It’s science time again folks! Time to warm up the Science Machine and climb on board for a tour of six of the coolest and most interesting science stories of the week!

So take a seat, remember to keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, and HAVE FUN!

Our first stop is a fascinating study that showed that dolphins have very long social memories.

This study builds on the relatively recent discovery that dolphins have “names”, namely a series of whistles and clicks that signify a specific individual.

From that, and with the help of a facility where bottlenosed dolphins have been kept going back decades, complete with recording of the dolphin’s noises, scientists were able to play back the “names” of dolphins that a particular dolphin had not seen for decades, and sure enough, the dolphins reacted by perking up and immediately responding in kind.

“Holy crap, it’s Dave! Hey Dave! Man, I haven’t seen you in ages! How’s the wife and kids?”

This shows that the dolphins have very long social memories, comparable to those of monkeys, elephants, and human beings.

It also suggests that dolphins, like us, the elephants, and the monkeys, are a highly social species.

Say goodbye to the dolphins, folks, because out next step is a disturbing bit of analysis that suggests that all forms of violence increase during an extended hot, dry period.

This is especially important to us civilization fans who are worried about what will happen to the state of global stability as climate change makes the world hotter.

Obviously, droughts cause famine and famine causes civil war. That’s a no-brainer.

But it goes far deeper than that :

For every standard deviation of change, levels of interpersonal violence, such as domestic violence or rape, rise by some 4 percent, while the frequency of intergroup conflict, from riots to civil wars, rise by 14 percent. Global temperatures are expected to rise by at least two standard deviations by 2050, with even bigger increases in the tropics.

So it’s a little more serious than heat just making people a bit more grumpy.

Nasty. Next, we will visit what brain science is telling about liberals versus conservatives.

Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives’ eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement

This fits with my own observations that conservatives seem to thrive on fear. They see the world as being extremely dangerous and thus need a high level of order and predictability, even conformity, in order to quell this deep fear of a hostile world.

This is born out by the finding that the more secure people feel, the more liberal they become.

To illustrate this point :

…psychologist Jaime Napier found that asking Republicans to imagine that they possessed superpowers and were impermeable to injury made them more liberal.

So perhaps in order for liberalism to succeed, it needs to craft a powerful message of security.

Everything will be okay, folks. You can relax!

After that reassuring message, let’s go on to look at the latest news about oxytocin.

For a while now, the science press has been calling oxytocin the “love hormone” because levels of it have been shown to rise quite a bit when people are in love, or even just thinking about someone they love. It spikes after pregnancy when mothers are bonding with their children. It even spikes when someone is just thinking about a favorite television show.

But new results show that oxytocin also spikes when you have a very negative experience, including negative social experiences.

So perhaps it is not the “love hormone”, but the “memory hormone”. It responds not to the nature of the experience but its strength.

Positive or negative, things that cause a very strong response are automatically considered to be very important to our survival, and so we remember them very, very strongly.

Leaving the land of honeymoons and PTSD behind, we enter the world of potentially epoch-making studies about the origins of cancer.

A team of researchers has discovered that 21 different kinds of cancer-causing mutations all leave behind a certain “cancer graffiti” signatures that point directly as to what exactly caused said mutation.

These 21 signatures represent 97 percent of known carcinogenic mutations, and so this discovery could radically improve the epidemiology of cancer by letting doctors and scientists track specific carcinogens and their effects.

For decades, cancer research has involved a lot of guesswork. This guy smoked a lot, so that is probably what caused his cancer. But he also worked in a toxic environment for decades, and then there’s his genetic predisposition due to many cancer deaths in his family….

This new discovery may well take the guesswork out and let us know exactly what leads to what kinds of cancer and take steps to minimize the risks.

Out final stop is at what might be even bigger news : a potential vaccine for malaria.

The results are small so far, but very encouraging, especially because the vaccine works on adults. There are parts of the world where malaria kills millions every year. A vaccine against it would be the ultimate tool for consigning it to the dustbin of history along with polio, the whooping cough, and Spanish flu.

A vaccine would be even better than the current treatment, oral administration of quinine. Its one drawback is that it does need to be delivered intravenously, which adds a great deal of complication to the question of distribution.

But recent developments in intravenous patches which deliver medicine via a postage-stamp sized patch riddled with microscopic needles might just provide a route around that problem, and countless others.

A future without cancer or malaria? Sign me the heck up.

Well that’s it for this week’s science tour. We hope you enjoyed your visit. The next tour will be a week from today, and will feature all new exhibits from all over the world of science.

Please remember to take your packages and valuables with you, and have a safe and pleasant evening.