What's Up With...? (July Edition)

...The Pepsi Challenge Not Working?

If you've ever watched TV, you're probably aware of the blind taste tests that Pepsi started back in the 70s, called the Pepsi Challenge. Essentially, they'd set up a table somewhere and have random people taste a cup of Pepsi and a cup of Coca-Cola, without labels, to see which one they preferred. Most people agreed that Pepsi tasted better, and the blind test was considered a success for Pepsi.

Except that Coca-Cola's sales didn't go down - Coca-Cola sales had been and continued to be higher than Pepsi's. Pepsi marketers were baffled; they'd scientifically proven that Pepsi was better, but people were still buying Coca-Cola. When actual scientists repeated the Pepsi Challenge, they got the same results, so they decided to see what happened when people knew what they were drinking. The same people who, on a blind test, said they preferred Pepsi, on a labeled test said Coca-Cola was better.

The reason this happened became clear as they repeated the test for a third time, this time scanning participants brains as they tasted the two drinks. When people drank Pepsi without the label, the 'reward center' part of the brain lit up, the part that says 'this is good'. When they drank Coca-Cola with the label, the 'reward center' still lit up, though it was noticeably less involved; what suddenly was involved, however, was an area in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that reasons things out. Participants were choosing Coca-Cola, not because it actually tasted better, but because their brains told them it was better, and that reasoning overrode their actual sensation.

Simple solution? Stop drinking cola drinks. They're not that good to begin with.

...The Declining Teen Pregnancy Rate?

We've all heard cultural critics talking about all the teenage girls nowadays getting pregnant, but what most people forget to tell you is that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, teenage pregnancy rates in 2009 (the latest year we have numbers for) were the lowest they've been since they started taking records, 70 years ago.

It's true. In fact, this decade is much better than how things were in the 90s. I have a hard time believing it, but there was actually an 8% decrease in teens having sexual intercourse in 2009 than in 1991, as well as an increase in the use of birth control among teens who do have sex.

There's still a ridiculous amount of teens having sex and getting pregnant, and it's much higher in the United States than in some other countries, but people who bash the modern culture for encouraging promiscuous behavior are obviously forgetting about the 80s and 90s.

...The Secret Life of Traffic Cop William E. Leasure?

Bill Leasure denied all the allegations against him, but he was sentenced with 15 years to life for, essentially, begin a criminal mastermind.

William Leasure was a traffic cop in Los Angeles who was unremarkable in almost every way. He never moved out of his entry-level job, and even turned down promotions because he 'wasn't ready'. If the allegations are true, he also stole expensive cars, committed insurance fraud for fellow criminals, resold millions of dollars in stolen luxury yachts, fulfilled at least two contract killings, and ran a large crime syndicate, among many other things.

There ended up being quite a lot of evidence against him, but he apparently did this without any of his coworkers noticing, not to mention his employers in the LAPD, or his wife, a Los Angeles city prosecutor.

...Everyone Swallowing Spiders in Their Sleep?

I'm sure we've all heard it somewhere - I first heard it from my brother, but saw it again elsewhere is some pretty credible fact books. Apparently, the average person swallows 8 spiders a year in their sleep, unwittingly.

For cats, it must be twice as much.

If you have heard this statistic, fear not; it's totally not true. This may sound obvious to those who haven't heard of it before, but this idea has been circulating around the 'net since 1993, and there are many people who still believe it.

The idea got started, ironically, when a woman wrote a column about all the 'facts' circulating by email that gullible people were believing. To demonstrate her point, she suggested the spider 'fact', which has now entered popular belief. And now I feel embarrassed for believing it, too.

...The Australian Prime Minister in 1905?

Alfred Deakin, the Prime Minister of Australia from 1905-1913, also lead a double life, but not as a crime boss. Instead, Alfred Deakin was an anonymous contributor to a London newspaper, where he talked exclusively about the political climate in Australia, often criticizing the Prime Minister and the leading political party. You know, his own.

Alfred, who dabbled in politics when he was younger, was asked to commentate for a London newspaper by the editor in chief while Alfred was in England. He complied, and continued to do so anonymously as he eventually took office a few years later. The letters took a few weeks to reach publication, seeing and London and Australia aren't nearby at all, and they probably had little effect on the politics in Australia, but imagine how much better a politician you would be if you had to constantly look critically at your own work?

...The Franklin Eddy?

You're probably aware of what water currents and jet streams are. They're pretty cool, networks of underwater flow that keep water in the oceans of the world moving. In the Atlantic, we have what's called the North Atlantic Current, a large, complicated, clockwise swirl that pumps water up the east coast of the North American continent, across the Atlantic, down over Europe and northern Africa, and back across the ocean to repeat the process.

There's a little problem, though. Part of that current, the part that runs through the Caribbean and up the east coast, is called the Gulf Stream, probably because it also loops through the Gulf of Mexico. If you've paid attention to the news in the past year and a half, you'll know that the Gulf of Mexico had a little 'accident' a while back, causing a lot of that water to become, put mildly, 'unswimable'.

However, last year, something not-totally-rare but still surprising happened. The part of the current that loops into the Gulf of Mexico stretched out. The current stretched and stretched, until it finally snapped into two. The main parts, the 'beginning' and 'end' of the current in the gulf, hooked up, completely bypassing the gulf, while the remaining piece of the current swirled itself into a small loop, called an eddy. They named it the Franklin Eddy.

The Franklin Eddy, in a nutshell, was a giant whirlpool of polluted water in the Gulf of Mexico, trapping all that water in the gulf and not letting it escape, say, to unpolluted areas like the east coast. I say 'was' and not 'is' because the Franklin Eddy is gone now; also, the Gulf of Mexico is just about as clean now as it was before the 'accident'.

Coincidence? I think not.