Blamestorming spreads like the plague: It's a typical experience in a large organization: a project has gone bad, and everybody involved looks to find ways to shift responsibility. But that practice is almost certainly self-defeating, according to a paper entitled, "Blame contagion: The automatic transmission of self-serving attributions." If people are directing their mental energy into pointing fingers, they're not going to spend time figuring out what went wrong and learning from that. The authors show that watching someone assign blame in these situations makes others in a group more likely to view doing so as a goal, one that they pursue themselves. As a result, blame actually does become contagious.
As if the carcinogens and nicotine weren't bad enough: Given the damage that cigarette smoke does to the integrity of the lungs, nobody should very surprised that bacterial infections of the airways is a common problem for smokers. What may be more of a surprise is the fact that the cigarettes themselves may be a disease vector. Researchers took cigarette samples from four major brands, and subjected them to an analysis that can identify the species based on ribosomal RNA gene sequences. The result? "Fifteen different classes of bacteria and a broad range of potentially pathogenic organisms were detected in all cigarette samples," write the researchers.
Are Louis Vuitton knockoffs as evil as the real deal?: There's been no shortage of questionable behavior among the ultrarich in recent years, and a study out of Harvard suggests it may actually represent a real phenomenon, as the authors are able to identify an environmental influence: luxury goods. "Experiment 1 found that participants primed with luxury goods were more likely than those primed with nonluxury goods to endorse business decisions that benefit themselves but could potentially harm others," the authors discovered. It's not a matter of the luxury-inclined actually seeking to harm others, the study suggests; rather, those exposed to high-end goods simply become very self-interested and indifferent to potential damage to anybody else.
Helping the living by doing genetic testing on the dead: This one's a presentation at a scientific meeting, so we only have a press release to go on. Still, the basic idea is absolutely biologically sound. Someone dies of heart disease, and the family starts to wonder whether there might be a predisposition to problems. The typical response would be subjecting the family members to genetic testing. But that makes no sense—there's only one dead person, but potentially dozens of family members, so it makes economic sense to test the dead guy first and only move on to the family if he carried a genetic risk factor.
You win some, you lose some: This one is probably more disappointing than weird. It became apparent a few years back that folic acid and vitamin B12, when taken during pregnancy, can help ensure that a fetus' neural tube closes properly. As a result, many US food products were fortified with additional folic acid. That may bring about its own set of problems; a study out of Norway where folic acid supplementation is rare, showed that people who were given folate supplements were more likely to die of any cause, and more likely to be diagnosed with cancer. Oops.