camp where people hang out together but watch out for their own good?

Perhaps, perhaps, we are as cooperative as we are (far more than most animals) for this reason: While there’s strength in numbers, there’s even more strength in numbers working together.

Apparently, the people of Scotland are famously toothless. They are also famously prone to heart and circulation disease. So they seemed ideal for figuring out what the connection might be.

First they counted the teeth in over 12,000 mouths. Here are things that predicted a tooth shortage:

Age, obesity, femaleness, poorness, singleness, smoking, sedentariness, NOT DRINKING MUCH ALCOHOL, obesity, generally lousy health, diabetes, high blood pressure, and a measure of inflammation.

(I realize that’s agrammatical, but it’s intuitively just fine.)

The scientists followed up a few years later to see who had kacked.

So, does your tooth count predict your death?

Yes. Particularly hazardous is edentulousness. Not familiar with that? Toothlessness. Total toothlessness. The edentulous Scots, of whom there are hordes, faced a triple risk of kacking from a stroke. And that’s after controlling for all those risk factors above.

But even those with some real teeth and some dentures were in trouble.

There’s something about teeth that has a BIG effect on your blood, and how likely it is to form a clot and suffocate your brain.

Notable and quotable: “In Scotland due to very high levels of dental caries, the complete removal of all natural teeth was a relatively common treatment for young adults.”

WTF, Scotland? Sugar, say many.

The fiends put their heads — or at least their cells — together two miles inland from Monterey Bay. In Pinto Lake, for reasons unknown, blue-green algae multiplied, octupled, and bloomed. They took full control of the lake, but were not satisfied.

On the heels of a heavy rain, presumably, they spilled out into river and swarmed downstream to the Bay. They constituted a blue-green tide, much like a red one.

Filter feeding animals in the Bay set about rounding up the scum. Pumping water day and night, they trapped and incarcerated the rogues. They did a really good job.

But nobody warned the otters that their food had become pods of poison.

This explains why the dead otters were yellow inside: The criminals kill by liver damage. Dogs around Lake Pinto also fall victim to the cyanobacteria.

I’d say “string ‘em up,” but they naturally come in strings.

As the authors note, medical science treats humans one disease at a time. Perhaps this compartmentalized approach came about in the Olden Days, when people croaked shortly after developing their first chronic morbidity. (Chronic = ongoing. Morbidity = disease.) Docs didn’t have many opportunities to observe the inexorable disintegration of multiple systems.

The Argyle Guy, a pharmacist, is all too familiar with this piece-meal approach to fixing patients: Heart Doc prescribes Drug A, while Foot Doc prescribes Drug B, and the two drugs don’t work together.

So this team looked for the patterns of “multiple morbidity” in a nearly 200,000 people. They wanted to know if any particular disease predicted the presence of additional conditions.

Sure they do!

They found one category with a particularly strong clustering effect: Stroke tends to keep company with narrowing arteries, kidney failure, and congestive heart failure.

Two other categories showed weaker clustering:

High blood pressure clumps with faulty fat metabolism, Type 2 Diabetes, and heart arrhythmia.

Obesity hangs out with a big bunch of comorbidities, including osteoporosis, deafness and hearing loss, cancer, arthritis, enlarged prostate, emphysema, bronchitis, COPD, hardening of the arteries, glaucoma, liver disease, dementia and delusions, skin ulcer, heart valve disease, and Parkinson’s. That’s the jackpot category, I guess — the kitchen sink collection.

Of the chronic diseases they measured, a few ended up in the trash can. Anxiety, asthma, thyroid disease, schizophrenia, and mood psychoses like bipolar disorder, PTSD, OCD, seemed to be more solitary morbidities.

This is the only cluster that occurs in young people. Well, younger — 30s. But if that’s your cohort, don’t despair. There’s plenty of time to add to your collection.

Fun as it is to identify your personal category of decrepitude, the importance of this study is that it hints at underlying factors in disorders we’ve thought of isolated, solitary, not part of a bigger system.

House analogy: If a window cracks; and then a wall develops a bulge; and then rain leaks through the roof; you can: Either rush around patching the individual systems; or go into the basement and see if the foundation has cracked.

This gang measured head circumference, height, and IQ in about 1500 twins, hoping to determine the role genes play in body and brain. They found that the three elements vary together — that whatever genes contribute to a tall body and a big skull also contribute to a slightly higher IQ. Yay!

This line of inquiry — hat size and smarts — hasn’t always turned up clear results. It has often, however, turned up controversy. Various ne’r-do-wells have tried to use anthropometrics to prove that people from one region are superior to than those from another.

That line of attack makes a nice demonstration that being smart and being useful aren’t the same thing.

I frankly have wondered about the rationale for studying intelligence in humans. Theoretically discoveries could be applied to people with serious thinking disorders such as schizophrenia, amnesia, or various forms of mental retardation. Some day. Maybe.

But if the goal is to improve the human experience as a whole, I would like to nominate kindness and conscientiousness as more productive traits to probe.

And for what it’s worth, I’m a lumbering Amazon with a colossal noggin.

This comes from a “meta analysis” of research on dominant males in a variety of monkey and ape species. By looking a numerous papers, researchers can sometimes see a trend that doesn’t show up in a single research project or experiment.

They were hunting for the payoff that creates dominance hierarchies in the first place. Presumably, if you’re going to fight your way to the top, there’s a prize up there. Presumably that prize is the right to mate with more females, and to eat the best food.

Surprisingly, the individual investigations have been unclear: Some say yes; others say… uh…

That’s surprising because various studies have found that winning the rat race is expensive for primates, in terms of stress. Males who fight for the throne suffer not only physical wounds, but chemical ones as well. Females, based on baboon research, actually raise more offspring if they have good friends than if they’re dominant.

But there has to be a payoff for all that stress and struggle.

The trend that emerged from 94 studies: Males do, in fact, get better access to uteruses in exchange for their struggles. But if it takes 94 studies to make this clear, then the advantage is small.

Which means the advantage to not being dominant is bigger than you’d think: Somewhat fewer kids; but no biting, no fighting, no stress.

This reminds me of drifter males in orangutans: They skip the final transition into fat-faced masculinity, and all the battles that ensue. They’re successful breeders because they pass for females — and then mate with them. WINNING!

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. There’s more than one route to the uterus. There’s a reason that your personal quirks are still circulating in the human gene pool.

Background: The eye’s pupil regulates how much light strikes the retina at the back of the eye. Too much light burns out the rods and cones. Too little leaves them unstimulated, and leaves you blind. Scientists believed the pupil constricted automatically, reflexively, in response to a photon blizzard, to protect the retina.

This experiment says there’s more to it.

The researchers monitored people’s pupils as they looked at an optical illusion. The illusion created the appearance of a bright light where there was none. The illusion was caused by the contrast between dark and light areas of a pattern.

And the brain was fooled. And the reflex was outed. The pupil constricts in response to contrast, or relative brightness.

Hahahah! Stupid pupil! Don’t believe everything the brain tells you! You might have been better off as an autonomous organ, instead of handing over operations to the brain!

So that’s it. It’s a bit arcane, but illusions are always fun. See?

Oh, my! Looking to credit this image, I ended up at site of its creator, one Akiyoshi Kitaoka. Run, don’t walk, to his web page, where your brain will be twisted, tortured, and toyed with in an embarrassing manner!

Researchers asked volunteers to record three types of social interactions for a week: positive; negative; competitive. They also subjected them to stressful conditions in the laboratory.

And they measured the inflammatory compounds circulating in these people.

Uh-oh. People with the most negative and competitive interactions were also producing the highest levels of inflammatory molecules.

Inflammation is the new bogeyman. It’s been linked with everything from heart disease to cancer. It’s best to avoid it. It’s best to sit like the Buddha under a tree and breathe deeply. It’s best to keep your cool.

Yup, someone has found paint spatter, powdered ochre in liquid form, spilled on the floor of a Dutch cave. Its age? Perhaps three times the number of eons that sapiens has been trashing Europe: 200,000 to 250,000 years. That gets into the question of the actual identity of the hominid who spilled the red paint. It’s as old any other ochre discovery. Anywhere. By any hominid, hunky or otherwise.

So perhaps it’s safe now for archeologists to forget about only Homo sapiens being all smarty and arty, and just assume any hominid with half a brain was playing around with any material that made pretty colors. Maybe that rules out Lucy, pea-brain that she was? Who knows?

I, personally, am going to assume that curiosity is the driving force behind early uses of color; and that any animal blessed with curiosity and a stone that turns bright red or white or black when you scratch it on something will commence doodling.

Which reminds me of the “Five Best Toys of All Time” essay that traveled the internets a few weeks ago.

On the list was: Dirt, and its mud derivative. No child can resist mud. Raise your hand if you’ve never played with mud, never used a muddy finger to make a mark on the ground, your leg, your face. I submit that finger painting is as universally “hominid” as the liking for candy corn.

What? Where’s the proof that ancient hominids liked candy corn? Hey, I’m part Neanderthal, and I love the stuff.

For more rigorous reporting on this, and any anthropology, please do yourself a giant favor and bookmark John Hawks blog at: http://www.johnhawks.net The specific entry on this find is here.

I started looking for research after the big-ass headline this week: SPANKING MAY MAKE KIDS STUPID. AND MEAN.

Here’s one of the first things I found: a page dedicated to dedicated child-ass-whackers. It doesn’t merely advocate spanking children. It seems particularly excited about the idea of spanking children’s bare butts.

It also implies that the worldwide renouncement of corporal punishment is a commie-anti-Jesus-loony-left-anti-family plot.

It also offers access to free paddles, and a collection of “spanking art.” Am I being a Pilgrim here, or is this starting to sound a little… um… I can’t quite say it.

But have a look at “Grandfather Prepares Peter for Corporal Punishment,” and let me know what you make of Grandfather’s intent. Is a cigar always… never mind. What the HELL is going on with Grandfather’s trousers… never mind. I’m sure the TOTALLY TERRIFYING people at CorPun (World Corporal Punishment Research) mean no har… no, actually I’m not so sure.

For what it’s worth, neither spanking nor sexual abuse has shown to be advantageous to a child’s psychological or social development. Au contraire. Researchers have already found that childhood spanking or slapping increases the odds of a person suffering anxiety disorders, alcohol problems, aggression, sexual dysfunction, and “externalizing disorders.”

(Those include ADHD, Oppositional-Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Bipolar Disorder.)

Science is pretty clear that unpredictable and unavoidable violence is bad for any animal’s brain. It’s stressful, which causes a unique and corrosive cascade of biological events in the brain. And it’s educational, seeming to wire a young brain to survive in an environment that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, so to speak.

Not the brain I’d want for my kid.

The study tracked the mating behavior of captive Rhesus macaques. By manipulating which males were in sight of the group, scholars could test the circumstances under which females and low-ranking males would hit on each other.

Both sexes were more likely to hook up if the alpha male was not in view; and they also played it cool if a few other high-ranking males were around.

This “audience effect,” the authors presume, evolved to prevent violent interactions when high ranking males discovered their inferiors in the act of uterus poaching.

I would add that it probably evolved as a means for females to collect the sperm they judge ideal for their offspring — which is not always the sperm of the meanest male.

Anyway, the audience effect should apply to humans as well. And sure enough, the average human pair displays a tremendous degree of privacy about their mating.

Whether darkness is an independent predictor of human mating behavior I cannot say, however. In many cultures, daytime is consumed with chores and child care, which may make nighttime the default “right time.” In cultures with less structured economies, the mating hours may be less structured as well.

This study shows that, subconsciously, women go into a mimicry mode when they sit down to dine with an unfamiliar woman. They are much more likely to take a bite of food within five seconds of their companion than outside of that window.

The same results have already been found with drinking, even among people watching a movie in which characters drink: Watching another person drink causes you to drink.

The obvious question is: Why?

The authors believe we subconsciously try to build a bond of similarity with the companion:

See? I’m doing everything you do!

And consciously, we endeavor to appear normal to the companion: Under-eaters are not liked in such experiments; and overeaters are seen as gluttons.

As the meal progresses, the mimicry rate drops. Perhaps we know pretty quickly if we’ve been accepted or rejected, or if we simply care more about the ribeye steak than the person watching us eat it.

Well, there are only so many trees in the cold, nasty north. And a guy who doesn’t stake out a goodly patch of them will not win the heart of a girl.

So the males essentially race each other north in order to stake an attractive claim. The females leave when it suits them and when insects will be popping along the route.

When they arrive, the strongest, most determined males will advertise their environs and win the girls:

Check out this forsythia — so dense, right? And look: private pond.

Is there a human example of protandry? I can’t think of one off hand, and that’s partly because my hand is off: I bit off a hangnail last night, and am now off to the antibiotic store because the finger is fat, red, hot, and quite sore. Crap.

Reports of nodding syndrome first trickled out of eastern Africa in the 1960s. But a recent cluster of cases in southern Sudan has given the disorder a home on the globe. Thousands of kids from ages 5 to 15 are thought to be infected, or affected, or afflicted — the cause is a Total Mystery. So is the real number of kids affected.

The disease progression is not. A child begins “nodding,” [video] looking like she’s fighting to stay awake. The nodding may be accompanied by seizures.

Oddly, so oddly, seizures are most commonly triggered by feeling cold, and by the anticipation of eating — by seeing food. Curiously, they are not triggered by foods the child doesn’t recognize, like chocolate.

[Wild speculation alert:] So perhaps a brain circuit involved in motivating us to move toward food and other necessities is involved. If chocolate isn’t recognized as food, the motivation circuit will not activate.

This puts me in mind of the “mind control” gang of parasites:

Toxoplasma gondii causes a rat or mouse brain to be attracted to cat pee, which increases the parasite’s odds of being returned to its preferred host for a mating bout.

Larvae of some phorid flies eat enough of their host-ant’s brain that the ant’s body acts only as a living incubator.

Euhaplorchis Californiensis begins life as an egg in bird crap dropped in the water. It eventually enters a killifish through the gills, migrates to the brain, and causes the fish to surface and flap around until it’s eaten by… a bird.

You get the idea: Some parasites remodel the brain, and behavior, of their hosts to suit their own ends.

BUT nobody knows what causes nodding disease. Hypotheses include: exposure to wartime chemicals; exposure to the river blindness parasite; eating seeds treated with pesticides; eating monkeys; [add your guess here].

Nobody also knows: how long a kid typically lives after the syndrome sets in. Since the seizures and nodding start with feeding and stop when feeding stops, kids tend not to eat. The seizures can also result in falling, and serious injuries. The brain slowly shuts down. An MRI study of 10 kids found no smoking gun; EEG detected seizures in some brains. The guesstimate is three years.

You gotta admire the peeps who go study nodding kids, huh? It’s not a disease you’d want to bring back to your own offspring.

Nothing coats a piece of food — from toast to roast — with mutagenic chemicals quite like a cooking fire. And mutagens are chemicals that mutate your DNA. Roughly one trillion studies now suggest a link between modern-day meat consumption and prostate cancer, so… uh… DUH!

Now, scientists cannot ascertain the pedigree of this particular mummy, “M1.” But regular Working Joe Egyptians were not bundled up in fancy mummy gear when they died. So Mr. M1 Uppercrusty probably had access to plenty of roasted meat, in addition to butter, cheese, and other “modern” killers.

It’s also instructive that the previous “oldest” case of prostate cancer was found up the butt of another rich dude, a 2,700 year old king from now-Russia. Rich people have always had the best access to the carcinogenic “Western Diet” of meat and fat. As has any culture that routinely cooks animals over fire.

And salt: Oldy-time people also preserved fish, meat, and vegetables with salt, since they  lacked ice and refrigerators. Salt: chemical food modifier. Look it up.

And smoke. I don’t know if smoking meat was as common as salting in salt-rich Egypt, but saturating a piece of meat with combustion chemicals is also a very old means of saving food for later.

We already know that roughly one trillion well-off Egyptian mummies are hiding atherosclerosis: hardening arteries, “rich man’s disease.” So, no. Just plain no. Oh, Mighty Isis, there certainly were modified foods in ancient Egypt.

These people knew how to preserve entire, soggy human bodies. They sure as sh*t knew how to preserve food.

Typical broiler barns (and cage free laying hen barns) consist of a bazillion chickens on a flat floor, with free access to food and water.

Typical broilers, aka chickens, aka birds, flock to the edges of this pen. Why? Same reason Mafiosos sit with their back to the wall: The fewer angles of approach your enemies have, the better your odds of seeing them.

All prey-type animals can relate to this. It’s why “edge habitat” is so popular: The deer who grazes at the edge of the field has quick access to the woods if wolves or humans turn up. Watch your backyard squirrels and birds for similar behavior: They venture into the “fields” but quickly return to an edge, or a tree, or another shelter.

Anyway, when all the chickens try to get to the walls at the same time, they get overheated and they don’t walk enough to be healthy, and they peck each other out of frustration. It’s like me at the Mall.

So experimenters added an attractive element to the middle of the cage: perches. The perches were low, just 10 cm off the floor, since these birds are made clumsy by their own speedy growth. But they helped.

Heaven only knows what perching does to a bird’s brain. The wrapping of those toes around an object may telegraph the message that the bird is within the protection of tree branches. It may signal that the bird is safe from foxes. It may just exercise muscles that have lain unused.

Whatever the effect on a chicken’s brain, its behavior changes for the better. Animals with access to perches were less aggressive, a sign of inner peace and tranquility. And although the birds ate less, they grew comparably to birds in typical cages. Perhaps their lower stress level allowed more calories to go into growing.

I expect this is the same reason you now find benches and chairs in the Mall: By granting an animal a reprieve from banging into other animals, you improve its tolerance for the environment.

LINGO: Free-range animals have access to outdoors. Cage-free animals are confined to giant pens, instead of torturously tiny cages.

This correlation was found in seals recently: The more old pesticide they had stored in their blubber, the lower their D levels. Uh oh. Low Vitamin D itself correlates with various nasty stuff like cancer, infections, and diabetes — in humans. Maybe seals, too.

So these folks checked out the human situation.

Back to the first question: Organochlorine pesticides are best represented by dear, old DDT. Banned long ago in this great nation, DDT is so resistant* to breaking down that it, and its chemical descendants*, continues to circulate in living things. Because it accumulates in fat, it is stored securely in bodies that consume it. Seals, who eat a billion oily fish, end up with all the DDT (and other organochlorines and persistent* organic pollutants [POPs]). Polar bears, and we, at the top of the food chain, are the ultimate consumers of POPs.

So that’s how the chemicals are still around, and still in everybody’s body.

How do they interact with Vitamin D? Good freakin’ question.

And what to do about it? Eat more Vitamin D? Who knows.

To date, the most efficient way to dump your body burden of POPs is — wait, there are two ways:

1: Be eaten by a polar bear, who will absorb all your POPs.

2: Breast feed a baby. This is challenging for men, but see “polar bears,” above. For females, nursing cycles so much fat, and the POPs clinging to it, into her infant that her own body burden is reduced by 69 percent!

*It is a goldarn miracle that anybody ever masters this language of ours. Why on EARTH does one of these words end “ent” and the other “ant”? Is there a rule for this? Did I miss that day in high school English?

Art: Cool painting, eh? Craftily the artist forces your eyes to sweep between the two points of high contrast — the dogs — in which process you stumble across the wraith.

Jeeeee-zuss!

Recap: In 2008 the Wenchuan earthquake smacked the crap out of south central China. A bunch of schools collapsed. Upward of 69,000 people died, and hundreds of thousands were injured. It was traumatic.

Now researchers have used that trauma to investigate the “who’s” and “why’s” of PTSD. Studying adolescents, they characterized the psyhcological burden each kid was carrying:

• Directly impacted by death or loss of house, etc., in the quake

• Post-quake trauma, punishment, illness, conflict, school pressure.

• Coping style — naturally retreats in hard times, or naturally seeks solutions

By 97 points on the Richter Scale, school pressure was the strongest predictor of which kids ended up with PTSD.

SCHOOL IS SO BAD FOR YOU!

There are, to be fair to school, there 99 potential problems with this study.

Prior research says that a naturally active amygdala — which is also active in anxious people — is a damn good predictor of who gets PTSD. So it could be that the same kids who are vulnerable to quake PTSD are also vulnerable to school pressure — that this is a mere correlation.

SCHOOL MAY ONLY BE BAD FOR ANXIOUS PEOPLE!

Another potential confound is that the scientists asked kids to recall the events in their lives, and human memory is notoriously full of crap.

Anyway, China is the right place to study this: Getting good grades early on sets a kid up for future educational opportunities. So academic pressure sets in early and hard in that culture.

But speaking purely anecdotally, based on convos with a number of educator pals, the same pattern is on the rise in the U.S. culture. Starting in high school, kids are pushed and prodded to do more, do better, reach for higher level courses, and start a small nonprofit providing clean water to all the people of Panama, so that they can get into a prestigious college. Where — and this is not anecdotal — a record number of them are suffering anxiety problems, in part because they don’t belong there. They were boosted, shoved, leg-upped, shot-putted, and application-tutored into schools more demanding than they could handle.

Whereupon they encountered their natural fear of heights. They’ve been told for so long that they’re special that most of them (three-quarters) believe they’re above average. This implies either a poor national grasp of math, or of reality. The fact that these kids hit a brick wall of stress when they hit college suggests it’s a realistic self-image that has eluded them.

Anyway, interesting insight into the pressures that come to bear on the human head: Rigorous schooling ain’t always good for your character, apparently — not always the best path to your child’s future.

Unless you want your kid’s future to be spent on anti-anxiety drugs.

Watching my own head, here: Knowing what I know of my culture, I bet most people would still want their kid to get into Harvard even if they knew it could stress the kid into an anxiety disorder. I mean, there’s a pill for that, right? There’s no Harvard pill.

These researchers shot volunteers up with the active ingredient in Psilocybe mushrooms, and MRI-ed them as they hallucinated. (They used seasoned veterans of this form of travel, to avoid a newbie going bonkers in the loud, small MRI tube.)

Most notable to the scientists was a disruption of a circuit of activity between brain regions. This particular circuit, linking a few different “hubs,” has been proposed as the origin of our self awareness: Somehow, feedback and eavesdropping amongst these regions may produce a “self” on which we can reflect.

And under the influence of ‘shrooms, that circuitry stifled itself. The quieter the wires went, the more intense hallucinations the tripper experienced. The technical description of this is: a state of unconstrained cognition.

Unconstrained cognition. Pilgrims aren’t into that.

Art: Study up before you chow down.

This study looked at how that response — a narcissist’s daily defense of his illusions of greatness — effects the body. It kinda hints that being a narcissistic man could cause excessive wear and tear.

Interestingly, the researchers split subjects into people with “healthy” and “unhealthy” narcissism.

Healthy: Self-confident, may enjoy leadership, connects emotionally with others.

Unhealthy: Entitled, exploitative, pursues power with abandon, shifting interests, socially adept but superficial.

“Bad” narcissism is believed to result in part from a childhood where love had to be earned the old-fashioned way: by making a parent look good. A kid lacking a naturally resilient personality is at risk to grow up believing they’re only as good as the people, places and things they can catch and stick to themselves like Girl Scout badges. In that sense, one narcissist can beget another, for generations. Also in that sense, they are like decorator crabs, who stick sea life to their own carapace. Or like caddis fly larvae in their tubes of detritus. Or a dog in the manger.

And woe betide the person who peers too closely at one of those merit badges. To a narcissist, that’s life-threatening. They don’t respond very well to therapy, because they defend their illusory armor with a fury that leads to a game called “musical therapists.” Musical everything, really, since any conflict results in a spirited round of the blame game:

It’s not my fault! You set me up! I deserve better!

Am I belaboring the point?

Anyway, it was only the unhealthy version that correlated with an elevated level of circulating cortisol. Cortisol is a stress indicator, and it’s not the greatest chemical to have coursing through your body. People who stress out too much suffer repercussions of the heart and immune system. Cortisol is a bit like battery acid.

The study found that men with unhealthy narcissism, but not their female counterparts,had unusual cortisol levels. Their levels seemed to run high. Defending those merit badges all day long seemed to wind them right up.

Females, however, didn’t show that effect.

No idea why. Hormones, presumably — chemistry and complicated things. Maybe Dr. Linz has a hypothesis.

Tomorrow: Tulipism. Or maybe Crysanthemism.