Can Animals Detect Earthquakes?

Over at the always-excellent Discover magazine blog 80 Beats, a fascinating post from a couple of days ago on a topic that has fascinated natural historians for several thousand years now: can animals’ strange behavior provide forewarning that an earthquake is about to strike?

I’ve been reporting a story about earthquake prediction for Parade magazine lately, and spent a day talking with some of the nation’s leading seismologists at Caltech. I came away with a renewed appreciation for the difficulty of the scientists working toward that holy grail of earthquake research, figuring out how to predict the behavior of faults that lie invisible deep beneath the surface of the earth (and which may be fundamentally chaotic in their nature anyway).

All the more intriguing, then, to hear that biologist Rachel Grant, while studying the mating behavior of toads in Italy, may have stumbled upon the first scientific evidence of animals being able to foresee what seismologists could not:

Her team was studying common toads in Italy in April 2009 when the amphibians began to disappear from the study site. This didn’t make much sense to her, the toads abandoning a breeding site in the midst of breeding season. So the researchers tracked them. They found that 96 percent of males — who vastly outnumber females at breeding spots — abandoned the site, 46 miles (74 kilometers) from the quake’s epicenter, five days before it struck on April 6, 2009. The number of toads at the site fell to zero three days before the quake. Grant says her initial reaction to the mass toad dispersal was annoyance—their flight was holding up her research. However, when they began to return the day after the earthquake, things began to make more sense.

It’s an amazing story, a seemingly irrefutable case of cause and effect. But I’m still not buying it. Here’s why. Continue reading Can Animals Detect Earthquakes?

Murder and Profit in Mexico’s Most Dangerous City

At first, Gerry and Margarita Licon only saw the benefits of doing business on the US-Mexico border. Co-founders of Licon Engineering, a construction management and engineering services company, the couple expanded their business from two employees to 38 in their first seven years in business, and took their revenues to more than $5 million. It seemed like they had the best of both worlds. From their headquarters in El Paso, Texas, they had access to US government contracts with set-asides for minorities and small businesses. Across the border in Ciudad Juarez, they could tap low labor costs and an ever-growing customer base in the manufacturing sector.

Business was so good that they weren’t particularly concerned when drug-gang warfare sent the murder rate in Juarez skyrocketing. By early 2008, six or seven people a day were being killed. Gunmen riddled a pickup truck with 31 bullets, killing the driver and her 9-year-old girl passenger. A man kidnaped from his front yard in El Paso turned up dismembered in Juarez.  Seventeen patients in a drug rehab center were lined up agains the wall and shot to death. The scale of the slaughter led Time magazine to dub Juarez “The Most Dangerous City in the Americas.”

Like many living and working in the border region, the Licons still didn’t think at this point that the crime wave posed a direct threat to them personally. The killings seemed to be strictly limited to those involved in the drug trade. But as the violence escalated, the criminality expanded. Kidnaping and extortion also became endemic.

And on an afternoon in March 2008, Gerry Licon experienced the dark side of Juarez for himself. Continue reading Murder and Profit in Mexico’s Most Dangerous City

In an Encounter with a Cougar, Four Different Ways to Panic

The new issue of The Brain, Discover magazine’s newsstand special, is now out, and with it an excerpt from Extreme Fear in which I discuss Sue Yellowtail’s struggle with a mountain lion in a remote canyon in southwestern Colorado:

At 25, Sue Yellowtail was just a few years out of college, working for the Ute Indian tribe as a water quality specialist. Her job was to travel through remote areas of the reservation, collecting samples from the streams, creeks, and rivers. She spent her days criss-crossing remote backcountry, territory closed to visitors, and rarely traveled even by locals. It’s the kind of place where, if you got in trouble, you were on your own.

On a clear, cold morning in late December Yellowtail pulled her pickup over to the side of the little-traveled dirt double-track, a few yards from a simple truss bridge that spanned the creek. As she collected her gear she heard a high-pitched scream. Probably a coyote killing a rabbit, she thought. She clambered down two steep embankments to the water’s edge. Wading to the far side of the creek, she stooped to stretch her tape measure the width of the flow. Just then she heard a rustling and looked up. At the top of the bank not 30 feet away, stood a mountain lion. Tawny against the brown leaves of the riverbank brush, the animal was almost perfectly camouflaged. It stared down at her, motionless.

She stood stock still.

As I go on to explain, Yellowtail had entered the first instinctual fear-response state, the condition of freezing known as attentive immobility. But her trial had just begun. Within the next 15 minutes, she would pass through the three other distinct forms of panic. Continue reading In an Encounter with a Cougar, Four Different Ways to Panic

Das Buch ist in deutscher Sprache!

According to Google Translate, that’s German for “The book is in German.” By which I mean that I just learned that the German edition of Extreme Fear will be on shelves April 26. Unglaublich!

Interestingly, the Amazon page indicates that book was translated “from the American” by Stefanie Schaeffler. Hopefully the original is intelligible to English-speakers as well.

Cutest Psychology Experiment EVER

For anyone interested in psychology, having a child is a fascinating experience, turning us all into amateur Jean Piagets. Having just written a book about the interplay between the frontal cortex and the amygdala (among other things), it was extremely interesting to observe a human being who had seemingly very little frontal cortex activity at all. Whatever he was feeling, boom, there it was on his face, no modulation or suppression at all. As a baby he could go through a dozen distinct facial expressions in the span of a minute.

Now that Rem is a year and a half, he’s exhibiting new and fascinating behaviors all the time. Just the other day he busted out with a move that was simultaneously hilarious and baffling. Once I figured it out, it blew my mind. Continue reading Cutest Psychology Experiment EVER

How a Peaceful Crowd Turns Into a Lethal Stampede

Few things are as bafflingly tragic as the mass death that can occur when a crowd of people becomes overcome by panic and stampedes within a confined space. As I’ve written earlier, in many cases of mass panic individual members of a crowd do not themselves act irrationally. However, in the case of a stampede the crowd truly seems to leave its senses, becoming a heaving mass in which rational behavior by an individual becomes impossible. The result can be truly horrific — in some cases, over 1,000 people have died in the ensuing crush.

Compounding the awfulness is the fact that in many cases the stampede is triggered by no actual danger. It seems that, in certain settings, a crowd that grows to a critical density reaches a critical state at which the slightest twitch is sufficient to send it into a stampede — like a supercooled drop of water that just needs the tiniest seed to instantly freeze.

The toll in human lives is immense: in the past decade there have been over 100 stampede events resulting in mass fatalities.  Yet there has been surprisingly little study has been done into the phenomenon. I was delighted, then, to learn via @bengoldacre of an absolutely fascinating new paper from Ed Hsu and colleagues at Johns Hopkins:  “Epidemiological Characteristics of Human Stampedes.” I emailed Dr. Hsu and he sent me copies of the paper, along with another, “Human Stampedes: A Systematic Review Historical and Peer-Reviewed Sources,” that further elaborated his team’s findings.

The papers are chockablock with intriguing findings, but here are some of the highlights: Continue reading How a Peaceful Crowd Turns Into a Lethal Stampede

Top 7 Management Secrets of Blackbeard the Pirate

Peter Leeson does not talk like a pirate. But the George Mason University economist has figured out how to think like one. In his book The Invisible Hook, Leeson argues that, despite their reputation as anarchic ne’er-do-wells, 18th-century pirates roamed the seas in pursuit of rational economic goals. In fact, they had a lot in common with small business people of today. “They were profit-motivated,” Leeson says, “and they confronted obstacles that a lot of modern small businesses also confront in their attempt to pursue profits.” There’s plenty that today’s managers can learn from the scurvy dogs of yore. Here are the top seven tips: Continue reading Top 7 Management Secrets of Blackbeard the Pirate

Do Toyota Drivers Suffer From Faulty Brakes, or Errant Panic Circuitry?

At first, it sounded like a straightforward case of a faulty product in need of a recall. Last summer, Toyota “‘became aware of rare cases where the accelerator pedal did not return to its idle position as swiftly as it ideally should.” It started changing the way it produced the pedals in question. Then, when it realized that further design issues could cause problems, it recalled 4.2 million vehicles. But the automaker’s problems didn’t go away. Within months, it realized that another problem with the pedals’ design could cause them to stick, and so started a recall of another 2.4 million vehicles.

Here’s where things began to get strange. Even as Toyota moved to correct problems with its accelerators, reports of malfunctions skyrocketed. Continue reading Do Toyota Drivers Suffer From Faulty Brakes, or Errant Panic Circuitry?

5 Best Sports Fantasy Getaways

As I’ve written earlier, pushing your boundaries on vacation is a way to make your whole experience more memorable. I can’t think of a more enjoyable way to do that than by playing ball with one of your sports heroes — or by carving  turns, paddling a whitewater river, or surfing a wave with a legendary athlete. Here are five ways to make the magic happen:

  • Surfing. Hit the waves on Costa Rica’s legendary Tamarindo beach with famed shredder Robert “Wingnut” Weaver.
  • Baseball. Since 2005, the Baseball Hall of Fame has held a yearly fantasy camp each October in upstate New York where participants get to play baseball with former pros such as George Brett and Ozzie Smith.
  • Tennis. There are at least a dozen events around the world scattered throughout the year where guests can play tennis with their retired heroes and heroines.
  • Sailing. Every year at the end of October the Bitter End Yacht Club in the British Virgin Islands hosts a Pro Am Regatta, where amateur sailors get to take to the waves alongside some of the sport’s biggest names.
  • Dogsledding. Austin’s Alaskan Adventures runs seven-day trips during which you can mush your own dog team under the tutelage of Jerry Austin, an Iditarod Hall-of-Famer.
pushing your boundaries on vacation is a way to make your whole experience more memorable. I can’t think of a more enjoyable way to do that than by playing ball with one of your sports heroes

A Strange Calm in a Sea of Danger

An uncanny thing about life-or-death crises is how often those in them don’t feel fear. Time and again, I’ve heard from people who’ve had a close brush with death and didn’t experience any emotion at all. In the moment, they felt calm and focused. Everything seemed crystal clear. They saw what they needed to do and they did it. Only afterward, when they found themselves in a place of safety, did they become overwhelmed with emotion.

In the book I tell the story of Johan Otter, who was hiking in Glacier National Park with his daughter when they were attacked by a grizzly. Stepping between the bear and his child, he fought it off as best he could until he felt the animal’s massive jaws locked on his head. “I felt a tooth going into my skull and I thought, ‘This is going to be it.’” Otter says. Continue reading A Strange Calm in a Sea of Danger