1: Ranking Cute Animals: A Stock Market Experiment

-It seems counterintuitive that an experiment showing how cute an animal is, could show how people as a whole, use the stock market. John Maynard Keynes described the stock market as a kind of beauty contest. “You see a bunch of woman’s faces but your not supposed to say who you think is the prettiest, your suppose to guess who everyone else will think is the prettiest.” After saying this, an experiment using a kitten, slow loris, and baby polar bear was conducted. Half of the contestants were to pick what animal they thought was the cutest and half the contestants were to pick the animal they thought everyone else would think is the cutest. This relates to the stock market because people would buy houses, not because they thought the prices made sense, but because they thought everyone else would buy a house at any price.

2:Parsing the new “humane” food labels

-It seems counterintuitive that the word “humane” on our food labels could create a global ordeal. Humane washing has become a big thing for the food industry. Whole Foods has just released a humane labeling system, Safeway and SuperValu have made animal welfare pledges, while Perdue is being sued by The Humane Society for false advertising of factor farmed chicken products. Each trade organization has its ow set of regulations. As of right now, nothing can really be done except for us consumers to take it upon ourselves and search standards and make our own decisions about which practices we think are humane or not.

3:Dogs Earn More Credit For Sniffing Out Cancer

-It seems counterintuitive that dogs are actually able to sniff out cancer in human beings. There has been a lot of evidence adding up that dogs can in fact be trained to use their noses and detect different kinds of cancer with near perfect accuracy. How?? Japanese researchers reported that an eight year old Labrador was 97 percent accurate in deciding which stool samples had cancer. The dog was also able to sniff out cancer in breath samples. The authors wrote that, “common scents may exist among various cancer types.” This dog was able to sniff out newly formed cancer AND more malignant cancers and any other factors such as patients who were smokers or had infections, etc, were not confused by the dog. These tests started when a household dog sniffed out they’re owners melanoma. In the last five years, studies have been tested to show that with only a few weeks of training, specific ages and breeds, could become pros at spotting cancer in breath, blood, urine and tissue samples. This could be a starting point in figuring out what cancer actually is and how to attack it on a more molecular level.