Late last year I began to sense that 2010 was going to be busy, and I was right. Having completed my first foray into the Adelaide Fringe with 'Pre-Coital' (and having had a great time) I am now within a couple of weeks of performing as half of Chip and Moo in 'Mr Natural: a Bodybuilding Odyssey' in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. We've been workshopping and rehearsing hard for a few months now and it's looking good.

We are one of 8 shows being performed at Young and Jackson's Hotel and you can find out more about our foolishness at the Young and Jacksons event page.

Next, there's the New Zealand International Science Festival, then there's 'Great Big Science Gig' and National Science Week, but let's try to take care of one thing at a time.

Image by Gregory TononIt is quite well-known that people’s morality can be more “flexible” when they are anonymous. Basically the repercussions for bad behaviour are much less when no-one knows who you are. Darkness can be a source of anonymity and so it can lead to moral transgressions and perhaps criminal acts.

Researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have published the results of a series of experiments that suggest people show significantly higher levels of self-interested and cheating behaviour when they are in a dimly lit room, but they took this idea a step further. In an effort to test the relationship between perception of darkness and bad behaviour, they examined people’s behavour when wearing dark glasses versus clear (unshaded) glasses. Even though we all know (consciously) that wearing sun glasses does very little to aid one’s anonymity, it seems that on a deeper level, we still think that darkness provides cover and some degree of anonymity whether it comes from nightfall or from Bolle.

The authors of the study (Chen-Bo Zhong, Vanessa K Bohns and Francesca Gino) found that wearing sunglasses is enough to trick the brain into thinking that the light has dimmed and you might just get away with being a little bit naughty. When asked to divide $6 between themselves and another person, however they saw fit, subjects wearing sun glasses showed significantly higher levels of self-serving behaviour, offering much less to the other person.

I guess this makes sense: as we have evolved there have been countess opportunities for us to “learn” that you can get away with more when it is dark. This is now well established deep in our genome. The advent of sun glasses was very recent and as far as our unconscious mind is concerned, if it looks dark, it is dark. This might also help explain Carey Hart wears sunglasses at night, but not completely.



Yesterday I was thrilled again to MC the BHP Billiton Science Awards presentation function, after attending the student finalists camp across the weekend. Once again both the camp and the presentation were a source of fun and inspiration. We climbed rocks, launched rockets, gazed at stars and ate loads. We also changed tyres and some of us got stuck in lifts. The future of science is in good hands. Congratulations to all the student finalists!

The Adelaide Fringe Festival is on in nearly a month and we’ll be there! There are hundreds of shows during the Festival and this year ‘Pre-Coital – the Science of Dating’ will be one of them. With support from RIAus, we’ll be performing ‘Pre-Coital’ at the Science Exchange on 12-13 March. I’ve never performed in the Fringe before, so I’m excited!

Image by Bedwetting in AustraliaI love this. Researchers from the Queensland Department of Primary Industries & Fisheries are teaching Murray Cod fingerlings how to recognise the bad guys in the wild. It might seem like the sort of thing that you’d expect the baby fish to have an instinct for, but there are now so few of the fish in our river systems that they need a bit of help when they make the move from research facility to river.

The scientists are releasing a fear hormone into the water at the same time as they show the fingerlings predator. In just a few days the young fish have learned to associate predators with fear, which will hopefully give them a survival edge when they graduate out of the tank.

Once widespread throughout the mid-altitude sections of the Murray-Darling Basin, Murray Cod (Maccullochella peelii peelii – how cool is that name!?) are now listed as threatened. Overfishing on a huge scale (sorry – fish pun), habitat destruction through sedimentation, altered river flows and the removal of structural woody habitat (old logs and snags, etc) have resulted in tough times for the Cod. It seems a bit sad that science needs to step in to fix another human mess, but if it works more power to their fins! No word yet on whether the fish have been taught to recognise anglers.

Check out this news story for some footage of the wee codlets.